Intel’s Arrow Lake didn’t make much of a splash when Core Ultra 9 285K landed, but now the dust has settled and prices are plummeting, we can look at it through an entirely different lens. A swift discount to the high-end Core Ultra 7 265K puts the processor at its cheapest yet, making a fantastic upgrade.
Head over to Amazon, and you can nab 17% off your order with the chip costing just $336.58 in the US. France and Germany see the same model drop to its lowest-ever price at €379.55 and €392 respectively, while UK residents can grab it for under £341. Check out your local deals by clicking the buttons below:
Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
Set the stage for gaming and AI workflows with this 20-core powerhouse, complete with its very own NPU. See performance in PCSpecialist Nebula Supreme R.
Armed with eight Lion Cove performance cores and 12 Skymont efficient cores, it’s within stretching distance of the nearest Core 9, offering performance that’s not world’s apart from the previous-gen i9-14900K in certain scenarios – like Blender.
However, rather than eclipsing predecessors in gaming with its 5.6GHz boost clock and 30MB L3 Cache, Arrow Lake’s priority is efficiency first and foremost. Sure, you can boost the TDP all the way up to 250W, but it’s far more effective at its 125W base rating, often asking for half the power of the Core i7-14700K it replaces. That means more pennies in the bank that you’re not wasting on electricity, and more for upgrades later down the line.
Buried within the technical makeup of Core Ultra 7 265K is a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU), which is designed to make AI-driven tasks much simpler. Half and full precision scores don’t come close to the speed of offloading such workloads to a discrete graphics card, but having an NPU at the ready achieves identical performance to its accompanying CPU cores at around half the power. Such is the trend here.
Ushering in the new LGA1851 chipset, you’ll no doubt need to upgrade your motherboard in tandem to seat your new processor, but this opens you up to a suite of new features, including WiFi 7 and USB4. These, too, have started slipping down to more comfortable price points, with MSI Z890 Gaming Plus WiFi flexing a 7% discount.
As always, keep in mind that Amazon guarantees a 30-day return window in the US and UK, while Europeans have 14 days to send the CPU back if you’re not entirely happy. In the meantime, make sure you’re following Club386 on Google News to be the first to see new deals as and when they drop.
