Intel Core Ultra 7 265K: What Real Users Actually Think

great deal

Just looking at the Microcenter stock near me, they sold one 265k processor over the weekend lol. This might be worse than AMD's 9xxx launch in Europe.

This is a great deal if gaming isn't your primary use case. 265k is a good all-round processor — it just should've been $299 on release. It runs cool and efficiently — it's not fussy about what type of cooling you have, it can game (though not competitively against Ryzen), it's good (sometimes great) on productivity. IMO the product itself has been over-hated. The product is fine, the initial price was not.

It's fast enough for gaming that it falls into the upper echelon of 'it really doesn't matter what you buy' while very handedly outperforming the 9700X in productivity at that $400ish price point. It honestly looks really good.

I own a core ultra 7 265kf with an Rtx5070 ventus 3x. I'm pretty happy with them, 1440p gaming running smooth and cool, also is a powerful cpu, so I don't have to worry about it being weak in the near future. My advice for you to choose a cpu is to ignore what 80% of the people says and focus on what you want and what you expect.

Dont listen to redditors everyone here is on intel hate bandwagon to be cool.

Even for gaming it's perfectly fine and you get the RAM + 2 games for free.

For the price it's hard to beat for a general purpose system. Better than the 14th Gen since there's still people having those fail.

All the price cuts, free goodies, and game bundles really pushed me over the edge to skip AM5. I mean heck the 265KF went as low as $209. It's like they're practically giving them away. That's amazing for a gaming and productivity machine, and next to no one especially on YouTube even cares to talk about that.

Cinebench R23: 265k = 36k, 9700x = 21k. Not sure how you got that 5% from. Also in my area both costs almost the same.

A 3.2% advantage in 1080p gaming, being virtually equal in 1440p and 4k, and a 17.5% disadvantage on average in applications — that's the actual data on the 9700X vs 265K comparison.

Release price of 265k was $399 and cheapest board was $199. Nowadays CPU is $270 and you can find an alright board for significantly less. It did get some BIOS updates + Windows fixes. So you can get scores around 5-7% higher than at launch.

Current intel gen is a flop... Sometimes even worse than 12th gen for gaming... Insta-skip for me. More cores is kinda useless if they accompanied by scheduling issues and much worse latency. Also that socket won't get any new gen intel cpus so kinda dead longevity-wise.

It's a great CPU, especially now with 200S boost.

For your information, all of the issues have been fixed and its current price drop makes it an amazing value.

The Ultra CPUs got a lot of tuning, bios updates — they run smoother and better than last year.

I purchased the 265k a couple of days ago and I'm really surprised. It runs really well and cool. I'm using a Deepcool AK500 air cooler and up to 210w pl2 never got more than 80c. At 125w (default pl1) it runs around 55c. In terms of productivity is quite fast, there are several benchmarks available. I use it for soft development and gaming. It's an amazing deal for 300usd.

I got a free game Battlefield 6 with a 265k and the mobo, ddr5 ram, nvme1tb, case and cpu aio 3 fan for 750$. Intel is the mid tier and lower tier king atm. Amd may have more legs but I'm keeping this setup over 5 years with no plan to change.

I got a 265kf for $209 on Amazon not that long ago. It's paired with a 5080 and 8000mhz DDR5. I have no issues with gaming performance at 1440p or 4k. Everything has been smooth and trouble free for me.

The biggest thing I am seeing with the Core Ultra / Arrow Lake CPUs are the parallels to the Pentium M — slower than its predecessor but much more efficient. Pentium M laid the groundwork for Core 2 Duo, and this architecture may be doing the same thing for future Intel generations.

Best value cpu under 300 for sure got excellent productivity performance, decent gaming performance for casual gamers (yeah we all know for strictly gaming amd is king).

I would not listen to these people. I for one have had the 9700x, 7950x3d, 9800x3d, 14900k, 7800x3d. One thing that sucks is 8 cores if you plan on doing multitasking. Most people talk but don't have real experience with the hardware. When I game and use x264 as encoder for stream, my games stutter hard on 8 cores. I'm going today to micro center for the deal.

I just got the 265k too, jumped from 14700k because of instability issues, I wish the jump of performance was better, but I'm still happy.

Great CPU! Paired with fast ddr5 and latest bios update with Auto OC make this cpu the best option for professional and gaming scenarios.

I use the I7 265k daily for Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere Pro, absolutely love it, it's a beast, together with an RTX 4070S. I have an ultrawide 5120 x 1440p monitor so needed some extra power.

In my country 265kf costs as much as 7800x3d. At this price point I'm not sure why would anyone be buying Intel.

In Adobe Illustrator, the Intel 285K is #1. The 265K is a step down from the #1 CPU, so it really will not be a slouch in Adobe software.

Arrow lake was a regression to alder lake performance, and it looks bad even in today's HWunboxed review. Even with core scaling the latency of arrow lake kills performance so bad even a 6 core AMD processor will outperform it.

The 265k ironically performs worse in photoshop than the rest — it's under the 12600k. In premiere, it's under the 14700k and 7950x. In gaming, it's below the 7600x. In power use, it uses as much as the 7950x and 9950x.

A tuned 265k is very competitive in the market. You won't break records but they are stable with excellent MT. If you utilize the iGPU for video editing, there's nothing better.

I produce music and do some light gaming. The productivity performance is almost on par with ryzen 9 9900x, which if you exclude the memory cost, is $170 more. I don't plan on upgrading this cpu for another 5-8 years so if it is the only gen on 1851, that's not an issue. And even with gaming, the performance is pretty good. It is consistently above 120+ fps on 1080p and above 60-80 fps for most heavier games on 1440p.

Switching from AMD X3D to Intel 265K is so much smoother and snappier. best Intel CPU for me. Intel did amazing job with fixing it after the disastrous launch in October 24. i was just waiting for the fixes and then even the price dropped and as extra 2 free steam games. i bought it and now i so happyyyyyy!

At a discount price the CPU is a beast, idles and runs extremely cool. I was on AMD before, the idle temps on a Ryzen 9 7900x are the same as 265k when gaming... The hate for this CPU is one sided. For ITX size systems how cool it stays is a major plus. People are sleeping on these chips.

Hardware unboxed did an updated review and still doesn't really recommend them. The issue is its a dead platform so you're buying an expensive mobo and ram for a somewhat cheap CPU that gets mogged by a Ryzen 9700X.

Good price, but given the chances of it being good for one generation before sockets change, they should skip the RAM and games and do a motherboard offering with it. Lots of people have spare RAM; nobody has a board for one of these.

Yes - Ultra 265k is trash. I'm incredibly annoyed owning this dogsht cpu. I have it paired with 48gbs of corsair hynix and asus rog z890-E. Games like League of Legends don't run smoothly on it AND THATS BAD. I have to overclock the bullsht cpu so the cores stay on. So stupid. Edit: As of May 2025 Asus FINALLY pushed an update to their motherboards for the issues.

The games kinda suck and the RAM isn't great, but I guess it's better than nothing at all lol. Arrow lake already doesn't perform well, pairing it with RAM like that is just going to make it even worse.

Sure it might perform just a little bit underwhelming but overclocking it extremely with temps in the 60s and low power draw is what makes it sell to me.

Definitely the 265K. It is already a cool running chip with very reasonable power consumption, if not overclocked.

I got it and a board and RAM for $500 plus 3 free games. I couldn't get anything like that for x3d and I work more than I game. It's quite a good purchase for me.

I got the core ultra 7 for about £260, and its been great. £140 cheaper than 9800x3d, 2.5x more cores, higher clock, and a decent 68mb cache. I mostly use my pc for editing, so of course i went with the ultra 7 over the 9800x3d, but its brilliant for gaming also.

It's ok, no issues so far after bios updates of course but to be fair it's no faster than my old cpu so not really worth the upgrade. It's nice to have ddr5 and 4 m.2 slots but those are the only things that are better — the cpu itself is not that impressive.