Review Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Review: Intel Throws a Lateral with Arrow Lake

[bit_user]

"The new chips come with 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 support, with..."

... so, we'll all be surprised when Battlemage cards arrive with 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0? The gaming reviews will need to be rewritten.

Every few years, TechPowerUp tests PCIe scaling of a few dozen games and high-end graphics cards. So far, games show only marginal benefits from PCIe 4.0 x16. Intel really jumped the gun on PCIe 5.0.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 PCI-Express Scaling

The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is a graphics card powerhouse, but what happens when you run it on a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 bus? In our mini-review we've also tested various PCI-Express 3.0, 2.0 and 1.1 configs to get a feel for how FPS scales with bandwidth.

www.techpowerup.com

The main benefit would be the ability to run two cards at PCIe 5.0 x8, except multi-GPU support among games is reportedly very rare and rough.

The double data rate PCIE5 should benefit AI processing even more.

Yes. So far, a handful of GPU compute apps are the main beneficiaries of PCIe 4.0. They'll probably show a bit further speedup from PCIe 5.0.

 

[YSCCC]

No, I mean big multicored chips that are inherently inefficient in gaming. 9950x, 7950x, 14900k etc. It's a lot lower than all of them in power draw while matching the 9950x in performance. At least based on tomhardwares review.

I dig through the THG review and never did they say where they get the numbers from, HWmonitor or through the EPS 8 pin will make a huge difference as denoted by like GN's power measurement rig build up video, as apparantly ARL draws power also from 24v significantly so the readings of different reviewers are all over the place.

It seems at this point measuring total power consumption while keeping the GPU the same would be a better metric to compare gaming efficiency

 

[helper800]

No, the 9950X seems to have an edge on MT efficiency, overall.

The answer is actually; it depends. Just like you said, it depends on the benchmarks. Efficiency is determined by the task, duration of the task, and power used to complete the task.

 

[thestryker]

20W sounds like a lot, but not so much when it's the difference between 58W and 78W.

20W sounds like 20W and at these power levels that's about 34% more than Intel.

I'm really not sure what the point of your post here is.

 

[thestryker]

I dig through the THG review and never did they say where they get the numbers from, HWmonitor or through the EPS 8 pin will make a huge difference as denoted by like GN's power measurement rig build up video, as apparantly ARL draws power also from 24v significantly so the readings of different reviewers are all over the place.

*Asus does on certain motherboards this isn't an ARL thing.

 

[YSCCC]

Well said. I bought the 9950X for productivity with some side gaming... I'd rather have the video editing/encoding/rendering performance over a few fps in gaming that I probably wouldn't even notice with my 4090 running the show.

I would definitely notice trying to do all that productivity on a 7800x3D.

As for power draw... could care less.

Yes, it just depends on tasks you will do.

Btw, I am using mine mainly as gaming rig but I do occasionally do large batch raw photo processing, current rig is a 14900k with 3070Ti, and I am surprised that once I was doing some background low utilization gaming, which mainly eats up the 3070Ti, the raw conversion by CPU alone is like dead slow in comparison, it seems to me that most production software relies on GPU more than CPU more, just not to bottleneck it.

With that experience I wonder if one allows GPU assist in productivity software in normal, daily use case, if changing a 9950X to 7800X3D will have meaningful time reduction and if so, by how much

 

[YSCCC]

*Asus does on certain motherboards this isn't an ARL thing.

Not sure it is an Asus only thing, coz some X posts also said that is for arrow lake, and TBF I didn't dig deep into that.

But solely judging how vast the power consumption of the ARL reviews under supposedly similar workload it looks suspicious enough for me.

And maybe it's me didn't read every word, the THG review don't seem to show the exact parts they are using in the review benchmarks, makes it even more difficult to suspect or confirm the numbers

 

[Raymond_52]

I find it somewhat funny that everyone is crying about the flat or slight fall in gaming numbers. Intel's sells the VAST majority of its chips to OEM's, of which the VAST majority of those systems are for business purposes. Right now, that is super good news for Intel since workload performance and power efficiency is tops on all those guys lists. Gaming is a tiny part of the CPU pie. Might be best to keep things in perspective.

Well said, the world does not revolve around gamers.

 

[Lafong]

20W sounds like 20W and at these power levels that's about 34% more than Intel.

I'm really not sure what the point of your post here is.

About 2 dollars a month if operated 14 hours a day at the average cost of electricity in the USA. Likely higher in Europe?

 

[thestryker]

Not sure it is an Asus only thing, coz some X posts also said that is for arrow lake, and TBF I didn't dig deep into that.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-ultra-9-285k/24.html

The ASUS Z890 Hero motherboard feeds four of the CPU VRM phases from the 24-pin ATX connector, instead of the 8-pins, which makes it impossible to measure CPU-only power with dedicated test equipment (we're not trusting any CPU software power sensors). You either lose some power because only the two 8-pin CPU connectors are measured, or you end up including power for the GPU, chips, and storage when measuring the two 8-pin connectors along with the 24-pin ATX. For this reason, we used an MSI Z890 Carbon motherboard exclusively for the power consumption tests in this review.

Roman also mentioned the Asus design in his preview video.

And maybe it's me didn't read every word, the THG review don't seem to show the exact parts they are using in the review benchmarks, makes it even more difficult to suspect or confirm the numbers

I don't recall seeing the power consumption measurement method explained but they have the part overview on page 4. ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Hero is the motherboard used so phsyical measurement on it would require a setup like GN's.

 

[Raymond_52]

The PC Gaming Audience has a disproportional amount of sales vs marketing, & customer psychological influence.

You have to understand how important they are.

Our noise influences ALOT of purchasing decisions.

🤣🤣

 

[YSCCC]

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-ultra-9-285k/24.html

Roman also mentioned the Asus design in his preview video.

I don't recall seeing the power consumption measurement method explained but they have the part overview on page 4. ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Hero is the motherboard used so phsyical measurement on it would require a setup like GN's.

Ar right, I skimmed before the test page coz usually it's where Tom's would show their setup.

If so the figures might need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

What I found confusing this round of reviews is that it seems they've changed so many stuffs behaviour that reviewers got confused, or with some other constrains they seems to be using rather vague wordings and the depict of test setup is kind of mysterious and overall have a lack of detail in that.

Together with the good efficiency gain compared to RPL, but lackluster gaming performance makes me wonder how it will age in a few months.

 

[TheHerald]

It's right there in the Pros and Cons sections of both reviews:

• Toms: "Generational regression in gaming performance"
• TechPowerUp: "Gaming performance lower than expected, slower than Raptor Lake"

TPU goes on to say: "Some games and applications aren't currently performing well at all"

Basically, I think people are disappointed because it jumped ahead by 2 full nodes and features much-enhanced updates to both the P-cores and E-cores. And, for all that, what we got just doesn't seem like a lot.

Well sure, but even with that horrible performance on a couple of games (I already brought up cyberpunk) it literally performs within 1% of the 9950x while consuming a lot less power.

The reviewers did you the favor of summarizing it quite simply and putting it where you will see it.

I guess im silly. Please explain it to me. Was anything on my post wrong? It literally is neck and neck iwth the 9950x in MT and MT efficiency, better in ST efficiency and light loads / idle, same gaming with much lower power draw.

 

[TheHerald]

This is exactly what TPU started doing in their reviews and it consistently shows Zen4/5 using 20W+ more than Intel.

It's not exactly idle that's the issue , since you can just...well turn off your PC. Try browsing. 7950x casually hits 70w browsing the web. As im writing this post my chip is at 5.5 watts. That's the main difference.

 

[TheHerald]

I dig through the THG review and never did they say where they get the numbers from, HWmonitor or through the EPS 8 pin will make a huge difference as denoted by like GN's power measurement rig build up video, as apparantly ARL draws power also from 24v significantly so the readings of different reviewers are all over the place.

It seems at this point measuring total power consumption while keeping the GPU the same would be a better metric to compare gaming efficiency

That only happens on the asus hero and / or other asus mobos. It's not the cpus thats' doing it, asus mingled the CPU vrms into the atx 24pin.

This is taken from an MSI mobo as explained in their review exactly because the hero does the weird shaenanigans. So both tom's and TPU agree that overall power draw in gaming is lower than the 9950x. Which is good, no?

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Swing and Miss would have been a better analogy than 'Throw'.

OUB this thing fails at nearly everything it was hyped for. GN did a good video on it. In its current state it's New Stock e-Waste.

 

[TheHerald]

The answer is actually; it depends. Just like you said, it depends on the benchmarks. Efficiency is determined by the task, duration of the task, and power used to complete the task.

Yeah, overall I wouldn't say the i9 is faster / more efficient at MT tasks, they are really neck and neck with the 9950x - depends on the task at hand. But on the other hand the i9 retained the monolithic characteristics when it comes to light workloads, with power draw being crazy low, and you can see that in both gaming and lightly threaded workloads where it draws way less power than the 9950x.

Spoiler

Overall if you can't take advantage of the AVX capabilities on the 9950x, the i9 is better imo.

On the other hand, the 9950x 3d will probably be overall better unless Intel can fix their gaming performance - and assuming the 9950x 3d doesn't have the same weird issues that the 7950x 3d where you have to disable half the chip to perform in games it will be the GOAT.

 

[YSCCC]

That only happens on the asus hero and / or other asus mobos. It's not the cpus thats' doing it, asus mingled the CPU vrms into the atx 24pin.

This is taken from an MSI mobo as explained in their review exactly because the hero does the weird shaenanigans. So both tom's and TPU agree that overall power draw in gaming is lower than the 9950x. Which is good, no?

The gaming power draw is lower, which is good, but it is also slower and draws more power than all last gen X3D in gaming, plus it is slower that way, so not really exciting gain, production wise it is much better looking, but as I said, welcomed improvement and acceptable performance uplift on MT, but not anywhere near exciting or upgrade tempting for quite a lot of ppl considering what the total cost is. So time for you to upgrade no?

 

[TheHerald]

The gaming power draw is lower, which is good, but it is also slower and draws more power than all last gen X3D in gaming, plus it is slower that way, so not really exciting gain, production wise it is much better looking, but as I said, welcomed improvement and acceptable performance uplift on MT, but not anywhere near exciting or upgrade tempting for quite a lot of ppl considering what the total cost is. So time for you to upgrade no?

Well gaming performance is really on par with the 9950x, while using a lot less power. The x3ds aren't even in the picture right now, cause all of them have low core counts. Even the 7950x 3d behaves like an 8core while gaming since it really just turns off the 2nd ccd. That doesn't appeal to me.

If the 9950x 3d fixes the above issue and it can be used as a 16core, id' say it takes the GOAT crown. If it behaves the same as the 7950x 3d, im probably hitting the 285k. I was looking to order yesterday but I can't find the unisex mobo anywhere on stock.

EG1. No cpu released or going to be released this year is going to be exciting for people with 13/14th/zen4. That much is a given.

 

[YSCCC]

Well gaming performance is really on par with the 9950x, while using a lot less power. The x3ds aren't even in the picture right now, cause all of them have low core counts. Even the 7950x 3d behaves like an 8core while gaming since it really just turns off the 2nd ccd. That doesn't appeal to me.

If the 9950x 3d fixes the above issue and it can be used as a 16core, id' say it takes the GOAT crown. If it behaves the same as the 7950x 3d, im probably hitting the 285k. I was looking to order yesterday but I can't find the unisex mobo anywhere on stock.

EG1. No cpu released or going to be released this year is going to be exciting for people with 13/14th/zen4. That much is a given.

Dont go for 9950X3D coz Intel is always praised by you, act like you said and support intel not only literally.

while fun part is that for production, it seems 285k is only on par or slightly quicker than 9950X, while drinking quite some more power for that, so it don't really look like it champs the 9950X but more like trading blows, all with the requirement of an all new platform.

 

[helper800]

Well gaming performance is really on par with the 9950x, while using a lot less power. The x3ds aren't even in the picture right now, cause all of them have low core counts. Even the 7950x 3d behaves like an 8core while gaming since it really just turns off the 2nd ccd. That doesn't appeal to me.

If the 9950x 3d fixes the above issue and it can be used as a 16core, id' say it takes the GOAT crown. If it behaves the same as the 7950x 3d, im probably hitting the 285k. I was looking to order yesterday but I can't find the unisex mobo anywhere on stock.

EG1. No cpu released or going to be released this year is going to be exciting for people with 13/14th/zen4. That much is a given.

I mean, I am on a 5800X3D and find nothing exciting still. Unless when I get a 5080/5090 equivalent I an CPU bound with my 240hz 4k screen I see no reason to get a better CPU.

 

[TheHerald]

Dont go for 9950X3D coz Intel is always praised by you, act like you said and support intel not only literally.

LOL, I praise whoever is making good products. Sorry that you don't like that.

while drinking quite some more power for that,

Not really true though.

Spoiler

https://tpucdn.com/review/intel-core-ultra-9-285k/images/efficiency-multithread.png

i9 and 9950x are very similar in both performance and power draw in MT. In gaming and lighter loads the i9 is way more efficient.

I mean, I am on a 5800X3D and find nothing exciting still. Unless when I get a 5080/5090 equivalent I an CPU bound with my 240hz 4k screen I see no reason to get a better CPU.

Yeap, im also on 240 4k, even a 5090 will be a bottleneck. I literally have to drop to 720p to get CPU bound at those heavy RT / PT games.

 

[YSCCC]

LOL, I praise whoever is making good products. Sorry that you don't like that.

Sorry you keep praising how good intel is, and even when Zen 4 is better than RPL you find weird ways to justify RPL efficiency and bash Zen 5%, so... well.

Not really true though.

Spoiler

https://tpucdn.com/review/intel-core-ultra-9-285k/images/efficiency-multithread.png

i9 and 9950x are very similar in both performance and power draw in MT. In gaming and lighter loads the i9 is way more efficient.

And now when convinent, TPU single graph suddenly becomes reliable again, good

 

[TheHerald]

Sorry you keep praising how good intel is, and even when Zen 4 is better than RPL you find weird ways to justify RPL efficiency and bash Zen 5%, so... well.

Bruh what? I've always said the 7950x 3d is overall better than the 13900k. The heck are you talking about? It's the 6core and 8core amd parts I dislike.

And now when convinent, TPU single graph suddenly becomes reliable again, good

As I've said 30 times before, when TPU agrees with other reviews, nothing wrong with it.

Just stop your obsession man.

 

[Guardians Bane]

If it's insane, Ryzen is super insane by being even more efficient.

Yeah, but if someone wants to stick with Intel, it's not bad. But why they'd upgrade to this platform with no known upgrade path is weird to me. I'm definitely going with an AM5 system for my next build now.