After the competent but uninspiring performance of AMD’s Ryzen 9000 processors, the PC enthusiast space is looking for some real excitement to drag it out of the doldrums. Some folks are so weary of the same old stuff that they’re actually excited about the PS5 Pro launch, despite it’s lofty price tag. Don’t fret, fellow hardware geeks—new Intel CPUs are just around the corner, and they might be pretty solid.
We say that because of the leaks that we’ve seen so far, including a new Chaos V-Ray benchmark result. For the unfamiliar, V-Ray is a 3D rendering kernel that makes for an intense multi-core CPU benchmark, similar to Maxon’s Cinebench. The Core Ultra 7 265KF appeared in the benchmark database with two results, giving an average score of 33,153 points.
As you can see in the image above, this puts it in the same ballpark as a pair of Xeon Gold 6154 CPUs, a Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, or a 64-thread AMD EPYC 7R32. Not bad considering we’re looking at a 20-core, 20-thread CPU. It also comes in very close behind the Core i9-14900, but that part has a restrictive 125W power limit applied; the unlimited Core i9-14900K is considerably higher up the rankings. It does beat the Core i7-14700K, though.
It’s important to keep in mind that not only is this technically pre-release hardware with pre-release software, but also that all of the benchmark scores in the Chaos V-Ray database are user-sourced, and thus should be taken with a grain of salt as there’s no accounting for overclocked or poorly-maintained machines. We also don’t know anything about the memory configurations of the systems submitting results.
Based on the leaked information, the Core Ultra 7 265KF appears to have a peak Turbo Boost Max clock rate of 5.5 GHz. However, the peak clock rate reported in the V-Ray database appears to be 4.99 GHz. It’s possible that that’s simply an all-core speed, and it’s also possible that these early sample CPUs are not boosting as high as they should.
Alternatively, it’s possible that Arrow Lake is going to end up a minor boost over the hot-clocked 14th-gen parts. We’ll know once we have silicon in hand, which may happen sooner than you think. As we reported earlier today, Intel may be launching Arrow Lake as soon as five weeks from now. Stay tuned for the latest info.