Intel hikes pricing for its flagship desktop PC chips by up to $50 — official Core Ultra 270K Plus and 250K Plus product pages now recommend prices of up to $349 and $229, respectively

Intel released its new Core Ultra 200S Plus desktop processors back in March 2026, and it appears that the company has quietly increased their prices. According to Intel’s official product page, the Core Ultra 270K Plus now has a recommended customer price of $339–$349, up from the previous $289–$299. Similarly, the Core Ultra 250K Plus has increased from $189–$199 to $219–$229.

While the increase amounts to an additional $30–$50 (depending on the model), it is worth noting that these higher prices have already been reflected on Amazon. We have reached out to Intel to confirm the pricing changes and will update this article if and when the company responds.

The Core Ultra 270K Plus and the 250K Plus are part of Intel’s Arrow Lake Refresh lineup and were introduced with a relatively low price compared to their non-Plus predecessors. Intel claimed up to 15% improvement in gaming performance at 1080p compared to stock Arrow Lake chips thanks to several key improvements aimed at addressing the architectural bottlenecks of the original Arrow Lake processors.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus comes with 24 cores, including 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores, which is similar to the more expensive Core Ultra 9 285K. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus comes with 18 cores across 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores, which is slightly below the 20 cores available on the Core Ultra 7 265K. Intel also increased the die-to-die interconnect frequency by 900 MHz to reduce latency and improve gaming performance.

The new chips also offer native support for faster DDR5-7200 memory, as opposed to 6400 MT/s on the non-Plus Arrow Lake chips. Then there’s Intel’s new Binary Optimization Tool, a free software utility that analyzes executables and automatically recompiles them with CPU-specific optimizations. According to Intel, this alone is responsible for a significant portion of the gaming performance gains.

While the increase in price may hamper the value advantage that these chips initially offered, there is no doubt that they bring meaningful performance to the table. In our testing, we found the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus to deliver excellent productivity performance with a noticeable uplift in gaming over the original Arrow Lake chips. In fact, it is currently the best Intel CPU on the market. As for the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, it offers one of the strongest value propositions at its price point. It also remains our top pick for the best budget CPU, thanks to its ability to compete with similarly priced gaming processors while excelling in heavily threaded workloads.