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Intel Core Ultra 9 285K defeats i9-14900K by 11% in CPU benchmark, lags behind AMD Ryzen 9 9950X in Blender

Core Ultra 9 285K appears to be quite the perfomer in multi-threaded tests despite lacking hyper-threading support. (Image source: Intel, CPU-Z)
Core Ultra 9 285K appears to be quite the perfomer in multi-threaded tests despite lacking hyper-threading support. (Image source: Intel, CPU-Z)
Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K was found flexing its muscles in CPU-Z as well as Blender. In both the benchmarks, the Arrow Lake-S CPU outperformed its predecessor, but failed to outclass AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X in the latter test.

Intel recently unveiled its Arrow Lake-S lineup of desktop CPUs, and in true Intel fashion, it's not without its quirks. This time around, the x86 titan took an efficiency-first approach for its lineup, promising similar performance to its last-gen Raptor Lake-R offerings at significantly lower power consumption levels.

As is to be expected, benchmark leaks for the lineup have been steadily popping up on the interwebs, a recent one of which sheds light on the single- and multi-threaded performance of the highest-end Core Ultra 9 285K in CPU-Z as well as in Blender. For those who have remained in the loop, the results are simultaneously disappointing as well as impressive, especially when considering that the Arrow Lake-S lineup misses out on hyper-threading support - a fact that is bound to ruffle a few feathers.

Multi-threaded performance gets a sizeable boost

In an earlier Passmark appearance, the Core Ultra 9 285K demonstrated impressive single-threaded performance improvements, handily clinching the crown. Due to the lack of hyper-threading, however, the 285K fell behind last-gen offerings from AMD as well as Intel itself. In the recently leaked CPU-Z benchmark, the story is entirely different. This time around, the Core Ultra 9 285K portrayed a respectable 11% improvement in multi-threaded performance, with single-threaded performance lagging behind that of the i9-14900KS as well as the i9-14900K.

Interestingly, the benchmark result reveals that the Core Ultra 9 285K exceeded 100 degrees C, which likely indicates that the processor underwent a decent amount of thermal throttling. That being said, the CPU did hit its maximum clock of 5.5 GHz on its P-cores and 4.6 GHz on its E-cores. Was there performance left on the table? That is hard to say, but we do know that an ASRock Z890 motherboard was utilized with 2 x 16 GB of DDR5-5600 memory along with an RTX 4080 Super.

AMD continues to trade blows with Intel

Moving over to the Blender benchmark results, the data reveals that the Core Ultra 285K outperforms the i9-14900K by a significant margin of over 14%, but is handily defeated by AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X which leads the 285K by almost 7%. The supporting hardware utilized during the test is not known, which probably indicates that the result might not be entirely representative of real-world performance.

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The Core Ultra 9 285K benchmark results hint at decent performance improvements. (Image source: CPU-Z Validator)
The Core Ultra 9 285K benchmark results hint at decent performance improvements. (Image source: CPU-Z Validator)

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momomo_us, 9550pro on X/Twitter

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2024 10 > Intel Core Ultra 9 285K defeats i9-14900K by 11% in CPU benchmark, lags behind AMD Ryzen 9 9950X in Blender
Sambit Saha, 2024-10-19 (Update: 2024-10-20)