Intel have announced a handful of new gaming CPUs, the Core Ultra 200S Plus series, to release next month. After 2024’s original Core Ultra 200S family went for efficiency gains at the cost of frame-punching game power, these 200S Plus chips are once again tuned more for straight performance, which sounds good to me. I like lower electricity bills and heat generation as much as the next hardware editor, and was fairly optimistic about that initial batch of Core Ultras at first, but they ended up so slow and dull it essentially put me off writing about CPUs for a year and a half.
Say hello, then, to the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 250K Plus, which’ll be out on March 26th 2026 at $299 and $199 respectively. There’ll also be slightly cheaper KF variants, without integrated graphics, for each. Intel VP Robert Hallock says these will be the “fastest desktop gaming processors Intel has ever built,” which they’ll need to be – while the blue team have been fiddling with efficiency, AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech has ran away with the gaming advantage, especially on the outstandingly quick Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
At a glance, however, the 200S Plus series doesn’t seem to have gone for gaming speeds through the usual medium of higher clock speeds and single-core muscle. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, for instance, only has the same 5.5GHz max boost clock speed as the Core Ultra 7 265K it replaces, while the new Core Ultra 5 250K Plus only barely ups its own boost clock, from 5.2GHz on the Ultra 5 245K to 5.3GHz here. Instead, both gain four additional Efficiency cores (the weaker but more power-sipping counterparts to the brawnier Performance cores). That should help their multitasking prowess, but won’t clearly aid games.
What should squeeze more frames out of your graphics card is an up-to-900MHz increase in D2D, or die-to-die, frequency. Translated from nerdspeak, this means the CPU’s composite parts – which include important bits like the memory and compute controllers – can communicate with each other faster, reducing latency and helping to keep games performance high. The original Core Ultra 200S series introduced this separated-tile design, Intel chips having previously clutched its controllers close together, and paid the price; hopefully this refresh fixes what it broke.
Intel’s in-house benchmarks suggest varied but positive results, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus averaging between 4% and 39% faster than its predecessor, and the Core Ultra 250K Plus bumping up between 8% and 24%.
It’s still hard to see even the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus beating the 9800X3D in a straight FPS footrace; these CPUs are ultimately just a refresh, with the next full generation not expected until Intel launches their long-rumoured Nova Lake chips much later this year. On that note, they also use the same LGA 1851 socket, work with the same 800 series motherboard chipset, and fit the same coolers as the 200S series.
A spot of course correction, mind you, wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, especially when those $299/$199 prices are significantly lower than what their 2024 equivalents cost when they were new. What the hell, PC hardware industry? Isn’t everything you make supposed to be out of stock and costing three times what it should?
