Intel Core i5-12490F soundly beats Core i5-12400F and AMD Ryzen 7 5800X in Geekbench but it's a China-only chip

Intel’s 12^th gen Alder Lake-S Core i5-12490F, a China-only SKU, has made a stop at Geekbench, giving us the first look at the CPU’s performance. On Geekbench, the Core i5-12490F posted a single-core score of 1806 and a multi-core score of 8872. These numbers are considerably higher than the recently announced Core i5-12400F.

In the single-core benchmark, the Core i5-12490F is roughly 10% faster than the Core i5-12400F. The former’s lead extends to 15% when we move to the multi-core benchmark. It is worth noting that the Core i5-12490F has a boost clock of 4588 MHz, 200 MHz more than the Core i5-12400F. Similarly, the Core i5-12490F also enjoys a 500 MHz faster base clock, coming in at 2.9 GHz as compared to the Core i5-12400F’s 2.49 GHz.

Comparing the Core i5-12490F to the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, Intel’s chip comes out ahead at single-threaded workloads and falls behind at multi-threaded workloads. The single-core Geekbench score of the Ryzen 7 5800X is 1673 and the multi-core score is 11246. In other words, the Ryzen 7 5800X has an 8% slower single-core and a 17% faster multi-core score than the Core i5-12490F.

Chinese retailers have already started selling the Core i5-12490F without the bundled cooler. For instance, at JD.com, the chip goes for 1620 Chinese Yuan (US$254). Sadly, Intel has no plans to bring the CPU to the Western markets.

Buy Intel Core i5-12600K desktop processor on Amazon