Intel Core Ultra 5 245K: Reddit's Honest Gaming Verdict

if its for gaming, I would just grab Ryzen 7600, games doesnt benefit from core count but from core quality.

5800X3D and 5700X3D are still the best budget gaming CPUs.

tl;dr Two years old 5800X3D is still faster.

Error Lake, indeed.

It is not "bad" it is just disappointing performance for the price and novelty.

So this gen literally DOA?

Who would even want this? Tiny performance uplift vs 14th and 13th gen in software workloads, very similar power draw and significantly worse performance in gaming. And they are asking 310 for this? That has to be next level arrogance.

The days of large gaming gains with OC are gone my friend. If you gain 10% you are on the extreme end.

AMD offers much better deals at much lower power consumption. Or you could simply go a (now cheaply sold) 14600k or 14700k.

For gaming it makes no sense to buy Intel anyway. AMDs X3D chips have no competition and you can buy either a 5700X3D on a small budget or a 7600/7700 on medium budget and upgrade to X3D later.

Always depends on local pricing. In a vacuum, 245K is unimpressive because usually you can buy a 7600 for cheaper - plus, putting yourself on AMD basically guarantees a shot at an X3D chip if that's something you want. But if a 245K is cheaper enough in your area to be worth considering then you might as well consider it.

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.

Intel is working hard to make AMD look good again, and they have been very successful.

To bad you need 1000€ ram for it.

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.

The tiny increases are because Intel pushes their designs to the max by default, because they have to. They don't leave any meat on the bone.

How the turntables. Intel went from only losing to AMD in core heavy productivity workloads to only winning in core heavy productivity workloads now.

4% worse before the updates that improved performance, now is about the same (some games ahead some games behind)

I was shocked by the bench vs realworld numbers. Can't believe they released something so underwhelming without a good reason, this cpu must be better for A.I tools than most software.

Intel's issue is not just pricing and performance. There's also the issue of both 1700 and 1851 being dead end platforms with no upgrade potential. The cost of upgrading to this platform just isn't worth it.

Wouldn't intel just gotten much better performance if they just respun the 14900K at TSMC 3nm? Arrow lake seems to be a waste of sand. Their tile implementation is atrocious with latency.

i rarely post on reviews threads but man, i'm so sad about intel right now, this generation is literally dead on arrival. as a 12900k user i was always looking for nova lake but seeing how arrow lake perform, it seriously make me thinking that nova lake might suck as well, my next cpu upgrade will 100% be a amd x3d cpu unless intel finally steep up their game.

If you overclock it right, its a great deal. assuming you get a z890 Board and decent RAM. The IMC on Intel 200 is really good. My 265k can handle 8600Mhz on normal DDR5. And i can say for sure it was never that easy to overclock ram.

its not bad for gaming. its just bad value. for the price of the any ultra you can get a better AMD cpu.

the real issue with the 245K is that for gaming, its a 6C/6T CPU, the E cores are useless for gaming performance and getting higher FPS. 6C/6T CPU in Late 2024, yeah but ill pass.

The problem is the memory latency due to the reuse of Meteor Lake's not very good SoC tile layout. 285K has like 80-100ns of memory latency vs the 50-60 you see on AM5 and LGA1700 CPUs. Memory latency is the exact thing that held back Zen 1 and 2 on the gaming performance front, so it's 100% growing pains on the use of tiles.

i got my 245KF for £130 during black friday, OC to 5.6/5.0 with tuned D2D/NGU and 44x ring with OC 8666MT memory and its my little bargain monster, very hard to complain when it was so cheap and can be so fast.

Intel nowadays acts like 2010s AMD, errors and underwhelming gaming performance. I hope next gen will get them back on track.

The 245k is NOT about the same as the 9700x in gaming. Its not even close. Its somewhere between the 7600x and 7700x.

245KF sucks, the 14600K beats it easily. For $200 maybe we will talk, maybe but definitely not 270.

The entire Core 200 product stack is disappointing and sad in terms of gaming performance which makes them bad options for gaming. 20% worse gaming performance over 14th gen and somehow also having stability issues reported which is not what intel needs coming off of the foot of 14th gen. The 5700x3d manages to beat the core 285k in gaming by a margin. A cheap low end chip on the AM4 platform.

It's "bad" in the sense that it's slower than 13th and 14th gen equivalents. But it's not a terrible CPU. Just disappointing compared to expectations. At that price point I'd be comparing to the 9600X.

It's alright, just kinda a weird choice if your main goal is gaming. It has its uses, but mainly gaming isn't one of them. It's somehow worse than its 13th/14th gen counterparts for gaming. Over on AMD, AM5 just has the best gaming processors available.

After the 13th/14th gen issues, 15th gen was Intel's chance to redeem itself. And instead, they rushed it to market way too early, with bugs and inconsistent or below-expectations performance being the result. A lot of that has since been fixed, but it still means that Intel missed its chance to rebuild buyers' confidence.

I ended up buying the Gigabyte B650I and the 7600X just because I found good prices on Amazon.de, 200€ for the CPU and 150€ for the motherboard. I spent 350€ in total and the Intel 245K alone costs 330€ on Amazon.it, so I thought it was a great deal.

Absolutely NOT. Im with 245k + 7900xt and everything is perfect on 2k 240hz max settings. With 9 fans in my pc case both components works on 70°C in gaming max performance.

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.

On paper, the 245KF isn't terrible. It's essentially a 12900K that uses 40% less power, and the 12900K was Intel's best CPU in years when it launched.

Don't even need to OC. My 245K runs everything I throw at it no problems.

The 9600x hit about $220 over the summer on amazon.ca - most reviews have it the same or 5% better than the 245KF for gaming. There are some CAD150 B650 motherboard deals around so overall platform costs will be lower. For productivity, it depends on the application but I still think the 9600x is the way to go.

It's not that bad in gaming. It's performance is worse than Zen 5 and Zen 5 X3d. But it matches the 5800x3d and 7600 which are still decent gaming chips. Core ultra makes sense if you want cheaper more features rich boards and have more productivity tasks as they beat zen5 in some workloads while being cheaper. If you're only gaming then zen5 makes more sense though.

Man, as someone whos been into gaming/pc mind space for so long, it's still crazy to think about how far intel has fallen. Feels like just yesterday where amd had bulldozer where as intel had far superior products. Crazy how much has changed in the diy pc building ecosystem.

Its suck cpu. I always go for intel until 13600k after changing to AMD. I bought 245k as i used to but all i can say its really bad for gaming with the price.