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

Just go for AMD. Why risk it? I was an intel fan since Pentium. For the first time I switched to AMD after my 13900k got the nasty bug. I'm not gambling on Intel anymore

Yeah the new chips are good however the performance is pretty sucky for gaming. For productivity though the 265k/kf is insane value tho

Cheaper than a 14700k dang, it's a fantastic for that price even considering gaming performance

$230 for this is great. Probably the best CPU value at the moment. To the people saying 'it's worse than AM5 in gaming.' It's 5% behind the 9700x at 720p with a 4090 (a completely unrealistic scenario) while being far ahead in productivity. In real world gaming there is no difference. The 9700x is $304 with more expensive motherboards.

Been using 265K for a while now. It is an amazing CPU for me (I never play games). I'm surprised by that the questionable gaming performance hampers sales that much. I matched it with 8400 CUDIMM memory and a B580.

AMD is the way right now. Intel are good for corporate desktops but are not competitive for gaming.

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.

I'm a Ryzen guy, have been since the start. If I were building a new PC right now I would be ALL OVER this 265KF deal. Absurd value at this price. I'm questioning anyone who doesn't tbh.

At 1080 the difference drops to 3.5% and at 1440 it drops to 0.0%. At 1440, it's 2.6% behind the 7950X3D (and 5% behind the first place chip), which is insane given the cost difference. I really think that Intel should never have released the 265k at ~$400. Maybe $300 MSRP and the reception would have been far better.

Arrow Lake isn't nearly as bad as folks think or say (unless all you do is gaming, in which case x3D chips are the way to go). It's a very compelling platform for productivity workloads and ironically great value, even with a Z890 motherboard. And if you game at anything other than 1080P, like 4K, the benefits of x3D chips are semi mitigated.

Arrow lake CPUs are in a super weird spot... Only a solid pick for price vs performance productivity. AM5 + their own 14th + 13th gen are better at gaming. It also kinda feels bad to buy a motherboard with 1 gen of CPUs when AM5 is getting another major generation. Intel is already dropping LGA1851 for LGA1954 (what nova lake will use)... So you don't even get the benefits of being on a new platform.

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.

A 3.2% advantage at 1080p gaming, being virtually equal at 1440p and 4k, and a 17.5% disadvantage on average in applications — the 9700X does not beat it in every possible way.

265K benefits a lot from overclocking. 200S boost is an overclocking profile for 200 series CPUs that's covered under warranty, you just turn it on in the BIOS.

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

All the price cuts, free goodies, and game bundles really pushed me over the edge to skip AM5. 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.

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. That socket also won't get any new gen intel cpus so kinda dead longevity-wise.

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

I bought the 265K, pretty happy with it. Came from a 5800X3D. For that price, it's a amazing deal.

Yeah I went 265k for my editing machine because I wanted iGPU but didn't want to deal with 13/14th instability. It's been fantastic

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

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 at up to 210w pl2 never got more than 80c. At 125w (default pl1) it runs around 55c. In terms of productivity is quite fast. It's an amazing deal for 300usd.

I got a free game Battlefield 6 with a 265k and the mobo, ddr5 ram, nvme 1tb, 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 upgrade.

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).

It's not as good as 9800X3D, it's 20% slower on average, in gaming. However, it is as fast or faster in gaming compared to Zen4 or Zen5 non X3D. And faster than a 9900X in workloads.

it performs the same as zen 4 in gaming (7000 series) (obv the non x3d ones). it mainly just dominates productivity, beats out a 9900x with ease

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

Its a mediocre chip on a more or less dead platform. Thumbs down for me.

My Core Ultra i7 265KF performs just fine in gaming. It's paired with a 4080 Super and 48GB of 8000mt ram (G.Skill). Everything on Ultra from RDR2, to MS Flight Sim 2024... there isn't anything I can't max out and play at 3440x1440p Ultra Wide.

The Ultra 7 265kf as a gaming chip it is bad value, as a production chip it is actually pretty good. I am not sure about going with the F model, Integrated graphics can be very useful for troubleshooting or if your GPU dies, and currently there is only a $10 US difference.

Definitely worth it at that price. It's approximately a 9700x. Unless you're planning on playing at 1080p 240+ hz it'll serve you admirably.

Beats 9900x in productivity, and does great in games, obviously not as good as say a 7800/9800x3d, but still good.

They're OK. Arrow Lake was brutally overpriced at launch and was worse at some things than the previous generation, so initial reviews were very negative. Gaming performance is generally adequate but not class leading. Ryzen usually beats it there, as does 14th Gen. There is a noticeable difference at 1080p but is pretty close to the non-X3D Ryzens at 1440p or higher. Multi core performance is great, especially for the price.

People are gonna tell you to go AMD all day (as I would if you were buying new), but that's a really good price. You'll be stoked on it.

The main issue with Core Ultras imo was always bad pricing. They're not bad CPUs, they're more energy efficient than their predecessors, and don't have any weird degradation issues. But their price simply did not match what they offered in performance, particularly in games. This should actually give Intel a breather, with newer, good chips being available at a competitive price.

If you're using it for productivity, it's great. Bumps heads with the 9900X and 14700K. For gaming? Sometimes it's better value than a 9600X, sometimes it's not.

Incredible multicore performance for the price, but gaming still seems seriously lackluster.

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 only 11 percent worse than the 285k which is almost double the price — best price to performance of any CPU out there right now.

I have tried one, it was ok... there were some gaming performance strangeness I could never quite figure out. Like in Oblivion remastered, it would often perform a lot worse than my 5800XT with the same GPU on a fresh, identical NVME... like 40-50% performance loss at times. Now when things worked well, it was great.

Its ok no issues so far after bios updates of course but to be fair it's no faster than my old cpu (265KF vs 12700KF) 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.

Such a dead platform. You don't find any serious information about undervolting or settings of expensive z890 mainboards. And knowing this will be the one and only LGA1851 generation, is making this so dead for me.

The price is really good. I just have a couple issues. First they lied a lot about 14th Gen and I am not sure anyone should trust them. Second they will be the only CPU in that socket. Nova lake will be in a new socket. While Nova lake does look very exciting I am not sure this chip is nearly as exciting. Again it's a good price for the performance but you are stuck on a dead end platform.