Intel’s Core i5-12400 and the rest of its non-K siblings are yet to hit the market, but going by early benchmarks, it’s going to be a midrange monster. The latest leaks coming out of China indicate that the Core i5-12400 is going to be faster than the Ryzen 5 5600X, all the while being around $100 cheaper: ~$200 vs $300. The processors were compared in Cinebench R15, R20, and R23, with the former coming out on top in most tests.
The Core i5-12400 is slightly slower in the older Cinebench R15 multi-threaded benchmark but wins in the single-threaded test. Meanwhile, both the newer versions of Cinebench see the 12400 trump the Ryzen 5 5600X in both the single-threaded and multi-threaded tests. CPU-Z is a close call, with the former edging past the latter in the single-threaded benchmark, and the opposite happening in the multi-threaded segment.
There are no apples-to-apples comparisons of the two chips available for gaming workloads, but going by the single-threaded advantage of the Golden Cove cores, you can be sure that the Intel part will level with its competitor, at the very least. Compared to the Core i5-11400, the 12400 is between 15-25% faster than its predecessor.
The Core i5-12400 is a hex-core SKU featuring only Golden Cove cores (no efficiency Gracemont cores). It has a boost clock of around 4.2-4.4GHz and comes with 18MB of L3 cache. The CPU is supposed to be paired with the B660 or H610 motherboards, and in most cases, DDR4-3200 memory. The 12400 and other non-K Alder Lake parts are expected to launch in January or February.
