When you're building a gaming PC in 2026, your wallet is probably taking a battering. But Intel just threw a curveball that might actually give budget-conscious gamers something to smile about. The chipmaker has released two new processors that pack more performance for less money than what came before. In a market increasingly dominated by AMD, that's a significant move.
Intel's Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is arriving at $300, and it's a processor that essentially gives you the same core configuration as Intel's previous flagship, the Core Ultra 9 285K, for a fraction of the price. You get 24 cores total (8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores), with a 5.5GHz boost clock. The more affordable Core Ultra 5 250K Plus sits at $200 with 18 cores divided into 8 performance and 10 efficiency cores, running up to 5.3GHz.
What makes this interesting isn't just the price. According to GameSpot's reporting, these are genuinely cheaper than the chips they replace. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus costs $300, down from a $399 launch price for the previous 265K model. The 250K Plus comes in at $200 compared to a $309 launch price for its predecessor. As The Register notes, this represents a reversal of recent industry trends where new CPU releases typically cost more, not less.
The performance gains are legitimate too. Using internal benchmarks across 38 games tested at 1080p with high settings, Intel says you can expect up to 15 percent better performance than its previous Arrow Lake chips, with some games like Hitman 3 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider seeing improvements over 20 percent. That 1080p focus matters because it's where CPU performance matters most in gaming, rather than being bottlenecked by your graphics card.
Here's the competitive angle: AMD's Ryzen 5 9700X and Ryzen 7 9600X are priced at $299 and $199 respectively. Intel is essentially saying you're getting better gaming performance at identical price points. According to Ars Technica, the newer Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has potential for a significant advantage depending on which games you play, since AMD's Ryzen 5 9700X is only marginally faster than Intel's older 265K in most scenarios.
These chips share the existing LGA 1851 socket, so they'll work with 800-series motherboards already on the market after a BIOS update. Intel has also bumped up support for faster DDR5 memory (up to 7,200MT/s out of the box, potentially up to 8,000MT/s), which should squeeze a bit more performance out of existing platforms.
Intel is also leaning on a new tool called the Binary Optimization Tool, which the company says can improve gaming performance by optimising code that wasn't originally written for Intel processors. The Register explains it essentially acts as a translation layer, potentially particularly useful for console ports that were optimised for AMD architecture used in PlayStation and Xbox.
The real question is whether this aggressive pricing strategy will actually move the needle. AMD has been the preferred CPU vendor for gaming builds for some time now, particularly with its X3D processors offering extra cache that disproportionately benefits games. But when you're pricing two strong chips at $199 and $300 with performance claims to match, you're at least making the conversation worth having.
Both chips launch on March 26. Intel has signalled that next-generation desktop CPUs are coming later this year, which will truly test whether the company can win back meaningful gaming market share or whether these Plus chips are simply a competitive holding pattern.