Intel Core Ultra 9 285K CPU Review
Peter Donnell / 4 weeks ago
Calculation
Geekbench 5 was, again, rather predictable in terms of how the U5, U7, and U9 stacked against each other, but what is surprising is how much the U9 leads the pack. It pulled an impressive lead, with the fastest AMD rival, the Ryzen 7 9950X, scoring 23766. That’s giving Intel a more than 18% lead here, and even the Core U7 matched the performance of the older Core i9-14900K. The U5 did well though, beating the 14600K by a fair margin, and matching the performance of the Ryzen 9 7950X.
We see AMD perform much better in Octact, but again the U9 dominates, the U7 is matching the 14900K again and the U5, while obviously slower, is on par with the Ryzen 9 7950X, but a little behind that of the i5 14600K, which is a small shame.
The stack is a bit strange here, with the U7 coming in slower than the U5, albeit not by a huge margin. However, AMD clearly holds the lead here, however, there are clear improvements from the i5, i7 and i9 to the new U5, U7 and U9 processors.
The loss of hyperthreading clearly isn’t something that sits well with Super Pi, with all the new Intel CPUs falling way behind their last-generation counterparts and AMD rivals. I suspect this could be improved as the hardware matures, but I guess at the same time, you can’t win them all.
Here we see clear benefits though, with the U5 thrashing the i5 14600K by a huge margin, nearly halving the processing time in WPrime. The U7 and U9 are similarly massively quicker than their last-generation counterparts, although the AMD 7950X and 9950X clearly hold onto the fastest times in this test, by a fairly significant margin.
We see another mixed bag in WebXPRT 4, with both the U5 and the U7 really struggling here, and only the brute-force power of the flagship U9 getting high on the charts, but still being put in its place by the 9950X and the 9700X yet again.
Interestingly, all three of the new Intel CPUs are tightly packed together here in Y-Cruncher, this is a strange result, and the test is still dominated by the Ryzen CPUs, especially the 9950X and 9700X which are in a league of their own. However, look at the results again, and you’ll see strong performance in single-core results from all three Intel CPUs, with even the i5 beating out the older 14600K by a few points.
