(Image credit: Intel)

Some say Intel robbed consumers of the Core Series 2 processor with P-cores (codenamed Bartlett Lake), and that the chips could have competed against the best CPUs for gaming. However, German publication PC Games Hardware (PCGH) recently put the flagship of the Bartlett Lake series, the Core 9 273PQE, through a series of benchmarks and discovered that it couldn’t even outperform the Core i9-13900K released four years ago.

Some Intel enthusiasts have been vocal about their desire for Intel to release a processor lineup that features only P-cores. Bartlett Lake is Intel’s answer to these demands. Essentially, Bartlett Lake is just Raptor Lake stripped of its E-cores. Speculation and leaks about Bartlett Lake have circulated for a couple of years now, but it wasn't until recently that Intel unleashed it.

Bartlett Lake comes four years after the introduction of the 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors and three years after the refresh of the 14th Generation Raptor Lake lineup. Needless to say, many enthusiasts were happy to finally see Bartlett Lake until Intel dropped the bomb that the new series would be exclusive to OEMs and embedded applications, locking out mainstream consumers from the lineup. Bartlett Lake still runs on the LGA1700 platform, so there are mods to run it on conventional Intel 700-series motherboards.

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Intel Core 9 273PQE Specifications

The Core 9 273PQE is the processor that purists have been dreaming about for years: a Raptor Lake chip built exclusively with 12 Raptor Cove P-cores. Impressively, the Core 9 273PQE boasts 50% more P-cores than either the Core i9-13900K or Core i9-14900K. When it comes to clock speeds, the Core 9 273PQE outpaces the Core i9-13900K and comes within just 5% of the Core i9-14900K's P-core boost clock frequency.

PCGH used the ASRock IMB-X1714 motherboard with the W680 chipset to host the Core 9 273PQE. For memory, the news outlet selected DDR5-5600 C46 modules to complement the 12-core processor. Only two specific memory kits are on the Qualified Vendor List (QVL). This motherboard comes with a chipset made for Bartlett Lake, unlike the mods we've seen to get the chips running on consumer chipsets.

The publication compared the Core 9 273PQE to a plethora of contemporary and previous-generation processors, though for conciseness, we’ve picked a small subset of the outlet’s results. To ensure an apples-to-apples comparison with the Core i9-13900K, PCGH also ran it on the ASRock IMB-X1714 with the DDR5-5600 C46 memory (the publication usually runs DDR5-6000 C28 memory with LGA1700 chips).

Intel Core 9 273PQE Benchmarks

Despite featuring 12 P-cores, the Core 9 273PQE delivered gaming performance comparable to the Ryzen 7 9700X and Core i5-14600K. With DDR5-5600 C46 memory, it was only slightly faster than the Core i9-13900K. However, when using high-performance DDR5-6000 C28 memory, the Core i9-13900K outperformed the Core 9 273PQE by up to 8.5%. That goes to show the impact of memory performance in gaming, as the switch from DDR5-5600 C46 to DDR5-6000 C28 increased the Core i9-13900K’s gaming performance index by 9.66%.

In application performance, the Core 9 273PQE outperformed the Core i5-14600K and Ryzen 7 9700X by 2.61% and 8.06%, respectively. However, the performance gap widened considerably when compared to the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-13900K (W680), with those models being up to 42.73% and 23.09% faster, respectively.

There is good reason to believe that the Core 9 273PQE didn't quite live up to its full potential, and several factors contributed to it. One of the primary limitations is that Intel has restricted the Bartlett Lake to commercial clients. There is little to no flexibility for fine-tuning or pairing the processor with faster memory, which has proven to improve gaming performance. Additionally, the lack of optimization for mainstream applications further hampers the chip’s performance. Then again, many games do not scale performance beyond eight cores, so the additional cores in the Core 9 273PQE offer diminishing returns in gaming scenarios.

Bartlett Lake is fine where it is, and we should leave it alone. Our attention is better directed toward Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 400S (codenamed Nova Lake) chips, which are scheduled to launch later this year.

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