What a Core Ultra 5-245 is good for
A strong mainstream gaming chip. It will keep up with most graphics cards at 1440p and above, and only starts to show its limits at 1080p with a fast card and a high refresh rate panel.
For the majority of builds this is enough processor, and money is better spent on the graphics side.
Performance cores and efficiency cores
This chip mixes 6 performance cores with 8 efficiency cores. Games run almost entirely on the performance cores; the efficiency cores absorb background work so it does not interrupt them. That is genuinely useful, but it means the headline core count overstates gaming capability — our model counts about 9.4 effective cores here, weighting an efficiency core well below a performance one.
This part has no hyper-threading, so thread count matches physical core count at 14.
Where it sits
Ranked 61 of 201 desktop processors for gaming. Nearest faster: Core i5-14600KF, Ryzen 5 7500F. Just below: Core i5-14600, Ryzen 9 5950X. Full method on the methodology page.