Our testing shows that Intel’s fix for its Arrow Lake chips isn’t effective in addressing the chips’ lackluster gaming performance, at least on the motherboards we tested with. And we found that the Core Ultra 9 285K’s updated gaming performance with one motherboard is now slightly slower than before. Additionally, the required operating system update has improved gaming performance for the prior-gen Raptor Lake Refresh even more than the Arrow Lake chips, so the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K falls even further behind its predecessor. As you'll see in our benchmarks below, the Core Ultra 9 285K still does not meet Intel’s initial gaming performance marketing claims and will not make our list of the best CPUs for gaming.
The Intel ‘Arrow Lake’ Core Ultra 200S launch was marred with lower gaming performance than the company promised, failing to match the prior-gen Core i9-14900K flagship in gaming despite the company’s already-uninspiring claims of parity. Intel pointed to numerous issues as the source of the low gaming performance and issued fixes via both Windows and BIOS patches.
