Here’s a story I thought I’d never cover. It turns out Intel’s budget CPU, the Core i5-10400 fails to beat even the $125 AMD Ryzen 3 3300X. Keep in mind that we’re assuming buyers of the 10400 chips won’t splurge for the higher-end Z series motherboards, and they really shouldn’t. One of the main drawbacks of the H series 400 boards is that memory frequency is limited to 2666MHz. In a recent post, we saw how much of an impact does memory speed have on the 10th Gen Comet Lake-S CPUs despite the fact that it’s a monolithic design. Opting for a Z series board if you’re getting an unlocked K series chip makes sense, but if your processor isn’t unlocked, there’s little reason to do so.
As you can see, with a 2666MHz memory kit, the Core i5-10400 falls behind just about every competing chip. It’s 9 FPS slower than the $125 Ryzen 3 3300X and just ahead of the $100 Ryzen 3 3100.
The same results are reproduced with the rest of the benchmarks. The Intel Core i5-10400 falls far behind the mainstream Ryzen 3000 lineup, managing to beat just the 3100. The $125 Ryzen 3 3300X, on the other hand, continues to be faster across every title. It’s surprising to see the $50 Ryzen 5 1600AF nearly level with the $180, a chip that costs nearly four times as much.
For those of you who didn’t know, all of AMD’s processors come with an unlocked multiplier and can be overclocked easily. Intel, however, limits overclocking to its K series CPUs for which it charges a premium. Furthermore, memory and I/O support are heavily restricted on the lower-end H series Intel motherboards (2666MHz max memory). AMD’s budget B450 and B550 boards, on the other hand not only offer a slew of I/O options, but better memory support as well as PCIe 4.0 for the latter.
