Two non-K CPUs are now Available for Pre-Purchase for Chinese Consumers, More on the Way
Intel China has already begun taking pre-orders of the newer Arrow Lake desktop CPUs aka Core Ultra 200 processors. These will be non-K and F variants of the already launched SKUs a few months ago. Surprisingly, two of these processors are now available for pre-purchase and these are the Core Ultra 5 230F and Core Ultra 7 265F chips.
The Core Ultra 5 230F is seen for the first time. It’s possibly exclusive to China but it’s just my speculation. No specifications are mentioned on the page but it should be between the Core Ultra 5 225 and Core Ultra 5 235 CPUs. The former is a 10-core CPU while the latter brings 14 cores. So, it’s unclear whether the 230F will boast 10 cores or 14 cores. Nonetheless, as per a rough translation, customers have to deposit ¥100 and the pre-sale price hasn’t been announced yet.
Similarly, we have the Intel Core Ultra 7 265F, which is a 20 cores, 20 threads processor with clocks of up to 5.3 GHz and 4.6 GHz on the P and E cores respectively. Just like the Core Ultra 5 235F, it won’t have integrated graphics and one would require a discrete GPU to get a display. Surprisingly, the boxes of both CPUs mention “Unlocked” but one recent leak didn’t have this mention on the boxes. So, it’s unclear what’s going on with the listing.
Typically non-K CPUs aren’t overclockable and should be the case with these chips too. Nonetheless, to pre-purchase the processor, users have to deposit ¥100 as well and for both the CPUs, no official pricing has been mentioned. This is because the official embargo is a week later from now but one can secure these chips by depositing some money now.
When the official sale begins, we will have MSRPs for all these new SKUs and the shipping will begin on 15th January in China. The pre-orders aren’t available in other parts of the world and so, it’s China-specific at the moment.
