Intel’s Ultra series has arrived. Is it any good?

INTEL’S IN A BIT of a bind right now, isn’t it? Its 14th and 13th gen chips have been rocked by over-volted BIOS and manufacturing failures, leaving it in a somewhat precarious position. In fact, arguably across the industry, this generation of desktop chips has been somewhat cruddy. AMD’s processors lack the real punch we’d expect from a gento-gen update, with token performance increases of just 10 percent, and on pages 74 and 76, you can read how Intel’s Core Ultra series has landed like a lead balloon, with worse single-core performance and paltry power savings, coming complete with hyperthreading removed, and a new nomenclature that makes even the most eager of tech heads scratch their collective craniums.

Is it all so terrible, though? What’s it actually like to build with one of these new chips? Well, that’s exactly what we wanted to find out with the PC pictured opposite. In short, this build’s entire premise stems from creating a testbed that’s versatile enough to serve both Intel and AMD moving forward. Picking the right hardware, chassis, cooling, memory, and storage is pivotal to building out a solid testbed like this, and that’s something that stays the same, regardless of the chip you’re using.

This isn’t your typical system, that’s for sure. There are odd SSD combos in it, insanely over-the-top motherboards, 64GB of DDR5, and enough cooling and GPU horsepower to make the Steam Hardware Surveys weep with joy. Still, it’s also a fantastic opportunity to push the limits of both Intel’s latest platform and Geometric’s brand new Model 5 chassis.

–ZAK STOREY

CPU

INTEL CORE ULTRA 9 285K

WWW.INTEL.COM