Intel Core Ultra 9 285K & Ultra 5 245K CPU Review

[Grimlakin]

While true, we also likely don't all have a full handle on every facet of the hobby, right?

And we also have to refresh our knowledge every few years if we don't have time to stay on top of everything...

100% true. But for me, and I presume for many, this is both a profession and a hobby. So for work I get the do engineering and develop server solutions, manage VMware (Maybe RHEL Hypervisors in the near future), and Illumio, and SAN storage running on dedicated fabric networks... SQL server tuning... all of that fun stuff. And at home I get to play games and use a lot of the tech that is ultimately derivative from what I have in the office.

 

[markfw]

As a new member here, I have to ask, why does this review only have 2 Intel processors compared ? Many places to like 5 of Intel and 5 of AMD so you can get an idea of what you might buy.

 

[David_Schroth]

As a new member here, I have to ask, why does this review only have 2 Intel processors compared ? Many places to like 5 of Intel and 5 of AMD so you can get an idea of what you might buy.

This was our launch day article - the only two chips that Intel sampled widely were the 285K and 245K. Anyone getting chips for review only got those two. We also procured a 265K that we covered subsequently - but since the Z890 platform was also brand new, we had to cover a board at launch time as well. If I'm remembering right, we also got about 3 significant BIOS revs in the week leading up to the publication date along with some pretty odd performance results that we went back and forth with Intel on.

To be frank on the traffic side of things, we do a lot more pageviews/SEO rank on gaming/GPU and motherboard reviews than we do with CPU reviews, so we usually just hit them once and don't revisit. CPU testing results can also be very touchy to BIOS revs, Windows versions, configuration making them pretty difficult to compare across even our reviews - so if we do haul out CPUs to test, we're also pulling in fresh comparison data at the same time. CPU testing also requires a fresh windows install for any CPU swap to ensure consistent performance....

That being said, the product comparison and graphing engine that is being built should allow us to easily display more detailed data and call out where the underlying system may have differed and let the readers sort it out - it's a big undertaking, but hopefully coming soon-ish.