Overall & Gaming Performance
 |
 |
The faster memory offers a 5% performance increase on all CPU tests, so the 285K takes the lead from the 9950x, which was tested with the RAM speed set at 6000 MHz. I will also try to find time to check the performance increase on the AMD platforms with faster RAM. In performance per watt, the Gigabyte mainboard with the 6000 MHz RAM has the lead, while the Taichi and fast RAM are losing.
 |
 |
Without gaming, we remain at around a 5% performance increase with the faster RAM, but the performance power watt is lower.
 |
 |
There was around a 3.5% overall improvement in gaming, but the performance per drop dropped notably. Also, the Gigabyte mainboard proved way more efficient than the ASRock one in gaming.
 |
 |
Normally, I should also add the additional cost of the faster RAM to the performance per price, but I only included the processor’s base cost. If you add the DDR-8000 extra cost, the performance per price scores will change, with the DDR5-6000 RAM having the lead.
This website needs better software for commenting.
No formatting is possible, no line break, no whatsoever. Where is BBcode for example?
The text was written nicely and readable but is now posted as an unreadable pudding without dots and comma.
Oh man!
sorry we use the standard WordPress editor.
If I were an interested buyer, personally I would still wait 3 – 4 months for Intels’ “magic” bios and driver updatest to appear (which were publicly marketed weeks ago to fix performance and whatever).
Personally I would NOT buy at all, because there is still a HUGE red flag: Intel execs/marketing refuses to answer if this Arrow Lake is the only CPU generation on this socket.
No, a silly refresh in late 2025 with + 5 % performance does not count.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/massive-dell-blunder-leaks-intel-and-nvidias-mobile-roadmaps-nova-lake-panther-lake-cpus-and-genxx-gpus-listed
The Deall leak from this year shows that next-gen Nova Lake architecture will arrive Q4 2026/Q1 2027 and will bring a HUGE update for core count, performance and efficiency.
Both P-cores and E-core will be doubled = 16 + 32.
Other rumors this year (job descriptions) have shown Nova Lake will be the bigget jump since the core architecture 2006.
This is all in line with amd next huge leap which is Zen 6, which will abandon the low-performance, unefficient chiplet-crap introduced with Zen 2, togehter with the ancient crap technology copper wire bonding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex_gPeWVAo0
Zen 5 is still stupidly overpriced and ancient crap packaging technology. Looking at pro-accelerators as MI300 and reading information on some forums, shows there will be big updates for modern packaging.
Core count is also now rumored to double.
If Intel execs/marketing continue to refuse to answer if Nova Lake will also come for this socket, buying Arrow Lake and this platform is a very very very unwise decision.
Thanks for testing.
Your power consumption tests are the real deal. I see some very different results compared to the other more mainstream testers.
Looks like peak- & average power consumption for both applications and gaming is still not good.
Also good to see you are testing games in 720p resolution. Lots of other testers still test 1080p + maximum graphic testing and don’t want to admit to themselves that in quite some new games even a rtx 4090 bottlenecks.
Critique and improvement proposal is that you don’t specify how you test the games; build-in benchmark or own custom scene= Do it like the testers at pcgameshardware and test with CPU-heavy custom scenes.
Drop the CringeBench 6 benchmark and for media encoding, please add AV01 codec (av1 format).
I would also like to see some power consumption tests for low-utilization applications; so far you only have tested the extreme, which is 100 % utilization. You also don’t specify which applications were used for that.
Another tests showing the E-core performance would be good. Also disabling E-cores and doing some performance tests.
Thanks and good luck.