Intel launched its latest generation Intel Core Ultra 200S “Arrow Lake” processors last October 2024. However, reviewers and the general public weren’t quite satisfied with their performance, especially in gaming. Thankfully, Intel just released an update through motherboard manufacturers and Microsoft that will make it run faster.
Download Your Motherboard’s Latest BIOS and Update Windows
Many reviewers criticized the Intel Core Ultra 200S CPUs for not performing in line with Intel’s benchmarks when they tested the chips for themselves. So, Intel investigated the problem and discovered the following issues: missing Performance and Power Management package, Intel’s Application Performance Optimizer not working as intended, getting a BSOD when launching titles with Easy Anti-Cheat, misconfigured BIOS performance settings, and some unoptimized BIOS settings.
Thankfully, Intel just released a community post saying that it has discovered the root cause of these five issues and that it has already resolved four of them. So, if you just bought an Intel processor—specifically, the following chips: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, Intel Core Ultra 7 265K/KF, and Intel Core Ultra 5 245K/KF—the company says that you should update your PC to get the best performance out of them.
To do so, you should update your Windows 11 to version 2611.2314 or newer. If you want to ensure that you’re getting this update and don’t want to rely on automatic Windows updates, follow one of these ways to update Windows manually.
Aside from that, Intel also recommends that you should update the BIOS to fix the misconfigured performance settings in Z890 motherboards. By doing so, Team Blue says that you could get somewhere between 2% to 14% performance improvements. If you’re unsure how to go about that, you can check out our guide on how to update your UEFI BIOS in Windows.
Intel says that motherboard manufacturers will release another set of BIOS updates in January 2025 to further optimize BIOS settings, claiming that it would give an additional single-digit performance uplift. So, if you don’t want to go through the hassle of updating your motherboard again, you can wait until Intel releases this latest update to get all the fixes in one go. However, we recommend updating Windows immediately as it’s essentially free performance and it’s also much easier to do than a BIOS update.
We’re happy that Intel is releasing a field update for its processors. This means that it’s cares for the performance of its chips and that it’s not leaving customers with a dud. On the other hand, we sure wish that there’s less instances of this happening, especially as bad product releases could lead to massive issues, like the instability problems that 13th- and 14th-gen Intel Core Ultra processors had in mid-2024.
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