Intel Core Ultra 5 235T: Real Users Weigh In on the OEM-Only Low-Power CPU

1. Come up with new naming scheme to make things 'simpler'. 2. Come up with bloated sku variants that are hard to follow. The marketing never learns.

I hope Intel survives.

Oh god, two more letters to add to the intel vocabulary.

It's become very clear most people commenting didn't even watch the video. There's been little to no improvement (Sometimes even regression) over the much cheaper 14400F/14600k, they're too close in price to the 265K (Which recently got a price cut), and Ryzen 5's just make a complete joke out of them since they're cheaper while performing better in gaming.

Core Ultra 3 could be the new value king.

The cheapest LGA1851 processor is only $40 less than the 265K and it comes with half the cores and a significantly lower clock speed. So yeah, I'd say pretty pointless unless you require the lower TDP.

So 235 is 3% faster in ST than 14500 at the same clock, but 285K is 9% faster in ST than 14900K despite being clocked 300 MHz lower. I'm confused. Also, per the same numbers, 9700X beats the 14900K by 8.5% in ST, but in game tests the 14900K beats it by about 10%. Doesn't seem like Geekbench translates well to FPS in games.

How many suffixes does Intel have at this point? We have K, KS, F, KF, X, H, HX, P, U, V, E, KE, Y, C, B, and now A...

i5/u5 have always been the best option for performance on a 'budget'. Plenty of times I've tuned them up to get top tier performance which sweetens the deal even more.

The problem is they keep switching the suffixes around and don't stick with one consistent one.

No major IPC increase for Zen 5 and no core count increase. And Arrow Lake is already competitive. Maybe they want to assblast Ryzen 5 out of existence.

CPUs that come with a stock cooler can be cooled by that stock cooler within safe limits.

More than half people in the world won't spend a lot of money to buy halo products or flagships. Ultra 5 is more than enough even for gaming. Not everyone is rich enough to buy high end hardware; saying mid end hardware is 'useless' is the same as saying RTX 4060 is useless just because 4090 exists.

As long as it performs, it doesn't really matter whatever combination of numbers and letters they name it.

Comparing i9 to the lowest tier i5, the all core frequency dropped 1.4GHz from the i9 on Raptor Lake, but with Arrow Lake it's now only decreasing 600MHz. They're really trying to make up for the fact that the i5s still only have 6 big cores, which is great now that the E-cores are so good too.

The OP STILL haven't clarified what they mean by 'hot'. What is the temperature in degrees is your new CPU running at?

Was expecting a larger ST perf uplift to be honest.

Yes, CPU gets hot when you use it. Expect it to boost towards 80C easily. 95 or even 105 is the throttle region. Below 70 is needed for the highest boost specs, but that's not supported on your product. Stock cooler isn't great but it will do.

Sure in the bios you can limit power, but you can leave it as it is. It may take more power when utilized. But in idle they will be around the same.

Price the 235 non-K at less than $200 and it will have a point again. Considering the 14400F, 14600K, 7600X, and 9600X are cheaper than $200, the 225/235 would still be way too expensive at $200, even the 245K would arguably be too expensive since the 14600K costs just $164 while performing similarly.

Well yeah, with the introduction of i9, the i5/U5 range started feeling more like the i3/U3 range. Except, they're not getting priced like i3 CPUs used to. Basically CPU shrinkflation.

Yeah at the new price of the 265K, it's just not worth going lower.

Glad I'm not the only one left feeling like that. Basically 2 whole node jumps, and we get what essentially amounts to a margin of error as an upgrade? Something is off here.

Could you just use a non-T chip and set a low power limit?

T series CPU's are only sold to Dell, HP, and Lenovo (and a few other OEM's like Asus in smaller numbers). Thus you only find them on ebay as parts pulls, or in the 1 liter corp desktop systems.

They are pointless because the 265K got a price cut and is now $300. Price the 235 non-K at less than $200 and it will have a point again.

Thankful that Intel isn't giving me a reason not to switch to AMD next upgrade tbh.

Intel always run hot. Put your mind to rest and get a tower cooler for $20 on Amazon or an AIO for $50, they will cool much better.

I don't get it. If they are power efficient version, shouldn't they be configured with more E-Cores and less P-Cores? Instead of 6+8, they could have gone with 4+16 or 4+12?

You need to weigh it up against your specific use case. Do you have hundreds of client devices connecting to it? Are they all using >10Gb fibre? In a homelab NAS the 245t will probably be overkill. But if you're happy to throw the money at it, it will be energy efficient (as efficient as x86 can be) and will take many years before you outgrow it. In my use case (legacy app - heavily single-threaded), the 245 (non T) made a fantastic choice when weighing price vs single threaded performance.

You could just get a standard 235 (or even better, a 245k because they're cheaper right now) and put a power limit on it in the BIOS to get the same effect.

ARL isn't particularly competitive when gaming, and nor for most non-gaming workloads (though there are occasions upon which it does very well against AMD and its 14th gen competitors).

I would definitely replace it with the 14500T as it's a noticeable boost in performance and especially allows you to put in a better GPU. Wouldn't do the 235T though as you'll see barely any difference while having to sell your apartment for DDR5 RAM.

The original cooler has been garbage. You need to buy an aftermarket cooler; a single tower/dual tower is enough.

CPU will get hot with stock cooler, this is normal and it will stay within safe limits. However, to stay there it might reduce the CPU performance. To get the most from the CPU you should get a bigger cooler.

To you maybe, but to me and other people in the scientific community this is a great improvement.

It's an awesome OC chip and with pretty good power draw stock (compared to 13th/14th gen), so that's far from useless.

Just got a 13700k with a Z690 MEG Unify and 32gb 5600 for 638 euros. I'm fairly sure I would have gained like 15% performance and would have to spend 300-400€ extra to get approximately equal specs on the new platform. Not worth it.

CPUs will boost with more voltage and heat if it thinks it can get away with it safely, and it will do that all the way up to 105C.

No stock Intel cooler has ever done a good job.