Intel Core Ultra 5 245K Processor Review - Team Blue Has Seen Better Days

Introduction, Specifications and Pricing

The first wave of Intel Core Ultra 9 285K reviews, including ours, were not what you would call glowing. Though the flagship chip offers excellent multi-threading performance and improved power efficiency, its gaming performance is less than stellar. The Core Ultra 5 245K's gaming performance is obviously not expected to exceed that of its big brother, will its lower power demands and lower price be viewed in a better light? Read on to find out.

The Intel Core Ultra 5 245K replaces the popular i5-14600K and i5-13600K. It's a 6P-8E hybrid design like its predecessors, but that's about where the similarities end. Arrow Lake and the 245K represent a complete architectural reset for Intel. Monolithic dies are out in favor of a disaggregated chiplet design. While the mobile-oriented Meteor Lake family did see a limited release on the desktop, mainly in the form of small form factor machines from boutique OEMs, Arrow Lake is Intel's first true tile-based desktop x86 CPU family.

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The Arrow Lake family drops support for Hyperthreading, meaning the Core Ultra 5 245K's 6P-8E core design gives it a total of 14 cores and 14 threads. It sits below the 8P+16E core 285 K and the 8P+12E core 265K. As Intel's long-used 'K' suffix denotes, the 245K is unlocked for overclocking, giving you the ability to change the clock multiplier. There's also a KF version, which lacks integrated graphics functionality.

The 245K includes Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores. Intel is deservedly proud of the Skymont cores, claiming a massive 32% IPC improvement. That should be more than enough to overcome the loss of P-core SMT in multi-threading performance. The Lion Cove P-cores receive a claimed 9% IPC uplift, which is more in line with what we've come to expect from intergenerational x86 performance uplifts.

For the Arrow Lake generation, Intel emphasizes improved power efficiency and performance per watt. The P-cores have a base frequency of 4.2GHz and a boost clock of up to 5.2GHz. The base clock is notably 700MHz higher than that of the 14600K, but it has a 100MHz lower boost clock. In tandem with the efficiency gains offered thanks to the Compute Tile's node shrink, the PL2 TDP has been reduced to 159W, down from the 181W of the 14600K. That should mean the 245K is easier to cool than the 14600K. The E-cores have a base clock of 3.6GHz and a boost clock of 4.6GHz. That's a full 1GHz and 600MHz higher than the 14600K, respectively.

The six P-cores each have a dedicated 3MB L2 cache, while the two E-core clusters share a 4MB L2 cache. The P-cores and E-core clusters share a common L3 cache, which totals 24MB. Thus, the total L2 and L3 cache add up to 50MB. Alongside the general-purpose cores, Intel has introduced a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to the desktop for the first time. Additionally, Xe-LPG Integrated graphics provide a dramatic uplift over the aging UHD 770 of the Raptor Lake generation. The 245K features high-spec media and display engines and DirectX 12 Ultimate support.

The Intel Core Ultra 5 245 K's MSRP is $310 US.

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The Arrow Lake Architecture

Intel switches to chiplets

The key design feature of Arrow Lake-S is the shift to a disaggregated tile-based architecture. Alongside the yield advantages of producing smaller chips, this approach allowed Intel to mix and match process technologies for different core functions. It gives Intel modular flexibility with its choice of components. For example, in the future, it could release a CPU with a faster iGPU without the expense or complexity of redesigning an entire monolithic chip.

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Arrow Lake-S features four primary tiles: the Compute tile, SoC tile, Graphics tile, and I/O tile. Additionally, a Foveros base tile serves as an interposer, linking the tiles to each other and the base package and socket pads. This approach differs significantly from AMD's, whose core complex dies and I/O die are connected via the Infinity Fabric and package substrate. Intel says its approach provides better latency and reduces power.

Compute Tile

The most important tile is the Compute tile. It contains the P and E-cores and cache, but surprisingly, it does not contain the memory controller.

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The Compute tile is built on the advanced (and expensive) TSMC N3B process. That alone is a very interesting choice, as Intel surely would have preferred to use its own foundries to manufacture it.

This tile includes six Lion Cove P-cores and eight Skymont E-cores. As you can see in the block diagram above, which shows the full 8P+16E tile, the E-cores are arranged in clusters of four cores. All of the cores are connected via a ring-bus interconnect, giving all the 245K's cores access to the 24MB L3 cache.

This arrangement differs from Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, which grouped the P and E-cores entirely separately. This arrangement reduces the hot spot generated by the P-cores, and heat is better distributed across the tile. It's also designed to minimize inter-core latency.

SoC Tile

The SoC tile is manufactured with the TSMC N6 node. It's not a cutting-edge node anymore, as apart from the NPU, it doesn't include compute-heavy units. This tile includes the DDR5 memory controller and PCI-Express functionality.

The memory controller supports up to 192GB of DDR5 memory, with native support for DDR5-6400. It supports CUDIMMs, paving the way to XMP kits at DDR5-10000 and beyond.

The SoC tile adds support for 20 PCIe 5.0 lanes. Users can now run a PCIe x16 graphics card and x4 SSD without compromise. Older Intel platforms supported Gen 5 SSDs, too, but it required taking 8 lanes away from the x16 slot. A further eight PCIe 4.0 lanes are used to connect to the chipset.

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The NPU is inherited from the mobile-oriented Meteor Lake, making Arrow Lake the first mainstream desktop platform to include a dedicated Neural Processing Unit. It offers up to 13 TOPS of performance, which is well under the 40 TOPS requirement to meet Microsoft Copilot+ certification. However, Intel argues that most desktops will include a discrete graphics card, putting the system well over that 40 TOPS level.

AI is all the buzz these days, and though the software ecosystem is developing rapidly, it's not all-pervasive yet. Arrow Lake's NPU may come into its own in the coming months and years.

GPU Tile

The GPU tile contains the Xe-LPG integrated graphics functionality, which is a big step forward from Raptor Lake's UHD 770 integrated graphics. This tile is built on the TSMC N5P node. Isn't it interesting how Intel's tiles are built on different processes?

The 245K's graphics tile includes four Xe cores, giving it a total of 64 execution units. Aside from a minor 100MHz reduction in boost clock, the 245K's Xe-LPG graphics share the same configuration as that of the more expensive 265K and 285K.

The I/O tile contains platform-oriented functionality, including Thunderbolt 4 and other connectivity support. It includes the media engine functionality, an impressive part of Arrow Lake's spec. It supports decoding up to 8K @ 60 Hz with 10-bit HDR and encoding as high as 8K at 120 Hz.

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The Display Engine supports HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, and eDP 1.4. Depending on the connectivity of the partnering motherboard, the IGP supports displays up to 8K at 60 Hz with HDR, up to four 4K displays at 60 Hz with HDR, or four 1080p displays up to 360 Hz. That's not bad at all for integrated graphics!

The Core Ultra 5 245K and Test System

Core Ultra 5 245K

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Our test CPU arrived in non-retail packaging. The picture above, provided by Intel, shows the packaging you can expect when you buy a Core Ultra 5 245K.

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Aside from the obvious labeling differences, the 245K itself looks nearly identical to 12th, 13th, and 14th-generation CPUs. Arrow Lake CPUs require a new motherboard with the LGA 1851 socket. It is incompatible with older motherboards, and should you try (don't do that), the notches are different; they won't physically fit. Thankfully, the new CPUs are compatible with LGA 1700 coolers.

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The backside offers 1851 pads. Compared to LGA 1700 chips, the pad area of LGA 1851 CPUs takes some of the area formerly occupied by the area in the middle of the CPU.

Test System

Our review CPUs were stuck in customs for nearly a week, severely limiting our testing time. In the future, we plan to crank up the 245K with some overclocking and see how it performs with CUDIMM memory. In the meantime, it's certain there will be BIOS and software updates that will hopefully iron out some of the performance kinks we encountered.

Motherboard: MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X (not yet listed)

• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux - Buy from Amazon
• OS Storage: Teamgroup T-Force Z540 2TB - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: Super Flower Leadex Titanium 850W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro - Buy from Amazon

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that Intel and AMD have relied on to showcase their newest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark has two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread, or 1T, and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads, or nT, of a tested CPU.

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The 245K's Cinebench results are solid, if unspectacular. The removal of Hyperthreading does no favors during this test. Its nT test result of 1,489 puts it ahead of the 14600K, and its single thread result of 126 is an improvement too.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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A render time of 677 seconds is a big improvement over the 14600K, even if mid-tier chips like the 245K won't be the favored option for users doing lots of rendering. If you use a GPU for rendering, CPU performance will matter much less.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher result means the task will take less time to complete.

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Unless you encode videos for a living, the 245K does well here. It will happily perform encoding or transcoding duties and easily outperforms AMD's Ryzen 7 chips.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory Latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's susceptible to memory speed and latency changes and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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This is not a good result for the 245K. A platform with weak memory performance will not do well under heavy compression and decompression tasks, which is what we see here.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency is an area that's traditionally favored Intel and its monolithic designs. AMD's chiplet architecture and the Infinity Fabric link inevitably add some latency compared to in comparison. A nanosecond or two here or there is not noticeable, but more significant margins, particularly when the memory is frequently accessed, will result in more undesirable and cumulative idle cycles.

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Low memory latency is important for many applications, including gaming. With DDR5-6000 C30 memory, both Arrow Lake chips fall well behind their AMD competitors and the 14th Gen predecessors. Is this a result of placing the memory controller on a separate tile from the core complex? Or is it something that can be addressed with Windows or firmware updates? We'll have to wait and see.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs purely for leisure, but some of us have to work, too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

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The 245K trails the pack again here. Some of the subtests are more memory agnostic than others, and the 245K's weaker memory performance does it no favors.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme is losing favor as a graphics benchmark in favor of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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The Time Spy Extreme CPU test again shows improvement, but its overall score is behind the 14600K. That's because its graphics score was lower.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.

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Here, our RTX 4070 Ti Super is still quite GPU bottlenecked. It serves as an example of how virtually all modern CPUs are sufficient for gaming in such scenarios. Though it's only one test, it shows no gaming gains to be had from upgrading from a 13600K or 14600K.

Far Cry 6

Far Cry 6 is an example of a game that exhibits CPU bottlenecking with powerful graphics cards. It tends to perform well on Intel CPUs versus their AMD counterparts.

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Far Cry 6 shows a major regression in gaming performance for the 245K. It's not looking good.

Horizon Zero Dawn

When using the 'favor performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.

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It's another poor result for the Core Ultra 5 245K.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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One could ignore a few FPS here and there, but when the 245K trails the AMD chips by such large margins, it really is a cause for concern.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

I'm a big fan of the Borderlands series and really enjoyed playing Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. At 1080p with the high preset, our RTX 4070 Ti Super still somewhat limits it, so the differences here are not as large as you'd see with an RTX 4090.

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The difference from top to bottom here isn't as dramatic as some of the other games we tested, but the 245K still fails to impress. The 1% low is easily the weakest of all the tested CPUs.

Benchmarks - Integrated Graphics

F1 22

F1 22 is not a particularly demanding title, and it doesn't need a high-end graphics card to enjoy smooth frame rates. We tested at 1080p with high settings.

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This result shows how much the 285K's integrated graphics capabilities have dramatically improved. It's twice as fast as the UHD 770-equipped 14600K. Many consider 35 FPS to be playable. We ran a test with AMD's FSR enabled, giving it a small but tangible performance boost. XeSS-supporting games should benefit even more.

Far Cry 6

As Far Cry 6 is not overly demanding on GPUs, it has been proven to run well on AMD's highly capable 8000G APUs.

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Far Cry 6 is borderline playable at high settings on the 245K, but if you add some upscaling to the mix, it crosses the 40 FPS threshold, which is good enough for casual gamers.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands still asks a lot of integrated graphics. Even the 8700G is barely playable.

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It's a step too far for the 245K here. One wonders how difficult it would be for Intel to release a CPU with a larger GPU tile. AMD's 8000G APUs could have some serious competition if so.

These results show Arrow Lake's Xe graphics have improved by 100% or more compared to the UHD 770 graphics of 14th Generation processors. It's hard to complain about 100% generation-on-generation performance gains!

Benchmarks - Power Consumption and Temperatures

Power

Intel is heavily touting the improved power efficiency of Arrow Lake, so how does it do?

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A peak reading of 141W is a solid result for the 245K. Though the Ryzen 9 7700X uses far less power under heavy loads, its idle power consumption is higher.

Temperatures

It goes without saying that temperature results are heavily dependent on your cooler's capabilities, case airflow, and ambient temperature. We aim to maintain a constant ambient temperature of 22 degrees Celsius for temperature testing.

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A peak temperature reading of 75 degrees doesn't illustrate the impressive temperature improvements. Our 360mm AIO cooler hardly had to work when it was under sustained loads. Even a mid-range air cooler should be sufficient to keep the chip under control without throttling.

Final Thoughts

Intel's xx600K CPUs have always appealed thanks to their blend of high and lightly threaded performance, gaming performance, and value for money. Their lower power and cooling requirements compared to the i9s, in particular, drew praise.

Unfortunately, the Core Ultra 5 245K falls short in too many of these metrics. It does well under multi-threaded loads, but buyers needing multi-threaded performance are likely to gravitate towards a higher-core-count Arrow Lake model or an AMD alternative anyway.

The 245K's gaming performance is disappointing. That takes away one of the reasons the likes of the 13600K and 14600K were popular. And apart from that, its value proposition is all but nonexistent, as buying a 245K also requires buying an expensive Z890 motherboard. That overall cost will be lowered in the months ahead, as cheaper B860 motherboards will lower the barrier to entry, but for now, given the cost of a motherboard, the CPU itself, and perhaps a new set of DDR5 memory, it's too much money to ask for what's on offer.

Are there fixes in the works for that poor gaming performance? Intel has long had a good relationship with Microsoft and has experience with disaggregated chips in the form of Meteor Lake, so perhaps that is wishful thinking. We suspect the inclusion of the memory controller on the SoC tile and not the Compute tile does not help.

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It's not all bad, though. The 245K's efficiency gains are impressive; it doesn't require an expensive AIO cooler, and the integrated graphics performance is a dramatic leap forward. True 1080p gaming is still a stretch, but adding some upscaling into the mix makes it doable. Just don't go expecting to enable ray tracing eye candy in AAA titles. If your PC is more of a general-purpose machine, you'll be able to play popular Esport and MOBA games. Credit to Intel for the comprehensive capabilities of its Media Engine, too.

The new CPUs come with an impressive new, albeit expensive, platform. Though Z890 motherboards are less of a natural match for a mid-range processor than a B-series board would be, at least Z890 doesn't lack features. Intel users can finally run a PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD and x16 graphics card without compromise. Add to that features such as USB 4, Wi-Fi 7, and CUDIMM support, among other things.

The Arrow Lake series delivers impressive multi-threading performance, but that's less of a purchasing factor for a lower core count chip like the 245K. Given the cost of buying a new Arrow Lake PC, it's a difficult chip to recommend. It will appeal if you're upgrading from something like a 6th-10th Gen system. Thanks to the new platform, you will get a significant performance uplift and up-to-date 2025-era features and connectivity. However, owners of 12th Gen or newer systems had best take a wait-and-see approach to see if the platform matures before diving in.