Intel Core Ultra 7 265: Reddit's Productivity Pick or Gaming Dud?

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.

Why is this getting downvoted? Bro just made an observation of the sales. it's clear that Arrow Lake is poor, not a surprise it'll have a weak reception. Loses to their own last gen in games, and more expensive at the same time.

I had high hopes, I even preordered a CPU/board. I canceled it as soon as the benchmarks came out. Ended up with saving $300 and going with a z790/14900k open box.

If they sold this for $300, it would be a good product. I reckon the lower TDP models will get more praise from reviewers because Arrow Lake scales really well with limited power. When both are limited to 45W, 285K outperforms the 9950X by 87% in multi-core.

That was me, oh and i already returned it.

the ultra 7 265 is totally fine for a proxmox build... it's plenty fast, has av1 support, and is much more efficient than the i7 14700. performance difference isn't going to matter much unless you're doing super heavy vm workloads constantly. the only reason to go 14700 would be if you really need those extra cores for something like multiple vms all running compilers or databases at once, but honestly most homelab and plex setups won't touch the ceiling of a 265

For software development, the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K is a good CPU and would be my personal choice (or perhaps the 285K if I needed a bit more horsepower). For my needs, I'd personally go with either 64GB or 96GB of RAM, but that depends on what sort of software development you'll be doing, the sizes of the code and data, etc.

That actually makes me excited for the T variant 35W office chips.

Intel definitely is better with plex. If you want to do some remote gaming with moonlight/sunshine, it might be worth just getting a cheap nvidia card (1660ti can be bought for 60-70 bucks from fb marketplace). It acts as a nice transcoder as well.

This is the chip I went with to build my 2nd music production pc. I needed intel for thunderbolt. Should have the board and chip this week and get to making music.

Never choose the Arrow Lake U over the Arrow Lake H, Arrow Lake U is just a refresh of the 2024 Meteor Lake CPUs. Arrow Lake H is more efficient, despite having a higher TDP rating. 32 GB RAM should be enough for your work.

No regrets building my production/gaming system using the 14th gen CPUs.

The problem with it is it's horribly misconfigured. If Intel called it a Xeon for workstations, it would be a top notch workstation CPU. If we call it a premium gaming CPU, then it's the laughing stock. For your use case it may make sense.

Apparently it had some problems, can't recall if that was a Gamers Nexus investigation. I believe it still has quite a few minor issues that build up to make it a little unstable, unless that has changed in the past month with fixes. It had microcode issues all the way up until a month or two ago but I still haven't seen any reports on if it has been solved.

I think it is competitive as is. It's cheaper than the 9900x and competes well against it in most applications. Gaming performance is what it is so I wouldn't buy any of these for gaming.

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 Photoshop, Ryzen 9000 is #1, and the Intel 285K is #2. In Adobe Premiere, the Intel 285K is #1 unless dealing with Red Camera footage. 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.

Why are you building the pc? If it's for gaming, cheaper CPU and more expensive GPU would be the way to go.

For productivity they are ok, it's in gaming that they are slower than the previous 14th. The other concern is that it may be a one off, it's unknown if they'll go on with this socket given the sales are pretty low and they might decide to wipe it for Panther Lake if they ever port it to desktop.

I once in your place and I was a bit regretting my decision to choose Ultra 7 265U with 64GB RAM. It has downside which I hate: shorter battery life and louder fans. I previously use Yoga Slim 7i with Lunar Lake, so I can attest the chip is cooler, less noise and have excellent battery life. The bright side if you use 265U, I think it handled multitasking better.

they took all the worst value components and put them in one pc

Depending on your workload, OS, and configurations new intel chips with the efficiency and performance cores can be annoying to work with it. Especially in virtualization, you also lose extra threads. Would recommend AMD as they are still offering traditional CPUs.

he probably confused it the 1st gen H series such as 155h or 165h that are known to throttle like there's no tomorrow.

Out of the options you listed, I would buy the 255H

Core ultra for sure. 14 series has had a lot of issues which are well documented.

I'm coming from 12700kf was thinking about cancelling my 265kf but after reviews going to stick with it. I looked at amd 7800x3d but zen4 is a step back motherboard wise so I'm happy with my choice just see how it plays out after fixes.

This is Intel's first chiplet design. Obviously there are some kinks to be worked out. I believe with microcode updates and Windows updating their thread director for Arrow Lake, performance gains can be had.

I'd personally vote for Core Ultra if you both, are willing to take the low risk of having issues with the CPU due to it's new architecture, and see yourself potentially upgrading the CPU in the future. If you're sure you do not want either of those, pick the 12700. It's tried and true and just works.

I'm using it for gaming. Most people will disable the internal graphics card for gaming, however, the NPU is not fully functional when that happens per the DirectX 12 logs. The NPU is actually a MCDM 3.2 compute device with a generic DirectX 12 api, so the Intel Arc and Xe drivers must be installed to make this work.

May I make a suggestion. If you're in full control of the code, is it possible to use your gpu to greatly accelerate the data processing? Unless you're adjusting the data based on the previous entry, parallelizing and using a gpu to crunch the number is way faster than any cpu. You'd then put less budget on the cpu + board + ram, and more towards the gpu. Any modern cpu can handle most coding tasks.

265T is quite strong, I compile things like LLVM regularly and it has cut down the compilation time of LLVM to 16 mins.

Its 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. Saying that I haven't overclocked it yet was waiting for a few more bios revisions first.

For 200 tabs + 20 apps, spend on RAM capacity + fast SSD first. The Ultra 9 285 is basically an Ultra 7 265 with +4 E-cores, a bit more cache, and slightly higher boost. That helps background junk, but not $350 worth for your use. Get the Ultra 7 265, 64–96 GB (or 128 GB if you're feral with tabs), and a fast NVMe.

For productivity, it'll be decent. Normally I wouldn't be a fan of a 7 class CPU with a 5060, but for your uses, it'll actually be alright. A massive upgrade from what you have, at least.

Not the best processor, but if it was a good deal who cares. Also in the grand scheme of things it's still pretty high up there.

The T variant delivers 95% of the full chip's performance. You're correct.

I too just ordered the MSI Ultra 7 32 Ram 2 TB w/RTX 5060. I have a PS5 pro so gaming wasn't that important. When &/if the tariffs go away, I'll look into doing a major upgrade on the video card and PS. My current PC for the last 8 years could only get upgraded to Windows 10 & support is no longer available so I was definitely in the market for a replacement system.

After more reading and asking around, my current understanding is that at idle the differences if any are negligible, and can hit single digit W power consumption for Intel, but higher for AMD. It's under load where the power use is vastly different.

Im looking at an Ultra 7 5070 Gaming PC, but this is pretty nice. A lot of people keep telling me AMD but I'm not so sure. People are conflicted.

would be good if it were half that price

$1,400 for those components is reasonable. $1400 for that level of performance is highway robbery.