Intel Core Ultra 5 245K review: where Arrow Lake breaks down

Intel’s latest Arrow Lake CPUs haven’t been off to a great start. What looked like competitors to the best processors money can buy have morphed into a disappointment, as inconsistent performance and a complete lack of gaming gains have left the CPUs in the dust compared to the AMD competition and even Intel’s own last-gen options. And unfortunately, the value-focused Core Ultra 5 245K isn’t above those issues.

This class of CPU is usually a workhorse — a value-packed chip that can deliver great gaming performance, solid productivity prowess, and power efficiency for around $300. There are some productivity gains here, and power efficiency is excellent. However, there are also big regressions in gaming, making the Core Ultra 5 245K tough to justify, even stacked up against the problematic 14th-gen options from Intel.

Intel Core 5 245K specs

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The Core Ultra 5 245K features Intel’s latest Arrow Lake architecture, which is built around the same two core designs as the mobile Lunar Lake chips. You can read all about Arrow Lake and how it works in my Core Ultra 9 285K review, but the short of it is that Intel stuck with a hybrid architecture combining performance (P) cores and efficient (E) cores, but it ditched its long-standing Hyper-Threading technology, giving each core access to only a single thread.

As you can see from the table below, the Core Ultra 5 245K and the last-gen Core i5-14600K both come with 14 cores, split across six P-cores and eight E-cores, but the Core Ultra 5 245K only has access to 14 threads. The individual cores on the Core Ultra 5 245K are more powerful, however, with the E-cores being the main driver on performance. As I’ll get into with my testing below, the Core Ultra 5 245K doesn’t struggle with heavily-threaded applications.

Elsewhere, the comparisons are more interesting. First, cache. Intel actually reduced the total amount of cache on the Core Ultra 5 245K compared to the previous generation, likely to save power and space. Cache accounts for a large portion of die space. It might be a smart move for efficiency, but as we’ve seen with CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, more cache has big implications for gaming — an area where the Core Ultra 5 245K has serious problems.

The efficiency angle makes sense when you look at the power requirements. Both processors come with the same 125 watts of base power, but the Core Ultra 5 245K tops out at 159W. The new Arrow Lake range is very efficient based on my testing, but that’s only in the context of Intel’s more recent power-hungry CPUs like the Core i5-14600K and Core i5-13600K. Compared to the competition from AMD, Intel is providing similar power efficiency.

Test configurations

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I kept to identical test configurations for all of the CPUs I tested for this review, only swapping out the motherboard and CPU. That means the same graphics card, the same kit of memory, the same cooler, and even the same SSDs and power supply. Although I did all of my testing for the Core Ultra 5 245K on the Asus Z890 ROG Maximus Hero, I also spot-checked the chip on the MSI Z890 Unify-X to make sure performance was similar.

All of the data in this review is fresh — even for older CPUs, I reran all of the tests to account for the latest Windows and BIOS updates.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind here. First, the Core Ultra 5 245K scales well with higher-speed memory. DDR5-6000 memory is still the most common (and cost-effective) memory you’ll find, but new CUDIMMs enable much higher speeds, and the Core Ultra 5 245K shows some performance improvements in certain apps with the faster memory.

In addition, I tested with the recent BIOS updates for the LGA 1700 CPUs. If you recall, high-end Intel CPUs like the Core i9-14900K and Core i9-13900K struggled with instability issues for months, and the most recent BIOS updates aimed at addressing those issues can reduce performance. The performance drop isn’t big — less than 5% at most, and only in some apps. Thankfully, that shouldn’t affect the Core i5-14600K much considering it wasn’t majorly impacted by the instability problems.

Productivity performance

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Just like the Core Ultra 9 285K, the Core Ultra 5 245K has a pretty wide range of performance. As you can see above in Cinebench R24, there are workloads where the Core Ultra 5 245K seems to pull off the impossible, outclassing a current-gen CPU like the Ryzen 7 9700X for $100 cheaper. But then there are others where the CPU can’t even muster enough strength to beat its last-gen counterpart, the Core i5-14600K.

On that side, you have apps like Photoshop and Premiere Pro. The Core Ultra 5 245K is able to outclass the six-core Ryzen 5 9600X due to a higher core count, but it still falls short of the Ryzen 7 9700X, and worse, the Core i5-14600K in Premiere Pro. And in Photoshop, it’s a bloodbath, with the Core Ultra 5 245K falling behind every other CPU I tested.

What’s interesting, and disappointing, is that the Core Ultra 5 245K performs well in some very specific applications, such as video transcoding. You can see in Handbrake above that the Core Ultra 5 245K not only beats the competition from AMD, it absolutely crushes every other CPU I tested. The same is true in Blender, which is a renderer like Cinebench where the Core Ultra 5 245K really shines.

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And in a multi-faceted test like Geekbench 6, the Core Ultra 5 245K trades a bit of single-core performance that we can see with the Ryzen 9000 CPUs for much better multi-core performance, even outclassing the last-gen Core i5-14600K — an impressive feat considering the performance I’ll dig into in the next section.

Although impressive, looking at some other tests like 7-Zip and Y-Cruncher paints a different picture. The performance of the Core Ultra 5 245K is all over the place. It has some advantages, particularly in transcoding and rendering, but both the Ryzen 9000 competition and the last-gen Core i5-14600K provide much more consistent performance across apps, even if that means sacrificing a bit of speed in specific tasks.

Gaming performance

The Core Ultra 5 245K is really hard to justify. When looking at a flagship, you can balance gaming performance with productivity performance, but for a CPU in this price range, the weight heavily swings in the direction of gaming. That’s not to say there aren’t shoppers who want productivity performance on a budget, but rather that buying a flagship from a couple of generations back will generally pull more weight than a new midrange processor like the Core Ultra 5 245K. These processors really earn their stripes with gaming performance.

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Or, at least, that’s what usually happens. It’s not the case here with the Core Ultra 5 245K, which is embarrassingly slow in games. Take Cyberpunk 2077 as a prime example. The Core i5-14600K is 13% faster, and it’s still the second-lowest performer out of the CPUs I tested. Even worse, the $330 Core Ultra 5 245K is 17% slower than the Ryzen 5 7600X — a six-core CPU that you can pick up for $215 right now.

Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t a cherry-picked example, either. You can see the Core Ultra 5 245K at the bottom of the pile in Final Fantasy XIV, and in Hitman 3, the Core Ultra 5 245K beats the Ryzen 5 7600X but still falls short of its last-gen counterpart. That’s bad news. You can find the Core i5-14600K for around $250 — that’s a CPU that’s $80 cheaper and provides better gaming performance.

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Things are a bit better in F1 2022, where the Core Ultra 5 245K manages to at least match the last-gen Ryzen 5 7600X and actually beat the Core i5-14600K. Looking at the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X from the current generation, however, the Core Ultra 5 245K gets curbed.

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Ashes of the Singularity is similarly disappointing. Once again, the Core Ultra 5 245K is able to claim a lead over the Ryzen 5 7600X, but it falls short of its last-gen counterpart.

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The only game where the Core Ultra 5 245K showed any sort of leading performance was Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, but it’s only a win on a technicality. The Core Ultra 5 245K, Core i5-14600K, and Ryzen 5 9600X are all within a few frames of each other — I would call the performance identical. Still, the Core Ultra 5 245K technically won, so I should let the CPU have its flowers.

Rounding out the list are Returnal, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and Black Myth: Wukong. These are all graphically-intensive games, so there’s very little movement when isolating the CPU. The Core Ultra 5 245K wins in some titles and loses in others, but the performance window in these games is very narrow and largely comes down to your graphics card.

Not the value punch

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Even in a generation where Intel delivers a lateral movement in performance, such as 14th-gen CPUs, the Core i5 class is usually a good recommendation based purely on the ratio between price and performance. That’s not the case here. The Core Ultra 5 245K takes big swings, as do all Arrow Lake CPUs, and unfortunately it misses more often than it hits.

The Core i5-14600K roundly outperforms the Core Ultra 5 245K, and it’s available for close to $80 less. Similarly, the Ryzen 7 9700X and even the weaker Ryzen 5 9600X offer better performance across apps, which are both competitive with Intel on price. Usually I can find an edge case where even a weak CPU is worth buying, but that just isn’t the case here. From both Intel and AMD, there are better options than the Core Ultra 5 245K.