Retail unit of the unannounced 12th gen Intel Core i5-12400 impresses with strong performance and manageable temps with the stock cooler

A YouTube going by the name of Chill Builds has managed to find a retail unit of the still unreleased Intel Core i5-12400. The Intel Core i5-12400 is a 6-core Alder Lake-S chip that Intel will use to capture the low-end segment of the market. But despite the chip’s low-end status, preliminary performance numbers are beating expectations.

Just a few days ago we reported that an engineering sample of Intel Core i5-12400 was seen trading blows or beating the Intel Core i9-11900KF in a bunch of games. Because engineering samples are often paired back in terms of capabilities, we stipulated that the retail Core i5-12400 chip might have slightly better performance. To our surprise, that is not the case. The engineering sample’s performance and the performance of the retail unit, as shown by Chill Builds, are nearly identical.

In the video, the Core i5-12400 posted a single-core score of 1693 and a multi-core score of 12137 on Cinebench. During benchmarking, all 6 Golden Cove cores of the Core i5-12400 were running at 3990 MHz. And although the CPU shot up to a toasty 81°C (177.8°F), it is interesting to note that the chip was cooled by an Intel Laminar RM1 stock cooler.

In other words, with a decent air or water cooler, the chip is likely to remain much cooler, which might result in a tiny performance bump. Fortunately, we won’t have to wait long to find out for ourselves as Intel is reportedly planning to launch the Alder Lake-S chips at CES 2022.

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