Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs. AMD Ryzen X3D CPUs

Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is a CPU designed for people who want to do a mix of tasks like games, work, streaming, and more without upgrading to the more expensive Core Ultra 9 line. It aims to provide performance across a range of workloads while keeping the general cost of the platform low. It does this by having 24 cores, higher frequencies, faster memory support, and better efficiency.

Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is currently the best all-rounder CPU on the market. It's the one you should get if you want to do a bit of everything and do it well on the mid to high end. This CPU is so good that it rendered the Core Ultra 9 285K basically pointless, and unless you really want to extract every last frame from an RTX 4090, competitive gaming basically makes X3D CPUs from AMD pointless.

Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus Specifications

Spec-wise, it's still an 8 P-core and 16 E-core CPU for a total of 24 cores, like the 265K, and Intel went ahead and raised the frequency to up to 5.5GHz. However, the main change is that it also includes support out of the box for up to DDR5 7200MHz, making it easier to reach 8000MHz in XMP, which is needed to get the most out of this CPU.

We covered already how even with the initial launch of the Core Ultra 9 285K, if you run that with 8000MHz RAM of the right kind and overclock it, we could reach an X3D CPU, the 9800X3D specifically. Here, they actually raised the D2D and NGU by 900MHz from the factory. That's a big increase, and that's basically what I was telling everyone to do previously.

The CPU is also extremely thermally efficient. A lot of people are still scared because of 14th Gen overheating and basically cooking themselves until they were broken, but the new Core Ultra CPUs are very power efficient. They were so power efficient that they were actually underperforming a little bit at launch. That was the problem, but that's now fully fixed.

$299 Pricing Makes the CPU Competitive

This CPU comes in at $299, and at that price, it is absolutely insane. Currently, the other best CPU on the market is still the 250K Plus from Intel, and that's the better value because the performance is so close. In single-thread performance, it's basically the same.

You just lose a little bit in multi-thread performance, which you may not need unless you do heavy productivity work. However, for just $100 more in a $2,000 or $3,000 computer, oftentimes it's worth buying this one. This absolutely destroys the Ryzen 7 counterpart in productivity. There's not even a comparison, really. You can only compare this to the Ryzen 9 for productivity. 

You can compare this to the X3D CPUs, where, of course, the 9850X3D specifically still pulls ahead by a significant margin. So, if you really want to game competitively, that's still the CPU to get. But if you want to stream, edit, do a little bit of everything, save some money, and have a more efficient computer, this is what you need to get.

You can run this on a relatively cheap air cooler fine. But if you run this on a high-end water cooler, then you can go ahead and undervolt it, unlock the power limits, or just straight-up overclock it, and you can get a lot more performance out of it.

An expensive motherboard is going to help you dramatically with RAM tuning.

Again, even in these times where RAM is expensive is to try to get fast RAM. 8000MHz would be ideal, but even if you go with cheap 6000MHz RAM, my verdict is still the same. This thing is great. You also don't need an expensive motherboard for it.

Still, you can run this even on a B860, save some money, get a decent cooler, save some money on the cooler too, get some cheap RAM, and still get basically all the performance. That gives you a beast in productivity. What the answer from AMD will be because currently the Ryzen 5 lineup is getting destroyed by the 250K Plus, and the Ryzen 7 lineup is getting destroyed by this.

That's the only reason why you would go with AMD and not with those brand-new Plus CPUs from Intel right now. So, if you invest in a new CPU now, you will then have to change your motherboard too if you want to upgrade in the future. But a CPU like this is probably going to serve you for quite a few years, so I think that's really not important.

Expandability is more important if you buy a cheaper lower-end CPU because chances are you're going to keep it for less time, or you may want to upgrade to the next generation sooner. But for high-end, I don't think it matters too much.