Alder Lake Core i5-12400 leaked benchmarks indicate Intel may finally have a solid counter to AMD Ryzen 5 5600X if priced below US$200

Intel is expected to announce the Alder Lake platform in the coming weeks, so it is not surprising to see early benchmark leaks pop up all over the web. The latest such leak is about the Core i5-12400, and the numbers seem to indicate that Intel will be giving some tough competition to the likes of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, which is largely considered to be the best value for money 6-core chip.

Unlike its higher-end cousins, the Core i5-12400 offers just six P-cores and 12 threads or Golden Cove performance cores without any Gracemont efficiency cores. The scores posted on Chinese social media appear to be from a retail sample with a single-core boost up to 4.4 GHz and an all-core boost up to 4 GHz. QS samples are nearly close to retail performance, so these numbers can be taken with some level of confidence.

In CPU-Z,  the Core i5-12400 seemed to have scored 681.7 points in single and 4,983.8 points in multi-core. This makes it about 6% and 3.52% faster, respectively than the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and about 25% faster overall than the previous gen Core i5-11400, which is a decent improvement. 

Coming to Cinebench R20, we see that the Core i5-12400 is able to score 659 points in single-thread and 4,784 points in multi-thread benchmarks, respectively. This is about 9.6% and 4.75% faster than an average Ryzen 7 5600X. 

The leak also indicates the CPU cores to be averaging at around 60 °C with the entire package consuming about 78.5 W of power, which seems to be quite economical considering that higher Alder Lake SKUs are reportedly quite power hungry.

Though we have seen quite a few price leaks for Alder Lake recently, there was no information about midrange SKUs of the likes of the Core i5-12400. If priced right below the US$200 mark, the Core i5-12400 has the potential to offer immense value over the Ryzen 5 5600X and could soon become the choice of mass adoption among mainstream desktop users.

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