Introduction

Core i5 12400 review
6x BIG and 0x Little

With six performance cores and hyper-threading, meet the Core i5 12400, what could be the most sought-after budget-friendly and rightly performing Alder Lake series CPU for use on a gaming platform today. It provides a significant amount of tier1 performance, can be tied to DDR5 memory when paired on the less expensive B660 chipset. Six high-performance cores properly clocked will offer you truthfully good gaming value, as well as excellent overall desktop performance for this processor, tagged at give or take 210 USD.

With this release, we enter the mainstream value segment, which means there's no K-version (overclockable) of the processor as reviewed today. The Core i5 12400 will come in a 12400 and 12400F revision, the latter one has its IGP disabled. Every chip still has 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes, which can be used for either graphics or storage, though it should be noted that there are presently no B660 devices that implement the 5.0 specification. However, using a 200 USD proc on an expensive Z690 motherboard might not be the wisest thing to do, we advise you to seek that value B660 motherboard. Here you'll end up at PCIe 4.0 lanes as opposed to PCIe 5.0 (not a big deal really).  Motherboards will support either DDR4 or DDR5 memory, with native speeds of 3,200MHz or 4,800MHz, respectively, depending on the model.  The Intel Core i5-12400 contains six Golden Cove P cores only, with hyperthreading. There are no energy-efficient E-cores active in this Alder Lake variant. The processor features an 18MB L3 cache and has a lower 65W TDP. On a single-core, the boost clock reaches 4.4GHz; on all cores that value is 4.0GHz with a base frequency of 2.5 GHz. This processor has a 65W base power (PL1) and a maximum turbo power of 117W (PL2). We have a lot to talk about and to explain; let's had on over into the article, where we'll start off with a bit more information bout the architecture that is Alder lake, the initial processors released, and of course, a full test of the processor. This article covers the Core i5 12400, a mainstream yet very gaming-friendly processor.