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.
