The Core i5-12400: Intel takes the crown in the mid-range CPU battle

The competition in the consumer-level processor market has increased immensely over the past 3 years, and it has forced both AMD and Intel to bring out their best in the CPU battle.

The mid-range processor pricing from Intel’s 11th generation was already hinting that the company will look to undercut AMD in this segment.

The release of Intel’s 12th gen Alder Lake series and their latest mid-range offering the Core i5-12400’s pricing and performance has set the tone of how competitive this segment will be in the future.

Features and Pricing

The Core i5-12400 is a 6-core 12-thread CPU, with Intel’s new Golden Cove core design, PCIe Gen 4.0 support and DDR5 memory support.

It doesn’t have Intel’s new mixture of both performance and efficiency cores which are available on the higher-end 12th gen processors.

This 6-core 12-thread processor has also got good pricing, by the time of this report, the 12400 costs BDT 21000, compared to its AMD Ryzen counterparts, the Ryzen 5 5600g and 5600X cost BDT 24500 and BDT 26500 respectively.

Performance

The 12400 performs exceptionally well both in multitasking and gaming, sometimes beating the recent 11th gen high-end Intel and AMD 5000 series CPUs. Let’s see some performance comparisons:

Image: Hardware Unboxed

Source: Hardware Unboxed

Here we can see that the 12400 beats the Ryzen 5 5600X in the multi-core performance in Cinebench, and in the single-core performance, the 12400 astonishingly beats the higher-end 8-core Ryzen and Intel 11th gen CPUs, putting the 6-core Ryzen counterparts in the dust.

This is an amazing result for a CPU that is both cheaper in price and has a built-in iGPU which the 5600X doesn’t have.

The 12400 also trades blows with the Ryzen 5 5600X in gaming performance. Let’s see some gaming benchmarks.

The following benchmarks show that the Core i5 12400 comes out on top in Cyberpunk 2077 and Far Cry6 in 1080p performance when compared to the Ryzen 5 5600X, and in F1 2021, the 5600x beats the 12400.

Although, in all the cases the margins are small. In Hardware Unboxed’s 10 game average, the 12400 and 5600X has almost similar performance with a roughly 10 FPS gap where the 5600X comes out on top.

But such margins can be overlooked as both the CPUs have their own advantages in different titles.

Source: Gamer’s Nexus

Final thoughts: The 12400 should be the go-to choice for a buyer who is looking to build a completely new computer, as it is cheaper than both the Ryzen 5 5600g and the 5600x while having better performance than the 5600g and better value than the 5600X.

12400’s another big advantage over the 5600X is that the Intel processor comes with a built-in iGPU (integrated GPU). So a buyer can use it as a stop-gap for the high GPU price situation while using the computer as the iGPU is good enough for any sort of day-to-day task.

The 5600X doesn’t come with an iGPU, so it must have an external GPU connection.

The most practical approach will be pairing the 12400 with a B660 motherboard that doesn’t cost more than 13k and using some cash to invest in a good CPU cooler.

With the performance promise and new features, the 12400 should serve as a competent processor for at least 3-4 years.

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