Intel Core Ultra 9 285K offers meagre performance improvement over Core i9-14900K in leaked benchmarks

Intel's Arrow Lake desktop processor are scheduled to hits shelves sometime in October 2024, about three months after AMD's Ryzen 9000 Granite Ridge debuts. X leaker Jaykihn has now posted some benchmarks Intel's flagship offering: Core Ultra 9 285K. The sample was tested at 250 Watts and pitted against the last-gen Core i9-14900K. For all subsequent comparisons, we'll be referring to the qualifying sample's (QS) score as it is closer to the retail version than an engineering sample (ES).

In Cinebench R23's multi-core test, the Core Ultra 9 285K scores 43,118 points, making it about 18% faster than the Core i9-14900K. The lead gets a lot less impressive in Geekbench, where both processors have nearly the same single-core performance (2,455 for Arrow Lake, 2,432 for Raptor Lake). However, the Core Ultra 9 285K takes back the lead in multi-core performance (27,381 vs 23,902). Interestingly, the Core i9-14900K takes back the lead in WebXPRT and Speedometer, but loses again in Crossmark.

With a few revisions and BIOS/microcode updates, the Core Ultra 9 285K should offer anything between a 10-20% performance uplift over Raptor Lake. However, it could come at a tremendous power cost as Intel has increased Arrow Lake's maximum operating (TjMax) to 105 degrees. Given the recent debacle with 13th and 14th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs, you're probably better off running your Core Ultra 9 285K with lower power limit, at least in its initial stages.