Intel has achieved the impossible: a €200 processor that crushes everything AMD offers at the same price, on a platform that finally knows how to keep its promises. The Core Ultra 5 250KF Plus is the CPU you’ve been waiting for for two years. DDR5 decided to spoil the party.
A rare price positioning in 2026
Let’s start with what’s immediately striking: Intel displays an MSRP of $199 for the 250KF Plus, and for once, the French price follows. At €199.90 at Alternate, the KF version (without iGPU) respects this positioning, which has become a rarity in the current context. For comparison, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, priced at $299 across the Atlantic, can easily be found at €350 and more in Europe. The €50 difference compared to the MSRP on the 270K Plus makes the 250KF Plus even more interesting on the French market.
The 250KF Plus is not the only variant available. Alternate also offers the 250K Plus in a Tray version at €216.90 and in a Boxed version at €228.90. The difference between the three:
- 250KF Plus à 199,90 € : without iGPU, Tray version, the choice for a gaming configuration with dedicated GPU
- 250K Plus Tray à 216,90 € : with iGPU, Tray version, practical for debugging without GPU or for occasional office use
- 250K Plus Boxed à 228,90 € : boxed version (without cooler).
For 99% of gamers and streamers, the 250KF Plus at €199.90 is the right choice. The iGPU of the 250K Plus will never serve you with an RTX or RX in place.
What’s under the hood
The 250KF Plus is not a simple rebadged 245K. Intel has revised the copy in depth. The processor has 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores for a total of 18 threads (no Hyper-Threading on Arrow Lake), compared to 6 P-cores and 8 E-cores on the 245K. The L3 cache increases to 30 MB, the die-to-die frequency is increased by 900 MHz to streamline exchanges between CPU tiles, and official memory support increases to DDR5-7200 MT/s. The max boost reaches 5.3 GHz on P-cores.
| Ultra 7 270K Plus🆕 | Ultra 7 265K | Ultra 5 250KF Plus🆕 | Ultra 5 245K | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CÅ“urs (P+E) | 8P+16E | 8P+12E | 6P+12E | 6P+8E |
| TVB | – | – | – | – |
| Turbo Boost Max | 5,5 GHz | 5,5 GHz | – | – |
| Turbo P-Core | 5,4 GHz | 5,4 GHz | 5,3 GHz | 5,2 GHz |
| Turbo E-Core | 4,7 GHz | 4,6 GHz | 4,7 GHz | 4,6 GHz |
| Base P-Core | 3,7 GHz | 3,9 GHz | 4,2 GHz | 4,2 GHz |
| Base E-Core | 3,2 GHz | 3,3 GHz | 3,5 GHz | 3,6 GHz |
| Mémoire supportée | DDR5-7200 | DDR5-6400 | DDR5-7200 | DDR5-6400 |
| Baseline TDP | 125 W | 125 W | 125 W | 125 W |
| Turbo Max Consumption | 250 W | 250 W | 159 W | 159 W |
The letter F simply means the absence of integrated graphics. For a gaming setup, this is not a problem, your GPU does the work.
Performance: honestly impressive
In terms of productivity, the 250KF Plus crushes its direct competitor. According to TechPowerUp, it outperforms the Core i7-14700K and is only 6% behind the Core Ultra 7 265K, while beating the Ryzen 5 9600X by more than 30% in real-world applications at the same price. It even outperforms the Ryzen 7 9700X and the Ryzen 7 9850X3D on multi-threaded loads thanks to the mass of its E-cores. For €200, it’s unheard of.
In gaming, progress is real and measurable. The 250KF Plus gains around 5% compared to the 245K, reaches the level of the Core i7-14700K and the Core Ultra 7 265K, and finds itself only 2 to 3% behind the 270K Plus which costs €150 more in France. Compared to the Ryzen 5 9600X, the two CPUs are in a pinch, the gap being negligible in practice. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D maintains a 20% lead in pure gaming, but it costs more than double.
Overclocking is a nice surprise: TechPowerUp reached a stable 5.7 GHz all-core, compared to 5.3 GHz in stock boost. Be careful though, overclocking remains locked behind a Z890 chipset, which implies a motherboard costing €200 minimum.
Gamer et streamer : le profile ideal
This is where the 250KF Plus really sets itself apart from its competitors at this price point. Streaming at x264 while playing is precisely the scenario where the 12 E-cores make the difference. The CPU can delegate OBS encoding to its E-cores while the P-cores manage the game, without the two stepping on each other. The 9600X with its 6 cores suffers much more in this configuration. If you’re streaming at 1080p60 in x264 Fast or Medium, the 250KF Plus absorbs the load without flinching where other CPUs at this price start to falter.
The real problem: the market context of 2026
And this is where enthusiasm needs to be tempered. The 250KF Plus arrives at a catastrophic time for the memory market. Since October 2025, DDR5 prices have increased three to four times in Europe.
In France, a kit 32 Go DDR5which was around €100 in spring 2025, today exceeds €350 to 450. Analysts do not anticipate a return to normal before the second half of 2026 at best, and the contractual increases announced by Samsung suggest that the worst is perhaps not yet behind us.
Concretely, if you are starting from a zero configuration and you are aiming for an LGA1851 platform with a 250KF Plus, here is the realistic platform budget today:
- CPU : 199,90 €
- Carte mère B860 (sans OC) : 150 à 200 €
- RAM DDR5 32 Go : 350 à 450 €
Or between €750 and €880 for the platform alone, without GPU, without storage. Six months ago, this same configuration cost less than €500.
The upgrade path question
This is the other dark side of the picture. Intel has confirmed that LGA1851 is a dead end : no next generation processor will be compatible with this socket. Nova Lake is announced for the end of 2026 or the beginning of 2027 on a new LGA1954 platform. If your 250KF Plus suits you for two or three years, it doesn’t matter. But if you are used to upgrading your CPU without changing your motherboard, this is not the right platform.
AMD, for its part, guarantees AM5 support until the end of 2027 at least, with at least one compatible Zen 6 generation to come.
Who is this CPU for, concretely?
Yes, go for it and:
- You set up a new config from scratch and your platform budget holds up
- You are a gamer AND a streamer: this is the best CPU at this price for this combination
- You create content, render, compile: the advance in productivity is massive
Think twice and:
- You are exclusively a gamer: the 9600X at 180 € does the same in gaming, and AM5 offers an upgrade path to an X3D
- You plan to upgrade your CPU in 12 to 18 months: LGA1851 is a dead end
- Your RAM budget is limited: a DDR5 configuration worthy of the name today costs the price of a mid-range GPU
To compare the 250KF Plus to the entire market, see our ranking and comparison of AMD and Intel processors in 2026.
Verdict
The Core Ultra 5 250KF Plus is technically the best mid-range CPU you can buy in 2026 at this price. Its productivity performance is without direct competition at €200, its gamer/streamer profile is ideal, and Intel finally respects its MSRP in France, which deserves to be highlighted. The problem isn’t the CPU, it’s the timing. Arriving on the market at a time when DDR5 is reaching historic heights, on a platform with no future, is a structural handicap that even the best performance cannot completely erase.
If you can afford the full platform today without compromising on the rest of the setup, it’s a solid purchase. If your budget is constrained by RAM, it’s better to wait or look to AM5 with a Ryzen 5 9600Xless versatile, but on a platform that still has a future.
