Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus tested. There is no madness
Although during the last fair CES 2026 in Las Vegas (USA) Intel focused entirely on mobile systems Panther Lakeit is common knowledge that the desktop series will also debut soon Arrow Lake Refresh. As the name suggests, it will mainly be a refresh of the offer – the same architectures and lithography, but newer stepping and higher clock speeds.
These are the last steps for the Intel LGA 1851 platform
And it happens to be at the base Geekbench the results of the flagship model appeared Intel Core Ultra 9 290K Plus paired with the GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Tachyon ICE motherboard and DDR5-8000 RAM. The number of cores is still 24 (8P+16E), and the clock speed is 3.7 GHz base and up to 5.8 GHz in Turbo mode – 100 MHz more than the long-available Core Ultra 9 285K.
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The new CPU scored 3,456 points in the single-thread test and 24,610 points in the multi-thread test. This means an improvement of 7 and 9% compared to the original, and at the same time these are 2 and 11% better results than the competition’s flagship – AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
In other words, there is nothing crazy – it is rather a proposition for owners of older PCs. However, please remember that these will be the last chips for the Intel LGA 1851 platform. AMD AM5 or the upcoming LGA 1954 seem to be a much more future-proof choice.
