Best buy incoming: sub-US$200 Intel Core i5-12400F beats the Ryzen 5 5600X

Many reviewers are praising the i5-12600K as the best value option among the new Alder Lake-S processors, but there may actually be a better Intel solution launching in a couple of months.  French review site Comptoir Hardware came into possession of what looks to be a qualification sample for the unreleased i5-12400F processor and the test results already recommend it as a strong competitor against the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, especially from a pricing standpoint.

The i5-12400F (no iGPU) uses the smaller Alder Lake die that does not include efficiency cores, so it only features the same 6 performance cores with hyperthreading from the i5-12600K. Base TDP is set to 65 W, while maximum turbo power appears to be 117 W, as the cores can run at as low as 800 MHz and a single-core boost can reach 4.4 GHz, although sustained boosts drop to 3.4 GHz. This CPU was tested on Windows 11 along a Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU and a DDR5-6000 RAM kit.

Comptoir Hardware’s review is very exhaustive with so many benchmarks, yet the Cinebench R23 and the overall gaming results should be enough to draw solid conclusions. In Cinebench R23, the i5-12400F still beats all Ryzen 5000 processors in single thread mode, whereas in multi-thread mode, it marginally outperforms the R5 5600X. It also gets a slightly higher average gaming grade compared to the same R5 5600X.

There is no official info regarding pricing; however, if we extrapolate the current US$157 MSRP of the i5-11400F (even though no retailer has it under $200) with the average raise of US$20 from Rocket Lake to Alder Lake, we would get something close to US$180 for an i5-12400F. This is ~US$120 less than the Ryzen 5 5600X that now costs ~US$300. Granted, AMD could cut prices even further meanwhile, but these will probably not match the US$180-200 mark in 2 months.

Buy the Intel Core i5-11400 CPU on Newegg