Intel Core Ultra 5 245K: What Real Users Actually Think

If its for gaming, I would just grab Ryzen 7600, games doesnt benefit from core count but from core quality. I like how Intel moved the "i5/ultra5" level of CPU, which is meant for regular user to the 14 cores... for a regular user 4/6 cores are enough, for gamer 6/8 cores are enough...

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

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

Even if we accept the core i5 to core ultra 5 rebrand, why on earth 14600k successor isn't called 260k, 14700k a 270k etc. etc.

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

Yes. 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

Has to drop price AND include games to be worth considering at all. Would not buy anyway.

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.

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. I'm a 14900KS user and outside of exotic loops using a chiller or full on LN2 it's basically at the maximum to be had with intels Extreme profile.

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

They're still bad for the money. You can get a 14-Core 13600k for sub-$200, maybe $169.99 on a pretty good sale. Along with a MUCH cheaper motherboard on top of it. It just isn't reasonably priced.

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'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 makes me think that nova lake might suck as well, my next cpu upgrade will 100% be an amd x3d cpu unless intel finally steps up their game with the 300/400 core ultra generation.

Would buy it at 100.

I mean, it straight up beats or ties something like a 7600x/7700x/7900x/9600x/9700x/9900x almost across the board. People over-blow how bad intel is. It's literally just 3dvcache in gaming that it loses. In production it is fine and beats AMD sometimes by massive margins. This is a gaming centric sub, so I get it, but people are taking it way too far IMO.

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

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 even tho its not the best chip, can handle 8600Mhz on normal DDR5. And I can say for sure it was never that easy to overclock ram.

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

Who cares about 245k when 285k is worse than budget cpus. I had Intel for 7 years. Now I'm on 7800x3d. Intel nowadays acts like 2010s AMD, errors and underwhelming gaming performance. I hope next gen will get them back on track.

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

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

You'd be on AM5, which has an upgrade path to better 7000 series to Ryzen 9000 as well as whatever the next gen of Ryzen CPUs on the AM5 socket. With Intel, you're stuck with the Core 200 series unless you replace the motherboard for whatever new socket they want to introduce.

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.

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.

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.

If you are mainly gaming then the 7600 hands down. The £7 is worth the performance increase over the 245k

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.

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.

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

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.

Just to update and thank everybody who replied, 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.

It's not that bad in gaming. Its 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.

Its a 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 is its really bad for gaming with the price