After years of outrageous power levels, self-destructing chips, and underwhelming laptop options, Intel’s pair of Arrow Lake Refresh processors—the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus—are so good that almost all of Team Blue’s recent failings can be forgiven. And in the case of the 270K Plus, it’s received one more special ‘award’: it can now be picked up as a delidded option from Thermal Grizzly.
The process of removing the IHS or integrated heat spreader from a CPU (aka delidding) isn’t something that most PC users would consider. Partly because you need specialised hardware to do this, and there’s a distinct risk of permanently damaging the chip in doing so, but it’s mostly because there’s no major advantage in doing so when using the processor in stock form.
However, for the overclocking crowd, it’s a bit of a must because allowing a cooler to have direct contact with the CPU die (or dies, in the case of AMD chips), can potentially get a serious reduction in operating temperature. This is turn lets you crank up the voltages to achieve much higher clock speeds.
If that sounds of interest, but you don’t want the hassle of delidding, you can always head over to Thermal Grizzly and buy a pre-popped processor from there. Naturally, since these are all done by hand and carefully prepared for use with liquid metal, they don’t come cheap.
Actually, that’s not true, because TG has just added the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus to its list of delidded options, and thanks to Intel’s low MSRP for the CPU, a bare butt KP chip will only set you back a fraction over $525.
That’s cheaper than a stock Core Ultra 9 285K (currently $560 at Amazon) and even without overclocking, the 270K Plus is better than its bigger brother in games, due to its higher internal bus clocks and other tweaks. Throw some serious overclocking into the mix, and hey presto! You now have the most powerful desktop CPU Intel has made in years.
AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D will still be better for gaming, and any AM5 gaming PC you buy or put together now will readily take a next-gen Ryzen with a BIOS upgrade. Intel’s LGA 1851 socket only supports the Core Ultra 200S chips and nothing else.
But for sheer all-round brilliance, especially if you game and do a lot of content creation workloads, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is very hard to beat for the money. Only the considerably more expensive Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9950X3D2 Dual Edition are better. I should know because I’ve not only tested every single one of these chips, but I also use a 270K Plus in my own rig now.