Intel Core Ultra 5 245T: What Reddit Really Thinks

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.

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.

Oh god, two more letters to add to the Intel vocabulary. The T suffix is barely known and now they add A as well.

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 5s just make a complete joke out of them since they're cheaper while performing better in gaming.

Intel is often only matching AMD, not beating them beyond margin of error. Sometimes, they're quite shockingly bad in some workloads and games, to the point that it beggars belief as to what is even happening.

Core Ultra 3 could be the new value king if the lower-end Arrow Lake lineup delivers on its clock speed leaks.

You found the one app where that is true. Good job. The multi-thread performance advantage is limited to specific benchmarks like Cinebench and doesn't reflect real-world gaming performance.

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. They don't leave any meat on the bone. These breaking point stock overclocks bit them in the arse with 13th/14th generation because of how delicate the ratios were.

The 235 is 3% faster in single-thread than the 14500 at the same clock, but the 285K is 9% faster in ST than the 14900K despite being clocked 300 MHz lower. The IPC improvements scale very differently across the Ultra 5 and Ultra 9 tiers.

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... It's getting impossible to keep track of what each variant means.

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

If these clocks are true, this is a fairly big step up from previous gens where i3s and locked i5s always had much lower clocks than i9s and unlocked i5s — before it was about a 1GHz difference, now it's much closer.

Efficiency is 'performance per watt'. If the performance isn't there, the efficiency isn't either. At least for gaming, this is a very inefficient CPU, and for productivity it's better than 14th gen, but worse than the competition. I don't think this warrants being praised for its efficiency.

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 — a 9600K for example can hang with the big boys in gaming with the right OC.

No major IPC increase for Zen 5 and no core count increase. Arrow Lake is already competitive. Maybe Intel wants to assblast Ryzen 5 out of existence at the mid-range.

Yes, you can reduce the power limits to that level and basically mimic a 245T. The question is just, why should you? In a NAS, the CPU idles most of the time, and this is traditionally and still one of Intel's strong points, at super low power consumption, which is basically independent of the CPU type. My 13900K idles at low single digit watts. So, if the power consumption is an issue when it is busy then yes, turn it down. Otherwise, it is only relevant when busy.

More than half the 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 the RTX 4060 is useless just because a 4090 exists.

The problem is the memory latency due to the reuse of Meteor Lake's not very good SoC tile layout. The 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.

Was expecting a larger single-thread performance uplift to be honest. The Arrow Lake mid-range doesn't deliver the generational leap that was hoped for.

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

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

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

TPU has the 245K as being ~5% slower than the 7700X, ~10% slower than the 9700X, ~20% slower than the 7800X3D, and the same fps as the 5800X3D in 720p gaming on average. Their power results have the 7700X and 9700X using ~15% more power in gaming. The only CPUs blowing the 245K out of the water in gaming efficiency are the 7800X3D CPUs, but those are a class of their own.

It literally doesn't matter. Like T these will only ever show up in OEM office PCs that are bulk order. Regular consumers aren't going to be buying these.

Check your BIOS if possible to set a max TDP. That's the cleanest way to cap power consumption on the 245K if you want to mirror the 245T's behavior.

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.

That's a huge 'unless' when it comes to lower TDP — for anyone who actually needs the 35W envelope, the T-series is the only legitimate desktop option Intel makes.

I didn't buy the 245K, I got a 265K with a great discount from Amazon. The MB is an MSI Z890I EDGE TI WIFI. I could limit the CPU to 65W in the BIOS no problem. I will try 35W once the other components are here and will post the results.

Good progress compared to RPL, not really impressive compared to Zen 5, which is slightly behind ARL in process node. Bottom line being, efficiency isn't critical in desktop as long as the heat is manageable.

You need to weigh it up against your specific use case. 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.

i7 265t seems a better choice: 225t / -35% / €247,90 | 235t / -21% / €254,00 | 245t / -20% / €278,00 | 265t / 0% / €345,00 | 285t / -9% / €573,00. The price-to-benchmark ratio clearly favors the 265t over the 245t in the T-series lineup.

The 245k and 245t cpus are not the same at all when idling. The 245k performance cores have a base frequency of 4.2 GHz vs 2.2 GHz for the 245t and the e-cores base frequency for the 245k is 3.6 GHz vs 1.7GHz for the 245t, so a massive difference and that makes the difference in power consumption when idling.

Base clock means something like this is the clock frequency that the cores hit in any case staying in the TDP. All the CPUs idle at much lower clocks, typically around 800MHz.

Intel's recent CPUs are so power efficient at idling that noticeable power savings will be realized but you'll also have a readily available speed boost when need be. Just use the CPU as is and you'll benefit from the best of both worlds.

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).

The power consumption is generally not from the CPU. The CPU uses most power when in boost mode but for a very short burst. The most power drawn is from the hard drives and GPU. If you really want to reduce power consumption look for a NAS solution that supports spin down when idle.

As for using the 245T as a low power multimedia NAS CPU — yeah it would probably be just fine for that use case.

You should find settings for PL1 and PL2 in your BIOS. Just edit these to adjust your power usage and you can dial the 245K down to match the 245T's TDP envelope.

It's an awesome OC chip with pretty good power draw stock compared to 13th/14th gen. So calling the Ultra 5 range far from useless is fair.

To me and others in the scientific community this Arrow Lake generation is a great improvement, even if it doesn't show in consumer gaming benchmarks.