Cameron Faulkner is an editor covering deals and gaming hardware. He joined in 2018, and after a two-year stint at Polygon, he rejoined The Verge in May 2025. The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was billed by the company in late March as one of its “fastest gaming desktop processor ever.” That hype was evidently accurate, as benchmarks done by Gamers Nexus show the processor giving AMD’s pricier X3D cache-equipped Ryzen 9000-series CPUs a run for their money. The Ultra 7 270K Plus also outperforms the Core i9 14900K in many tasks, which has long been a preferred choice for gamers. Thankfully, it won’t cost you a ton to buy the 270K Plus if you’re considering a PC upgrade or building one from scratch. You can get this CPU at an all-time low price of $279.99 (about $45 off the normal price) right now at Amazon . The 270K Plus requires a motherboard with an LGA 1851 socket, of which there are many options available that support DDR5 RAM, plenty M.2 SSDs, and with support for Wi-Fi 7.…