Overclocking goes away on the 285, does AI pay any of that price?

  The 285 gives up overclocking freedom, not AI capability. Its NPU, quoted around 36 TOPS, keeps handling always-on jobs like meeting backgrounds and denoise exactly as the 285K does, and 24 threads with VNNI remain on tap for quantized inference. The measurable difference is the turbo easing from 5.7GHz to 5.6GHz, and that only shows under sustained all-core load.

  Skip manual overclocking and a Z890 board and the 285 keeps the full AI experience for less money. Buy the K only if you actually live at the frequency ceiling, because nothing about the NPU or the thread count changes here. Heavy local inference still outruns both chips regardless, so do not overthink the non-K part.