Intel’s new Core Ultra 200-series desktop processors, codenamed Arrow Lake, launched to seriously underwhelming reviews back in October. Now the American firm has collated five issues that it says are to blame for the difference between its own performance expectations and what reviewers experienced, with four of the five problems described as being already resolved by BIOS, Windows or application updates, and further performance enhancements to arrive in January 2025.
For context, our Core i9 285K and Core i5 245K review saw performance wins for the 285K against the outgoing 14900K in three titles – Crysis 3 Remastered, Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Forza Horizon 5 – while the 14900K retained its crown in the other eight games we tested, often by extreme margins.
Here are the five issues, their root cause and current status, quoted from Intel’s release:
The table makes for interesting reading, and Intel’s community blog on the subject goes into further detail on each identified issue too. In it, Intel promises “a complete performance digest, inclusive of the January BIOSes” at CES early next year, so we should get a better idea of exactly the performance differentials we should expect with all five fixes applied.
We also saw extremely poor performance in Cyberpunk 2077 in particular, and that seems to have been solved in game update 2.2 if the patch notes are to be believed.
If you are one of the vanishingly small number of people to be running a Core i5 245K, Core i7 265K or Core i9 285K system, then you’ve probably already updated to the latest Windows and BIOS versions, but it’s worth doing so now if you haven’t – and again in mid January when further BIOS updates are made available – to ensure that your system is delivering maximum performance. Intel says that the January BIOSes can be “identified with Intel microcode version 0x114 and Intel CSME Firmware Kit 19.0.0.1854v2.2 (or newer).”