There’s one word to describe Intel’s and AMD’s latest CPUs: disappointing. AMD’s Zen 5 desktop CPUs arrived in August and failed to impress in both productivity and gaming workloads. The Ryzen 9 9950X was supposed to be a “monster,” but it was underwhelming for PC gaming. Now, it’s Intel’s turn to disappoint.

Over the past week, I’ve been testing Intel’s $589 next-generation flagship Core Ultra 9 285K processor. It runs cooler and a little faster than Intel’s Core i9-14900K in non-gaming tasks, but it falls flat in PC gaming: in many titles, it provides worse performance than the 14th-gen chips it was designed to replace.

Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K is the first enthusiast desktop CPU with a built-in NPU, or a neural processing unit, for accelerating AI tasks. It’s also the first CPU that’s built for Intel’s new LGA 1851 socket, meaning you’ll need a new motherboard to be able to use it. Intel is using its latest 3D packaging technology and Arrow Lake architecture to increase the power efficiency of the Ultra 9 285K, a big departure from the hot and power-hungry 13th and 14th Gen desktop CPUs.

I’ve been impressed by the power draw improvements, particularly during gaming with the Ultra 9 285K. During a Cinebench 2024 benchmark, the Ultra 9 285K drew 254 watts of CPU package power, while Intel’s Core i9-14900K drew 267 watts for the same task. That’s a small difference, but the Ultra 9 285K managed to provide 15 percent better performance in the multithreaded test and nearly 7 percent better performance in the single-thread test.

It’s the same story for Geekbench 6, where the Ultra 9 285K delivers 8 percent better performance over the 14900K in the multithreaded test and 2 percent more for the single-thread test while drawing less power. Both the PugetBench tests for Adobe Premiere Pro and Photoshop are within margins of error, so performance seems to be similar for both of those workloads between the Ultra 9 285K and 14900K.

The gaming side largely went in the opposite direction during 1080p testing coupled with an RTX 4090. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, an older game that always scales well with CPU generations, I saw the Ultra 9 285K deliver frame rates that were 8 percent lower than the 14900K. In Cyberpunk 2077, the Ultra 9 285K fell nearly 9 percent behind the 14900K, and in 2023’s Forza Motorsport, it was nearly 20 percent behind. These are the types of figures I’d expect to see as gains over previous-generation CPUs, not regressions.

To its credit, the Ultra 9 285K puts out a lot less heat than the 14900K, which is never a bad thing in a gaming rig. Even during CPU benchmarks, the CPU package never exceeded 85 degrees Celsius, while the 14900K reached 99C during the same tests. I also noticed that idle power draw is lower, power usage during most games is lower, and even the coolant temperature on the all-in-one cooler I was using was a few degrees lower on the Ultra 9 285K than the 14900K. But most high-end rigs have high-end coolers, and performance nearly always trumps all.