The Core Ultra 7 270K was too good, so Intel scrapped the flagship Core Ultra 9 290K Plus — benchmarks of the 290K prototype find slim 2% faster performance in gaming and applications

Intel canned the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus from the Arrow Lake refresh lineup announced a few months ago, despite a swirling of leaks and rumors confirming its existence. The chip ultimately never came out, but a Chinese reviewer just got their hands on an engineering sample and put it through the wringer — the underwhelming results in games and professional apps show why Intel likely chose to keep it in the archives.

As a reminder, the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus would be based on the existing 285K, so it'd share the same 24-core config (8P+8E) but with slightly tuned clock speeds, DDR5-7200 support, and newer features such as Intel's binary optimization tool. That tool is actually one of the ways to confirm this 290K Plus was legit since it only supports Arrow Lake refresh silicon at the moment, and the BIOS recognized the CPU correctly.

Jumping to the tests, multi-core results in synthetic benchmarks were more impressive than the single-core numbers. The biggest win was seen in CPU-Z, where the 290K Plus was 2.84% faster than the 270K Plus. In Cinebench R24, the 290K Plus managed only a 0.69% higher score in the single-core test. On average across all synthetic workloads, the 290K Plus beat its lower-tier counterpart by only 1.5%.

You may like Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus BenchmarksSwipe to scroll horizontally

Benchmark Metric

Core Ultra 9 290K Plus

Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

Performance Delta (U9 vs U7)

CPU-Z (Single-Core)

920

905

+1.65%

CPU-Z (Multi-Core)

19,546

19,007

+2.84%

Cinebench R23 (Single-Core)

2,465

2,433

+1.32%

Cinebench R23 (Multi-Core)

44,810

44,230

+1.31%

Cinebench R24 (Single-Core)

146

145

+0.69%

Cinebench R24 (Multi-Core)

2,568

2,540

+1.10%

Geekbench 6 (Single-Core)

3,315

3,286

+0.88%

Geekbench 6 (Multi-Core)

24,273

23,642

+2.67%

In more intensive tasks such as compression, real-time rendering, and compiling, AMD's new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 won in all but one test: Ansys Fluent Simulation. Here, the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus was 9.3% faster than AMD's of fering and about 4.6% faster than the 270K Plus. Averaging out all the results, the 290K Plus was 6.3% faster than the 270K Plus but about 8.3% behind the 9950X3D2.

Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus Gaming Benchmarks

At 1080p, the average FPS improvement over the 270K Plus is about 2% across six titles. The biggest difference was in Delta Force, where the 290K Plus achieved 8.3% higher FPS and 3.33% better 1% lows. Both Black Myth: Wukong and Resident Evil 9 actually saw it lose to the 270K Plus by around 1%. The 9950X3D2, as you'd expect, bested either Intel offering with ease thanks to its massive cache pool.

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Game

Core Ultra 9 290K Plus

Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

Performance Delta (U9 vs U7)

Counter Strike 2

Avg: 368 / 1% Low: 214

Avg: 364 / 1% Low: 212

Avg: +1.10% / 1% Low: +0.94%

PUBG

Avg: 193 / 1% Low: 99

Avg: 189 / 1% Low: 96

Avg: +2.12% / 1% Low: +3.12%

Delta Force

Avg: 234 / 1% Low: 93

Avg: 216 / 1% Low: 90

Avg: +8.33% / 1% Low: +3.33%

Black Myth: Wukong

Avg: 98 / 1% Low: 87

Avg: 99 / 1% Low: 88

Avg: -1.01% / 1% Low: -1.14%

Resident Evil 9

Avg: 138 / 1% Low: 103

Avg: 139 / 1% Low: 100

Avg: -0.72% / 1% Low: +3.00%

Cyberpunk 2077

Avg: 206 / 1% Low: 123

Avg: 201 / 1% Low: 123

Avg: +2.49% / 1% Low: 0.00%

Moving to 1440p gaming, the difference shrinks even more since the games become more GPU-reliant as you scale the resolution ladder. Delta Force once again exhibits the largest gap, about 6.8% ahead of the 270K Plus, and a surprising 14% ahead in 1% lows. The 290K Plus still falls 1% behind in Black Myth: Wukong while matching the 270K Plus in Resident Evil 9. On average, the unreleased flagship is 1.5% faster than the actual top-end Arrow Lake refresh CPU.

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Game

Core Ultra 9 290K Plus

Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

Performance Delta (U9 vs U7)

Counter Strike 2

Avg: 352 / 1% Low: 211

Avg: 344 / 1% Low: 209

Avg: +2.33% / 1% Low: +0.96%

PUBG

Avg: 189 / 1% Low: 103

Avg: 188 / 1% Low: 94

Avg: +0.53% / 1% Low: +9.57%

Delta Force

Avg: 218 / 1% Low: 89

Avg: 204 / 1% Low: 78

Avg: +6.86% / 1% Low: +14.10%

Black Myth: Wukong

Avg: 86 / 1% Low: 76

Avg: 87 / 1% Low: 78

Avg: -1.15% / 1% Low: -2.56%

Resident Evil 9

Avg: 95 / 1% Low: 73

Avg: 95 / 1% Low: 73

Avg: 0.00% / 1% Low: 0.00%

Cyberpunk 2077

Avg: 184 / 1% Low: 127

Avg: 183 / 1% Low: 129

Avg: +0.55% / 1% Low: -1.55%

If we put all the numbers together, we get roughly 2% gains in gaming and almost 4% in productivity tasks, compared to the Core Ultra 270K Plus. Those slim margi ns would make it hard to justify a much higher price tag for a Core Ultra 9 SKU, which explains why Intel likely never released it. The chips that did come out are excellent value, so that a flagship offering might've thrown the whole lineup off-balance, especially in terms of optics.

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