Introduction

Intel on December 18 gave us a detailed update on how the company is tackling the various performance issues its Core Ultra 200 Arrow Lake-S desktop processors are facing. The company launched Arrow Lake in October to mixed reviews—while the press appreciated the massive gains in energy efficiency over the previous generation Raptor Lake, the generational performance gains were rather modest in applications, and the chips tested slower than their predecessors. Intel's problems compounded when AMD's Zen 5 architecture was supercharged by 3D V-Cache technology on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which stormed past everything from Intel in gaming benchmarks. Shortly after, Intel announced that the gaming performance of Arrow Lake fell below expectations, but this could be fixed, and listed out probable causes.



Enough history, the December 18 update from Intel lists out the fixes that the company already put out in circulation, in the form of motherboard BIOS updates that fix certain crucial default settings; and updates to Windows 11 24H2 from Microsoft, as part of its monthly "patch Tuesday" release cycle. Intel claims that the November update to Windows 11 24H2 should address several issues.



These however, do not constitute the biggest in the line of fixes from Intel. The microcode update 0x114, slated for January 2025, improves gaming performance by a single-digit percentage when averaged across a test suite of 35 games (which means in certain games, the gains could be a lot higher, and in others, the gains could be lesser). We will be sure to comprehensively test all Arrow Lake processors we have in Q1 2025 with the new 0x114 microcode update, but in the meantime, we thought we could put the other set of updates to the test.

We've tested a Core Ultra 9 285K processor on Windows 11 24H2 with the December 2024 patch Tuesday update (version 26100.2605), exceeding the 26100.2161 (November update) requirement. Also tested, is the 285K with the version of Windows 24H2 that was available to us in October. We tested the 285K on the older Windows 11 23H2 with its October 2024 and December 2024 patches. Lastly, a benchmark run was done on a fresh installation of Windows 11 24H2.

This isn't a fully fledged processor review, we have a small selection of tests across applications and games. The application/synthetic benchmarks include Y-cruncher, Cinebench 2024 1T and nT; Blender, Avast Anti-Virus (a test that was broken in our October review); 7-Zip compression and decompression; H.265 multithreaded video encode, and LAME MP3 encode. The game benchmarks include Alan Wake 2, Baldur's Gate, Elden Ring, Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, Starfield, and The Last of Us Part One.


Update Dec 20th: So things moved quickly, and overnight, ASUS released a new BIOS version for the Hero, which includes the 0x114 microcode update! This update is not marked as beta, which suggests they thoroughly tested it first. I got up early and benchmarked it for you. This article has been updated accordingly.

Test Configurations

The following list details the various test configurations you will find in this article:

• 23H2 / Oct 24: This is a configuration that roughly matches what we originally reviewed Arrow Lake with (except for a slightly newer BIOS that came out in late October)
• 23H2 / Dec 24: This is the previous config, but with Windows Update fully updates as of yesterday.
• 23H2 / Dec 24 / uCode 0x113: Next, we updated the BIOS on the Z890 Hero to 1101, which was released on November 29 and uses microcode 0x113. All settings in BIOS are identical. This was the newest BIOS at the time I originally published the article (Dec 19th)
• 24H2 / Fresh Install: Now we installed Windows 11 24H2, a fresh installation (not an upgrade from 23H2). The motherboard BIOS version remains at the newest 1101. We didn't allow Windows Update to install all the updates and started benching instead.
• 24H2 / Dec Patches: Now we ran Windows Update several times with reboots, to ensure we have the latest updates, up to yesterday, which includes the KB mentioned by Intel.
• These two test runs (purple bars) were added on Dec 20th, after the article was published:
• 24H2 / Dec Patches / uCode 0x114: Test run with ASUS BIOS 1203, which includes the new 0x114 microcode that according to Intel adds a few percent in additional performance. This BIOS also updates the ME version to 1827.
• 24H2 / Dec Patches / uCode 0x114 / ME: An additional test run with the newest Intel ME firmware version (1854) manually flashed to the motherboard.