Intel Core Ultra 5 245K review: Is this the midrange processor to upgrade to?

Note: This review was first published on 28 October 2024.

Intel launched its new high performance consumer processors Core Ultra 200S (codenamed Arrow Lake) last week, and in our review of the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K (read it here) we said that despite its mixed gaming performance it stood out for outperforming the AMD’s own flagship, the Ryzen 9 9950X, at advanced content creation workloads. Yet, even with better power efficiency over its Raptor Lake predecessor, we also noted that it’s difficult to recommend the Core Ultra 9 285K at its current US$589 price tag.

So, enter the Core Ultra 5 245K, the mainstream variant of Core Ultra 200S series – and successor to the Core i5-14600K. It is priced at a more palatable US$294 and goes head-to-head against the Ryzen 5 9600X (read our review here), which was available for US$279 at launch. Just like all of its Core Ultra 200S brethren, the Core Ultra 5 245K only works with the new Z890-based motherboards like the ROG Maximus Z890 Hero (read about it here). So, you’re looking at quite a hefty investment if you’re considering to upgrade to an Arrow Lake platform.

Anyway, I’ve already covered the Core Ultra 200S extensively in a separate feature which you can read here (and I highly recommend you do so first), so I’ll jump straight to our performance review of the Core Ultra 5 245K.

Test Rig

Our CPU test rig comes with the following specifications, with motherboards used being the only different components used.

• ROG Crosshair X870E Hero (AMD) / ROG Maximus Z890 Hero motherboard (Intel)
• Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD
• Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 memory
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition
• Windows 11 OS

For cooling, we used the ROG Strix LC III ARGB LCD for both Intel and AMD processors. I then put the Core Ultra 9 285K through some of our regular gaming and workload benchmarks and against AMD’s own equivalent – the Ryzen 5 9600X. I’ve also included numbers from the previously reviewed Core Ultra 9 285K as well as the higher tier AMD chips. This will give us an idea of how each stack of both Intel and AMD’s latest processor series compare.

Gaming performance

Just like my review of the Core Ultra 9 285K, my game list here includes a mixture of old and recent games to test the Core Ultra 5 245K’s performance, and while the list isn’t exhaustive by any measure there are enough different game engines and APIs variety to give us an idea of broader performance trends.

1080p benchmarking is a great measure of a CPU’s prowess, no thanks in part to the high-performance GeForce RTX 4090 card used here. You see, at lower resolutions, the GPU can process and transfer data much quicker than at higher resolutions. A CPU bottleneck happens here because the processor cannot keep up with the processing speed of the graphics card. The CPU, after all, is responsible for processing real-time game actions, physics, UI, audio and other complex CPU-bound processes.

So while it’s unlikely that even new Core Ultra 5 245K owners are going to be playing games at 1080p, the results at this resolution can clue us in the chip’s the raw power when it comes to gaming.

The Core Ultra 5 245K certainly huffed and puffed, but it just could not match up to its direct competitor, the Ryzen 5 9600X. It's also note worthing that both the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X were better than even the Core Ultra 9 285K in this game too.

The Core Ultra 200S apparently don't work well with Total War: Warhammer III at resolutions higher than 1080p, especially at 4K. Despite trying out a few remedies (including disabling the integrated GPU), the problem did not go away. Intel has a bit of work to do under the hood here.

The reverse is true with Metro Exodus, where the Core Ultra 5 245K – and the Core Ultra 9 285K – could almost match the Ryzens at 1440p and 4K, but trail behind at 1080p. 

It’s the same with Returnal.

The Core Ultra 9 285K performed best out of all the processors here, and I was expecting the Core Ultra 5 245K to best the Ryzen 5 9600X too. But it didn't quite achieve that, even though it was very close.

Cyberpunk 2077 just don't seem to play well with the Core Ultra 200S series processors.

Intel did admit to us that performance of its new processors wasn't expected to be higher than "parity" between Arrow Lake and the older Raptor Lake 14th Gen Core series in gaming scenarios during a pre-launch briefing, and pitched the "dramatically lower power consumption" as the real reason to buy a Core Ultra 200S chip. But the performance gap even between its flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, much less the Core Ultra 5 345K, and the lower-end Ryzens are astounding – and not in a good way.

Productivity and Content Creation performance

While the Ryzen 5 9600X is still the better processor when it comes to gaming when compared against the Core Ultra 5 245K, it’s quite a different story in our real-world productivity and content creation benchmarks.

In Handbrake where each processor encodes a 4.5GB video, the Core Ultra 5 245K came out the fastest – besting even the Ryzen 7 9700X. Despite having lesser cores here, it does look like the Arrow Lake's combined E and P cores work more efficiently for this kind of workload.

SYSmark 30 is a great benchmark as it measures and compares system performance using real-world applications and workloads – such as office suite-style applications, tasks like web browsing, file compression, and application installation, and photo and video editing applications, including multitasking.

Here, the results are almost identical to what we saw with Handbrake. The Core Ultra 5 245K performs really well with high-level content creation workloads, such as video editing – surprisingly even besting both Ryzen 9 processors. But that said, it lags behind when it comes to other simpler tasks, such as file compressions and even simple photo editing.

Power and thermal efficiency

I’ve already talked about how Intel has built the Core Ultra 200S series focusing on power efficiency with a twist: you won’t be getting peak performance and peak efficiency simultaneously (read about it here). But just comparing gen-to-gen, the Core Ultra 5 245K is a markedly improvement over the i9-14600K in both power and thermal efficiencies.

As we can see in the charts above, where I measured the power and temperature of each processor while running Cinebench R23 (Multi Core) and Metro Exodus, all of the Ryzen processors exceeded its TDP and the 9600X even hit their PPT (Package Power Tracking). That said, 88W on the AMD processor is still such a miserly (and very impressive) power output considering how much faster Metro: Exodus ran on it as compared to the Core Ultra 5 245K.

Final thoughts

The Intel Core Ultra 5 245K is a mixed bag. Its gaming performance is poor, but it fared well when it comes to content creation such as video editing with Adobe Premiere Pro. But as the midrange option in the Core Ultra 200S series, it’s not typically the processor users look for to accomplish these types of workloads.

From a price point of view, the Core Ultra 5 245K isn’t as disappointing as the Core Ultra 9 285K but against AMD’s Ryzen 5 9600X (and even the Ryzen 7 9700X), which not only runs better in games but are even better at power and thermal efficiencies, there’s not a lot to attract one to the Arrow Lake processor.

In short, the Core Ultra 5 245K (and by extension the Core Ultra 200S series) isn’t a bad processor and if you’re an Intel loyalist or simply prefers to build an Intel platform, there’s a lot to like about the Core Ultra 200S series – even if it could take a little while for Intel to fix some of its performance issues with Windows 11. Growing pains is to be expected now that Intel has moved into a completely different, chiplet-based architecture design. That said, I'm also intrigued to see how Intel manages this post-launch, and I won't be surprised if the company puts out an update that changes the Core Ultra 200S' gaming performance in the near future.

But right now, there are simply better options from Team Red for lesser money.

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