popularEragorn | Staff posted Today 08:20 PM
Item 1 of 5
Item 1 of 5
popularEragorn | Staff posted Today 08:20 PM
[Micro Center] Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus CPU, Gigabyte Z890 Eagle WiFi7 1851 MB, 32GB Crucial Pro DDR5-6400 RAM $549.99 + Free Pickup
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The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is part of intels arrow lake refresh lineup, essentially slotting in as a tuned and rebranded core ultra 9 285k at a far cheaper price. It has 24 cores (8p+16e) and 24 threads as it doesn't support hyperthreading. In terms of productivity performance it is slightly superior to the i9-285k and not far behind amd's current mainstream flagship 9950x (excluding avx-512 workloads) while costing significantly less. It's also quite strong for gaming, slightly beating out amd's current zen5 non-x3d cpus, though falling a fair bit behind am5 x3d cpus (not terribly relevant unless you're using an rtx 5080 or stronger at below 4k resolution + upscaling). Power efficiency is also decent for a cpu of this class, somewhat worse under load than amd's zen 5 cpus but FAR better than previous 14th gen intel, and has a noticeable advantage of lower idle power draw compared to current multi-ccd amd cpus. The 270k+ supports intel quicksync (hardware accelerated video encoding/transcoding using the igpu), and enjoys a meaningful advantage over amd cpus in specific workloads that make use of it. The primary negative for the 270k+ is that it's on the dead end lga1851 socket; intels upcoming nova lake cpus will use the lga 1954 socket. Therefore, you'll need to replace your motherboard if you want to upgrade to a better cpu in the future. Amds am5 socket, on the other hand, is guaranteed to at minimum support next gen zen 6 cpus, and is heavily rumored to support 2-gen in the future zen7 cpus as well.
Reviews:
Techpowerup: https://www.techpowerup
Pugetsystems content creation: https://www.pugetsystem
Gamers nexus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWbThC2
(9950x3d2 review with additional experimental benchmarks including the 270k+ in the tables: https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/do-n...s-24-hours)
Hardware unboxed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQmQEyp
Motherboard specs: https://www.gigabyte.co
The Gigabyte Z890 EAGLE WIFI7 is a full size atx z890 (current gen high-end chipset) motherboard. It has: a 14(60a)+1+2 vrm, three pcie x16 slots (1x gen5 x16, 2x gen4 x4), four m.2 slots (1x gen5, 3x gen4), one usb4 type-c port, 2.5g lan, wifi 7, and bluetooth 5.4. Overall it appears to be a decent midrange board, and should be sufficient for even fairly strenuous productivity workloads.
A review can be found here: https://thinkcomputers.
The ram is the biggest disappointment in this combo, though considering the ongoing dram apocalypse (where prices have multiplied 4.5x and supply is heavily limited) that's to be expected. Ddr5 6400 cl32 is fairly decent, however as a crucial ram kit it unfortunately uses micron memory chips (most likely micron h-die if I had to guess). Compared to hynix memory, micron memory has drastically worse overclocking/tuning potential. This doesn't matter much if you would just be sticking with base xmp settings, but is fairly impactful if you are willing to manually tune your memory. That being said, hynix memory is obscenely expensive nowadays, and you'd be extremely hard pressed to find even micron memory like the one in this bundle for under $300.
Overall, if you need a new productivity/mixed usage computer in the short term, particularly for workloads intel still reigns supreme in (I highly recommend referencing the reviews I linked previously to compare cpu performance for your specific workloads), this bundle offers a very compelling value. If you can afford to wait 6+ months, nova lake will likely provide a substantial performance uplift, and amd might lower zen4/5 cpu prices in the meantime to better compete. If you don't need top tier multithreaded performance, it might be better to wait for a cheaper zen4/5 bundle which would have a meaningful upgrade path on the am5 socket.
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