That’s currently AMD’s best mid-range desktop CPU, and will be until the Ryzen 7000 series launches later this year, so for the cheaper Core i5-11400F to come along and pip it is quite the achievement. The Core i5-12400F isn’t as much of a do-anything powerhouse as the Core i5-12600K, but it canes the Core i5-11400F on desktop duties and slips ahead of the Ryzen 5 5600X for good measure. These 12th Gen P-cores are enough of an architectural improvement over the 11th Gen Cypress Cove core that the new chip still delivered a big step up in both single core and multicore portions of the Cinebench R20 benchmark. This chip having the same core count as its predecessor also shouldn’t hide the fact that they are very much not the same kind of cores. It’s compatible with both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM, just as its more expensive stablemates are, and besides having extra PCIe 4.0 lanes on the chip itself it will also be ready to work with PCIe 5.0 hardware once it’s available. The upside is that at £180 / $180, the Core i5-12400F is about one-third cheaper than the Core i5-12600K, and still provides Alder Lake’s big futureproofing benefits.
Then there’s all the ways in which it looks like a losing choice next to the (brilliant) Core i5-12600K: no overclocking support on most motherboards, no E-cores to augment the P-cores, no integrated graphics to fall back on if your graphics card dies, and lower frequencies across the board. That in mind, the Core i5-12400F isn’t the most obvious upgrade on the last-gen Core i5-11400F: it has the same core count of 6, the same thread count of 12, the same top clock speed of 4.4GHz and even a slightly lower base clock speed of 2.5GHz. Going back several generations now, pretty much every Intel CPU ending in “400F” has provided good gaming performance for less cash than the more headline-hungry 600K models. The Core i5-12400F does have a good pedigree, in fairness. Although the sole reliance on Performance cores (or P-cores) puts it behind the Core i5-12600K for desktop multitasking, if it’s just the frames per second you’re after, this cheaper chip can match and sometimes even surpass its big brother. Turns out, the concern was for naught: the Core i5-12400F is a cracking slice of silicon, both for the money and for games specifically. Here was a much more affordable, still gaming focused-alternative to the Core i5-12600K, yet it would lack the signature hybrid of fast Performance cores and flexible Efficiency cores that made that chip one of the best gaming CPUs ever made.
There was cause for joy and concern alike when Intel revealed the Core i5-12400F, alongside loads of other new 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs.
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