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Amazon has slashed the price of the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus by 34% off its list price, bringing it down to $145. This is the lowest price ever recorded for this processor, which originally launched at $200 before climbing to a recommended price of $220. The deal has already sold out, though Newegg currently lists the chip at $210.

The 250K Plus belongs to Intel’s Arrow Lake Refresh family and features 18 cores with six Lion Cove performance cores and twelve Skymont efficiency cores. It operates without Hyper-Threading but offers a maximum boost clock of 5.3 GHz and power limits of 125W/250W. As an unlocked K-series processor, it allows for overclocking when paired with a Z-series chipset, which includes baked-in frequency improvements.

In productivity workloads, the chip is 33% faster than AMD’s Ryzen 7 9700X despite costing roughly half as much, and 80% faster than the similarly priced Ryzen 5 9600X. In single-threaded performance, it outperforms every AMD offering tested, including the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X. While gaming performance is slightly lower than expected, averaging about as fast as the Core i5-14600K, the $145 price point makes it a strong value compared to competitors like the Ryzen 7 9700X.