Intel's budget Core Ultra 5 230F, depicted by the black packaging and exclusive to the Chinese market, has been tested in detail by Expreview. Within the limited 65W envelope, it lands impressive wins against its predecessor, occasionally toppling the Core i5-14600K in productivity. However, it still suffers from issues plaguing Intel's high-end Arrow Lake offerings, with introductory prices extremely close to those of the unlocked K-series.
The Core Ultra 5 230F offers 10 cores (6P + 4E) and 10 cores based on the Arrow Lake architecture with Lion Cove performance and Skymont efficient cores. The max turbo frequency on the P-cores sees a nice 100 MHz bump versus the Core i5-14490F at 5 GHz, while the efficient cores can boost 700 MHz higher than last-gen. The Core Ultra 5 230F seemingly uses A0 silicon (the 6P + 8E die), which is different from other budget models based on the B0 stepping (the 8P + 16E die).
