Upgrade from Intel 265K to 270K Plus worth it?
Posted by legit_split_@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 35 comments
I know this sounds like consumerism taking its toll but hear me out.
I bought a used 265K for 230€ a few months ago, really happy with its performance. However, I could essentially get 285K performance for 70€ more if I were to sell my CPU. What do you guys think?
Wor3q@reddit
The most important question is: can you actually make use of that extra CPU performance?
If not, then the answer is easy. If you think about future proofing, that same processor will only get cheaper, so buy it when you will need it.
Alternative-Luck-825@reddit
yes, 5-10% for gaming ,15-20% for productivity.
Wor3q@reddit
I'm not asking if it is theoretically faster. I'm asking if you can make use of that additional performance.
You won't see that 10% in most games, since you will be held back by GPU anyway.
For productivity you will have to do something really heavy, like stress simulations to notice the difference.
Alternative-Luck-825@reddit
5-105 gaming performance improve is not theoretically， its really work.theoreticall 720p ,with 5090 is 15%
roshi665@reddit
WHO THE FUCK USES 720 with a 5090....
puneet724@reddit
If you tune your 265k difference will be 0.. extra cores doenst help anything in gaming
ExchangeCautious601@reddit
265K is fine
Additional_Air779@reddit
UPDATE: I did in fact upgrade my 265K for the 270K Plus and really struggled to get it working without crashing. Turns out I needed to run the Intel® Platform Performance Package for it to work. Apart from that, everything is a bit snappier. If you've got the spare cash, why not?
legit_split_@reddit (OP)
Is that supported in Linux?
Additional_Air779@reddit
No idea to be honest, but I bet it wouldn't need it in Linux.
guigarma@reddit
I think it would be best to wait for the 400 series that will be released in Q4. 2026.
It is true that the 270K Plus is essentially a 285K: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/7114vs6326vs6296/Intel-Ultra-7-270K-Plus-vs-Intel-Ultra-7-265K-vs-Intel-Ultra-9-285K
legit_split_@reddit (OP)
400 series? You mean Nova Lake? That would require a new motherboard and doesn't make sense for me
guigarma@reddit
Yes, Nova Lake, and true, new motherboard... But they plan to support it for many generations. For the LGA1851 this is the end of the road.
Additional_Air779@reddit
I would. In fact, I'm probably going to right now. Reason is I like knowing I've got a bunch of fast cores under the hood. Us PC enthusiasts aren't all Vulcans.
capcapfall@reddit
Interesting that I just asked this question in another post. "This is my dilemma. I bought the 265k last October but never got to build the pc due to a family emergency. I've been kinda depressed and abandoned the whole thing. Now the 270k plus is out and benchmarks look great. Should I continue with the build (265k) or get the 270k plus? I'm more productivity focused (music production) and maybe casually game in 1440p and 4k."
legit_split_@reddit (OP)
So most people here are recommending me to keep it, and now that the first listings are coming online I think they may be right.
Currently the cheapest 270k plus I can find goes for 320€, which means it's 40% more expensive for 10-20% more performance depending on the workload - not a good deal.
Also I have the challenge of finding a buyer that's unaware of the 250k plus which is currently selling for 230€ new, and offers similar gaming performance to the 265k which is the mainstream use-case.
For me my use-case is running LLMs and I need as much memory bandwidth as I can get, making the 270k plus's better IMC (integrated memory controller) more appealing to support memory higher speeds. On the other hand, I've also read that the 265k can be overclocked heavily, so I'm gonna try that first before coming to a conclusion.
ecktt@reddit
No.
OCer have been tweaking the 265K interconnects to get similar, if not better, performance for a while now.
It was a hidden budget gem.
dertechie@reddit
As much as I know the results, I'm kinda hoping we see someone run some tests to compare a 265K with OC to match the die to die, bus speeds and e-core turbo on the 270K Plus and just see how it all does.
The only advantage the 270K Plus should have at that point is the new binary optimizations, 4 more E-cores (and the accompanying L3 cache) and better binning.
There's still part of me that's tempted to just send my essentially BNIB 265K back to Newegg and just grab the 270K Plus, even if I know it's not worth it and I should just tweak it since unless I got a chip with interconnects that just barely makes the grade for 265K.
ecktt@reddit
I've seen the result before this launch, but with 8000MT/s and more aggressive OC. It lands between a 7800X3D and 9800X3D.
But were talking 6000MT/s EXPO with no PBO. Still very impressive though.
The people who were not impressed with this generation from Intel are also not the techie type from back in the day. I seriously suspect there were a group of engineers who wanted to give the enthusiasts a budget killer secretly, but almost everyone missed the point. Therefore, they had to release the 270K and 250K to make it completely obvious.
dertechie@reddit
Everyone, including Intel themselves apparently with the launch pricing for these.
I remember thinking “these look like Intel priced these purely based off multicore speed and ignored the gaming benches”. Or they looked at them with the same eye I did and said “good enough to shift the bottleneck to the GPU” and forgot how bad the numbers would actually look in reviews.
Now that they’ve cut the prices down to something reasonable they look a lot better.
airinato@reddit
There is no point, just a waste of time and money. Even if you have a high refresh rate monitor, the FPS difference is both unnoticeable and too little to care about.
If you're really chasing frames just get the hell off Intel anyway.
Key-Pace2960@reddit
On the one hand it's only $70 and it's a great price for that performance but on the other hand it's not like it's a significant upgrade.
Those 4 extra e-cores will only come into play with applications that scale well to that many cores and are only gonna be a modest improvement even in the best case scenario and the other improvements are even more modest.
Imo if the all-core performance is that important to you for that to be a worthwhile upgrade you might also wanna look into prosumer/workstation platforms like xeon or threadripper.
Lazy-Alarm-4468@reddit
If I were u would keep my because 265k its recent chipset.
militant_rainbow@reddit
270k - 265k = 5000, which is $50. So you’d be paying $70 for $50 more in performance. Not worth the trouble
Belzebutt@reddit
Either that or buy 256 MB of RAM, am I right?
VaultBoy636@reddit
Overclock your 265k and you have the same performance in games. Only go for the 270k if you need the extra cores
RJsRX7@reddit
I'm probably keeping the 265K; while the 270K is an improvement, I'm not sure it makes for a meaningful change in what headroom there is.
If that changes, maybe I'll consider it.
SAHD292929@reddit
Its a jump from an i7 to an i9 so it should be worth it especially if you sell your old processor.
MichiganRedWing@reddit
What do you use your PC for?
Spontenous_decay@reddit
yeah definitely worth it ,
NotNerdKid@reddit
why? u r upgrading that.
grigoriymicro@reddit
Well, if you 100% know that there is someone to buy your current cpu, then yeah, I guess that would be a nice upgrade.
ArchusKanzaki@reddit
Unless you can sell your old one for same price or slightly lower, probably not. Current one still performs really well, basically on par or slightly better than 250K Plus. Same-gen upgrade is rarely worth it unless the performance is at least 2-3 tiers different.
kiko77777@reddit
Just keep what you've got
FireFalcon123@reddit
If it were me, I would just keep the 265K