Intel Core i5-12400F, 6C/12T, 2.50-4.40GHz, boxed

Die meisten Prozessoren werden nicht im High-End-Segment, sondern im Preisbereich zwischen 150 und 250 Euro verkauft. Wir schauen, welche Modelle dort am sinnvollsten sind.

Der Tradition folgend, müsste der Core i5-12400 die rundeste CPU im neuen Portfolio sein. Aber Intel hat den Rotstift angesetzt, andere Lösungen sind plötzlich interessanter. Für nur 15 Euro mehr gibt es mit dem Core i5-12500 bis zu 500 MHz mehr Takt und eine bessere iGPU. Beide Modelle konkurrieren um den Platz an der Sonne.

Following the conclusion of our testing, one thing is clear: the 12900K and 12600K are stellar CPUs, but the 12700K and 12400F do nearly as well while costing significantly less than Intel's top-end 8P-core and 6P-core CPUs. On average across our eight game test suite at 1080p, the 12700K is 96 percent as fast as the 12900K - incredibly close. Meanwhile, the 12600K is 90 percent of the speed of the 12900K, and the 12400F is another cut behind at 82 percent the speed of 12900K. At each step down the ladder, you are losing measurable amounts of performance, but 12th-gen is extremely competitive compared to both AMD's Ryzen 5000 series and Intel's previous 11th-gen chips. In fact, the 12400F is only 3fps slower (~1 percent) on the eight-game average than the 11900K - now that's progress. In AMD land, the 12700K (96%) outperforms the 5950X (92%) by a decent margin, while the 12400F (82 percent) is pretty competitive with the 5600X (87 percent) while costing around $100 less.

Overall performance of the Core i5-12400F is very impressive thanks to the Golden Cove processor cores. Unlike the higher-end Alder Lake CPUs, the 12400F has no E-cores. The E-cores were introduced with Alder Lake by Intel to reach core count parity with AMD and offload less intensive workloads to these cores that are engineered to operate with higher energy efficiency at lower clocks and voltage. These E-cores let non-time critical workloads execute with reduced power impact, heat output, and battery drain (on mobile devices). The drawback is that it's not trivial for the processor to decide whether to schedule a program on the efficient E-cores or faster P-cores. While this logic generally works well, we found several cases of tasks getting scheduled on the wrong cores in our Core i9-12900K review, which caused serious performance implications. All this is no problem on the 12400F as it's more like a "classical" Intel CPU—there's only one type of core.

Budget gaming has a new champion.