Intel Core i5-12400 Desktop Processor 18M Cache, up to 4.40 GHz

Product Information

With no E-cores on the silicon, and thus no Thread Director, the i5-12400F is a more traditional multi-core processor. Functionality, performance, and other benefits of this feature may vary depending on system configuration. AMD also has plenty of Curve Optimization features that leverage undervolting to increase boost activity. All our game testing is done at 1080p to highlight the potential differences between processor generations, and as you can see there is a definite performance delta between the three Alder Lake CPUs we've benchmarked.

In addition to choosing the right CPU cooler, system builders must choose a proper power supply (PSU). As seen in our previous faceoffs, Intel's hybrid x86 Alder Lake design, which mixes fast performance cores (P-cores) with small efficiency cores (E-Cores), represents the company's most disruptive architectural shift in a decade. The single-core test only uses one CPU core, the amount of cores or hyperthreading ability doesn't count.Finally when compared to the 12600K, the 12400 was 30% slower and this is partly due to the 10% reduction in frequency along with the removal of the 4 E-cores and a 10% reduction in L3 cache capacity. With it, this processor stands a good chance of becoming the legendary processor of Intel's Alder Lake generation. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) will run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications.

The savings are truly massive and it places Alder Lake roughly on par with Zen 3 for this comparison.There are even more with 2000 series and they didn't exactly become obsolete and not able to play games when the 3000 series was released. Designing the system around the turbo boost TDP ensures that it operates within the specifications under the highest theoretical workload. You could point to a 20% drop in performance in Far Cry 6, but we are talking about a drop from 147fps to 118fps. Intel's Alder Lake marks an overdue and drastic improvement to the company's power consumption and efficiency.