Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus Review – Intel’s Fastest Gaming CPU

Introduction

Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus leads a new 2-part refresh of the company’s Core Ultra Series 2 Arrow Lake family of desktop processors. These aren’t just speed-bumps over existing SKUs, but come with increased CPU core counts, more L3 cache, minor increases in clock speeds, faster uncore frequencies, and a brand new software-side update that makes games more aware of Intel’s contemporary x86 architecture, extracting more performance. The other SKU from today’s release is the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, which we’ve reviewed here.

Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 Arrow Lake generation received mixed reviews despite the company significantly increasing the IPC of its E-cores over the previous generation, and massively gaining on the energy efficiency front, thanks to the new TSMC 3 nm node for the Compute tile, a node more advanced than even the TSMC 4 nm that AMD uses for its Ryzen 9000 Zen 5 series. On its own, the new Lion Cove P-core is touted to offer an IPC increase over the previous Raptor Lake core, but it lacks support for Hyper-Threading, and since the CPU core counts haven’t increased over the previous generation Raptor Lake, the overall thread count of the processor has reduced. With its 2026 refresh of Arrow Lake, Intel attempts to address this shortfall in thread counts by increasing core counts for the two new SKUs over the chips they are intended to replace.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus replaces the current Core Ultra 7 265K, it launches at an aggressive…