Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Review

Despite its different name, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is essentially the Core i9-15900K, just with a much smaller number as its namesake. Intel effectively rebranded its Core series of processors this generation, to bring it in line with how it’s naming mobile CPUs. Also like Intel’s mobile chips, the Core Ultra 9 285K includes a dedicated NPU, capable of 13 TOPS (trillion operations per second).

The necessity of this dedicated NPU in any gaming PC with a graphics card is up for debate, but the Core Ultra 9 285K ends up being a worthy followup to the Core i9-14900K, for the most part. The Ultra 9 285K, and its little sibling, the Ultra 5 245K offer a sizable increase in creative workloads, but ultimately fall short when it comes to gaming performance.

Specs and features

The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K uses the same big.LITTLE design philosophy Intel’s been using since its 12th-generation Alder Lake processors. This pairs ‘big’ Performance Cores (P-Cores) that tackle demanding workloads, with ‘little’ Efficiency Cores (E-Cores) that handle background tasks. This design allows for much greater efficiency, especially when your computer is sitting idle.

The Core Ultra 9 285K is built on Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture, and features 8 Performance Cores and 16 Efficiency Cores, for a total count of 24 CPU cores. Unlike previous generations, however, Intel has disabled Hyper-Threading, so all of these cores are single-threaded. In the past, Intel’s desktop processors had Performance Cores with Hyper-Threading, each with two threads. However, thanks to improved communication between each of the cores, this didn’t end up lowering multi-core performance.

New to Arrow Lake, however, is a 13 TOPS NPU built into the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K. This is the same NPU built into Intel’s 2023 Meteor Lake laptop processors, rather than the faster Lunar Lake NPU. Still, it leads to much better AI inference performance than a processor without a dedicated NPU.

Intel has also pared back clock speeds a bit, with the Core Ultra 9 285K featuring a max Turbo Boost of 5.7GHz, down from 6GHz in the Core i9-14900K. This lower clock speed does mean single-core performance won’t see much of a generational improvement this time around, but 5.7GHz is still incredibly fast.

Much like the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, Intel also wanted to dial back power consumption and temperatures, after a few, well, hot generations. Power consumption largely stays the same, with the Core Ultra 9 285K still peaking at 250W, compared to 253W in the Core i9-14900K. However, temperatures are much improved. With the same cooler, the Core Ultra 9 285K peaked at 86°C, which is high, but still much lower than the 100° reached with the Core i9-14900K.

With the added NPU, the Core Ultra 9 285K will not be supported on the existing Z790 platform. Instead, you will need a Z890 motherboard to use this processor. Given the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is a $589 processor, needing to buy a motherboard on top of it makes it hard to recommend for anyone that had a 13th- or 14th-gen processor. However, Z890 does include features like ECC memory and up to 20 PCIe 5.0 lanes.

Performance

Rather than selling this processor on the back of promised ‘next-gen performance’, Intel is billing the Core Ultra 9 285K as a baseline for future desktop processors. That’s why the NPU included here is so basic, to be sure, but any $589 processor needs excellent performance to be worth the price of admission.

For the most part, though, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is conservative with its performance, even falling behind in gaming. In some cases, in fact, gaming performance takes as much as a 7% hit compared to the previous generation. For instance, in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p Ultra settings, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K delivers 165 fps. That seems high, but compared to the 177 fps delivered by the Core i9-14900K or the 206 fps by the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, it’s a sizable drop-off.

In the 3DMark SpeedWay test, which tests DirectX 12 Ultimate performance, the Intel Core Ultra 9 delivers 10,003 points, compared to 10,101 from the Intel Core i9-14900K and 10,149 from the Ryzen 9 9950X. That’s just a 1% difference, and it’s within margin of error, but it’s still emblematic of the Core Ultra 9 285K’s gaming performance.

That’s not to say the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K can’t be a great gaming processor, it’s just not much of an improvement over the Core i9-14900K, even after the latter’s microcode updates. Luckily, the Intel Core 9 Ultra 285K is able to stretch its legs in creative workloads.

In the Blender Monster benchmark, the Core Ultra 9 285K is able to render 265 samples per second, compared to 226 in the Core i9-14900K. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X is able to keep up, though, delivering 268 samples per second.

The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K takes a lead in Adobe Premiere, with a score of 16,231 points, compared to 15,179 for the Core i9-14900K or 15,796 points in the Ryzen 9 9950X. This makes for a 6% bump in performance when moving from the 14900K to the 285K. Likewise, in Cinebench, the Core Ultra 9 285K took the lead, scoring 42,245 points, followed by 41,123 points with the Ryzen 9 9950X and 33,957 with the Core i9-14900K.

As long as the Intel Core i9-14900K is still available, the Core Ultra 9 285K doesn’t make much sense for PC gamers. It does get you on the newer Z890 platform, but that’s not worth it, especially if Intel’s next processors require yet another motherboard upgrade.

An AI Desktop CPU?

No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to escape manufacturers shoving AI into every single computing product under the sun. To some extent it makes sense, right? AI is the new hot technology, so it makes sense to pack high-end hardware with tech that can actually run it. However, the NPU built into Arrow Lake is a generation behind its laptop counterpart in Lunar Lake, which is hard to swallow in an expensive part meant for enthusiasts.

This is doubly true because the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is going to be paired with a discrete graphics card more often than not. And if you have a high-end graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, a 13 TOPS NPU is essentially pointless.

Don’t get me wrong, the NPU does deliver better AI performance than the processor would on its own. In the Procyon AI Vision benchmark, the Core Ultra 9 285K managed just 144 points when measured on CPU performance alone, less than the 14900K at 226 points. However, when I tested the NPU, that number jumped to 373 points.

So while the NPU in the Core 9 Ultra 285K definitely makes AI workloads faster than a CPU without it, that performance is nothing compared to a dedicated graphics card. In the same test, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 in my test bench managed a score of 2,386 points, seven times the NPU’s result. To be fair, this is expected, GPUs being good at AI is why Nvidia is now a trillion dollar company, but it highlights just how unnecessary the 285K’s NPU is in a desktop system.

Intel claims that the NPU is there to help with background AI tasks while the graphics card is otherwise occupied. That makes some sense, but right now there just aren’t a lot of background workloads that would really take advantage of this NPU, at least not enough to give you a noticeable boost in, say, gaming performance.

Right now the biggest selling point for AI in PC gaming is in upscaling and frame generation. However, the NPU in the Core Ultra 9 285K just isn’t going to be used for that. Graphics cards that support AI upscaling have dedicated AI hardware already: Nvidia and Intel both ship desktop GPUs with Tensor Cores. AMD’s FSR isn’t even AI-based yet, but AMD’s cards still have AI accelerators to improve AI performance.

Instead, this processor seems like it was designed for the two people in the world that are running several AI models while also gaming. I’m sure those people exist right now, but it seems like this processor is built for a future where every program is using AI in one way or another.

If AI proves to be useful enough to everyday users to stick around in a meaningful way, having a dedicated NPU to run models in the background might make sense. Unfortunately, no one who is honest with themselves knows whether or not AI is ever going to be that important, and this NPU is going to be silly if AI goes the way of 3D or NFTs.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra