Intel Core Ultra 5 245K Review: Mainstream Excellence

Intel's Arrow Lake generation marks a real change of direction, leaning on the firm's laptop know-how and prioritising energy efficiency over ever-higher clock speeds. The Core Ultra 5 245K sits at the foot of the K-series line-up — the most affordable of the three unlocked Arrow Lake chips, launched alongside the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K and the mid-range Core Ultra 7 265K. On paper the cheapest is the most tempting; in practice it is a little more complicated. This review is based on that published test, not on a hands-on trial of our own.

Arrow Lake marks a first for Intel on the desktop: the chip is a true system-on-a-chip, built from separate "tiles" bonded together by Intel's Foveros 3D packaging. Tellingly, every one of the four essential tiles — compute, GPU, SoC and I/O — is manufactured by TSMC, on nodes down to 3 nm; Intel handles the design and assembly rather than the fabrication itself.

The compute tile pairs new Lion Cove performance cores with Skymont efficiency cores, and the headline change is the disappearance of HyperThreading — each performance core now handles a single thread. Intel claims a 9% IPC gain over the 14th generation, with far bigger strides on the efficiency cores (up to 32% single-thread and 72% multi-thread over the old Gracemont), finer clock control in 16.67 MHz steps, down from the old 100 MHz, and a wider branch predictor, more dispatch ports and a doubled L2 cache. An improved Thread Director acts as conductor, allocating work to the right cores at the right moment. The 245K itself fields 14 cores — six performance plus eight efficiency — with 24MB of L3 cache.

Like the rest of the range, the 245K is not an APU, but its integrated graphics have grown up: first-generation Xe cores (not the Xe2 destined for the Battlemage graphics cards), with four Xe cores, full DirectX 12 support and roughly double the graphics performance of the 14th generation — enough for lighter titles and everyday display, not for demanding games. The NPU is more of a token effort at 13 TOPS, well below the 40 TOPS that Copilot+ requires. The SoC tile also brings two Thunderbolt 4 ports, PCIe Gen 5, a generous spread of USB ports running at up to 5, 10 and 20 Gbps, and support for the new CUDIMM memory standard. All of it drops into the new LGA1851 socket on the Z890 chipset, with more affordable boards promised to follow.

The 245K is, logically, the least powerful of the trio. In applications it puts in a respectable showing — it comfortably outpaces its direct predecessor, the Core i5-14600K, in the heavier multi-threaded tests, and it even springs a surprise in video encoding, edging past AMD's Ryzen 7 9700X. Elsewhere the picture is more mixed: it slips behind the i5-14600K in 3DMark, and in gaming it can lag oddly — Shadow of the Tomb Raider saw it fall unexpectedly far back, quite possibly a symptom of the same launch-software gremlins. As across the range, testing was complicated by scheduler problems in the Windows 11 24H2 update, which Intel and Microsoft still need to iron out. It also dominates the synthetic memory benchmarks, as all three Arrow Lake chips do, and the integrated graphics, at least, crush any non-APU competition — no small feat for a chip at this price.

The one clear win, shared with the whole range, is efficiency: the 245K runs much cooler and draws far less power than the 13th- and 14th-generation chips, and it is in fact the most efficient of the three Arrow Lake K-chips. Even so, AMD still sets the pace — the Ryzen 7 9700X, and even the cheaper 9600X, edge it on efficiency-per-watt while running cooler and drawing less power still. It is a big step for Intel, and a genuine strength here, but not quite enough to catch its rival on this measure.

On paper the Core Ultra 5 245K is the most appealing Arrow Lake chip, thanks to a keen price that undercuts its siblings. In practice it is a harder sell. It is by no means a bad processor — it is the coolest and most efficient of the three, and strong enough in applications — but it runs straight into fierce competition from AMD's Ryzen 7 9700X, which is often a little cheaper, wins clearly in games and, with a much lower power draw, runs cooler and more efficiently still. As things stand, it is difficult to steer buyers towards the 245K while that Ryzen exists. Future price cuts, cheaper motherboards and a few software fixes could yet change the maths — so this is a capable, efficient entry point that, for now, is waiting for its moment.