With recent speculations suggesting the presence of the Core Ultra 9 285K as the top-end chip in the imminent launch, the leaks and rumors around Intel’s future Arrow Lake desktop CPU line-up are beginning to heat up. However, a fresh set of Geekbench 6 results discovered by BenchLeaks on X indicates that this CPU’s Core Ultra 9 285 non-K version may perform noticeably worse than its Ryzen 9 rivals.

The ASUS Prime Z890-P motherboard appears to have been used to obtain the Geekbench 6 test results, which show performance below even the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X of the current generation, not to mention any of the Ryzen 9 variations. The AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, for example, scored up to 19,381 and 3,624 in multi- and single-core tests, respectively, while the Geekbench 6 multicore score was an abysmal 14,150. The single-core score was a meager 3,081. Still, there seems to be more to this story—specifically, an unusual test setup that might drastically distort the test results, given that the “stock” Intel Core Ultra 9 285K appears to score far better in the Geekbench 6 charts than this specific 285 does.

With multicore scores as high as 21,447, apparent engineering samples of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K that appeared on the Geekbench 6 charts greatly outperform the K-SKU CPU with the same core configuration and very similar clock rates. Examining the data more closely, it seems that the Core Ultra 9 285 CPU-powered ASUS test platform only had 8 GB of DDR5 RAM operating at 5586 MT/s, whereas Core Ultra 9 285K testing, which yielded substantially better scores, had up to 32 GB of DDR5 RAM operating at up to 5598 MT/s.

Nevertheless, at a mere 2.5 GHz as opposed to the 285K’s 3.7 GHz base frequency, the reported base clock speeds of the Core Ultra 9 285’s E-cores are likewise noticeably lower than those of the highest-scoring Core Ultra 9 285K. This might also account for a portion of the disparity.

There may be some validity to this benchmark score because Geekbench isn’t known to be particularly RAM-dependent; the benchmark’s maximum working set is approximately 1.6 GB. It wouldn’t be shocking to see the CPU do noticeably better in following benchmarks, though. This Geekbench result, at the very least, confirms earlier speculations regarding the anticipated hardware setup of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285 and 285K CPUs:

16 E-cores, 8 P-cores, and 24 threads

2.5 GHz is the base clock (P-core base clocks will probably be higher).

5.586 GHz is the boost clock (probably only for P-cores).