Intel Core Ultra 9 285K CPU Review: Performance, Thermals & Power Analysis

Power Consumption – Intel LGA1851 Socket & Z890 Chipset

Intel states that the new CPUs won’t deliver significant performance gains over the previous generation. Still, they will be notably lower in power consumption for the same workloads, meaning they will be way more efficient. I am looking forward to seeing that since, so far, the Intel 13th and 14th generation CPUs, especially the high-end models, were extremely power-hungry.

Using the i9-14900K as a reference, Intel claims that the system’s overall power consumption has dropped by 80W. I will check this with the Powenetics V2 system, which can measure the CPU’s power consumption alone.

Lower power consumption also means less stress for the cooling systems, which had a tough time on the 13900K and 14900K CPUs, which could apply over 350W sustained loads if you set high enough PL1 and PL2 values.

Intel LGA1851 Socket & Z890 Chipset

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It’s time for a new socket, the LGA1851. This means you must buy a new mainboard to use one of the latest Intel CPUs. You will have to spend a significant amount since, so far, only the top Intel Z890 chipset is available. More affordable chipsets and mainboards will be available in 2025.

The processor connects to the Z890 chipset through a DMI 4.0 x8 chipset bus (bandwidth comparable to PCI-Express 4.0 x8). It puts out 24x PCI-Express Gen 4x downstream lanes. This is a massive increase from the Z790, which has 16x Gen 4 and 8x Gen 3 lanes. The integrated USB complex consists of 32x USB 3.2 5 Gbps serial-deserializers, which motherboard designers can configure into 5x 20 Gbps ports, 10x 10 Gbps ports, and 10x 5 Gbps ports. There’s also a 14-port USB 2.0 hub. Intel has retired the HDA “Azalia” audio interface with Z890, which means onboard audio CODECs will have to use the newer MIPI SoundWire and USB 3.2 interfaces (which CODECs like the Realtek ALC4080 and ALC4082 already do).

The chipset integrates a 1 GbE MAC and Wi-Fi 6. Nonetheless, given the new chipset’s available PCIe and USB 3.2 connectivity, manufacturers can easily provide Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5 GbE ports (or better). They can also use Intel’s Killer networking package, which combines existing Intel networking PHY with the advanced Killer prioritization engine, and DoubleShot Pro, which work together to reduce network latency when gaming.