Thanks to IT Home user Huanan Wu Yanzu for the tip!

IT Home News on May 17: Intel released its latest Arrow Lake Refresh products earlier this year, but the flagship model — the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus — which had been rumored, was not among them.

Content creator @51972 obtained a Core Ultra 9 290K Plus through overseas channels and conducted comprehensive tests — the results showed extremely limited performance improvement in both gaming and professional workloads, which is likely the reason Intel abandoned it.

The Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus features a slight frequency adjustment of about 100-200MHz over the existing 285K base (8 P-cores + 16 E-cores, for a total of 24 cores), adds support for DDR5-7200 memory, and includes a new Intel Binary Optimization Tool.

In CPU-Z benchmarks, the 290K Plus is approximately 2.84% faster than the 270K Plus, while in the Cinebench R24 single-core test, it is only 0.69% higher. Under full-load averages, the 290K Plus is just 1.5% faster than the 270K Plus, which can almost be considered within margin of error.

In heavy-load applications such as compression, real-time rendering, and compilation, the AMD R9 9950X3D2 is only slightly inferior to the Ultra 9 290K Plus in the Ansys Fluent simulation test. Considering all productivity benchmarks, the 290K Plus is about 6.3% faster than the 270K Plus, but about 8.3% slower than the 9950X3D2.

In terms of gaming tests, at 1080p resolution, the average frame rate of six games for the 290K Plus is only about 2% higher than that of the 270K Plus. The largest gap is in "Delta Force," where the 290K Plus leads by 8.3% in average frames and 3.33% in 1% low frames.

However, in "Black Myth: Wukong" and "Resident Evil 9," the 290K Plus even falls behind the 270K Plus, let alone the R9 9950X3D2 with 3D V-Cache.

At 1440p resolution, the gap further narrows (IT之家 reminder: at this resolution, games rely more on the GPU, so this test is less meaningful for CPU evaluation; it is conducted only to satisfy a small portion of fans).

The 290K Plus again shows a clear advantage in "Delta Force," with average frames leading the 270K Plus by about 6.8% and 1% low frames leading by 14%.

However, in "Black Myth: Wukong," the 290K Plus still lags behind the 270K Plus by about 1%, while "Resident Evil 9" is tied. On average, this unreleased flagship is only 1.5% faster than the currently available 270K Plus, which is almost within the margin of error.

Overall, the gaming performance improvement of the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus over the Ultra 7 270K Plus is around 0–2%, while productivity performance improves by about 1–4%.

TomsHardware believes that such a tiny performance gap makes it difficult to justify the high price of the Intel Core Ultra 9 flagship model, which also explains why Intel ultimately did not launch this chip. The already available Arrow Lake Refresh models offer excellent price-performance ratios, and forcing a flagship out would disrupt the positioning of the entire product line, especially in terms of market perception, where the drawbacks would outweigh the benefits.

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