Many of our graphics card reviews early last year and in the early 2020s focused on the difficulties of reviewing and recommending graphics cards when the manufacturer-suggested price points effectively didn’t exist. Now, reviews of any new PC component have to contend with the much more broadly awful market for consumer PC parts as AI data center-fueled demand for RAM and flash memory chips drives up prices for DDR5 kits, SSDs, and GPUs.

In our August 2025 system guide, 32GB of DDR5 and a decent 2TB SSD would run you less than £150. Today, you’d pay between three and four times as much for similar components. This is the context that Intel’s Core Ultra 200S Plus chips—the $199 Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and $299 Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, still codenamed Arrow Lake just like the originals—have launched into.

They’re solid performers, they’re reasonably power-efficient, and for heavy multi-threaded workloads, they’re a better value than what AMD can offer for the same price (though even years-old non-X3D AMD chips retain a small edge in games). But getting a good price on a CPU does little to mitigate the cost of the rest of the components, either in a new build or in an upgrade (since in both cases you’re likely to be contending with a pricey upgrade from DDR4 to DDR5).

Unlike AMD’s AM5 socket, Intel’s LGA 1851 socket provides no upgrade path. Intel has put together quite a decent mid-generation refresh here, CPUs that at most other times in PC building history would have been the basis for a good budget-focused gaming PC or workstation.

But both chips have the disadvantage of launching at a moment when “value” in most other PC components is difficult to find. In this climate, Intel’s latest processors are like finding a rare gem amidst an avalanche of rubble—worth collecting if you can afford it, but still a struggle for the average builder.