Intel announced their 12th Generation Alder Lake processors late last year, but only the high-end overclockable K-models. At CES, just a few days ago, they finally shared more details about more affordable processors, like the Core i5-12400F in this review. As expected, and continuing the i5-x0400 legacy, the Core i5-12400F is a six-core processor with Hyper-Threading enabled to achieve twelve threads. With this configuration, it goes right up against the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, which is AMD's most affordable Zen 3 processor—a hit with gamers on a budget. What makes the Core i5-12400F so interesting is that it's positioned quite aggressively against AMD's offerings. Just $180 will get you this 6c/12t processor, while AMD wants $300 for the 5600X.

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.

Averaged over our real-life application tests, we found the Core i5-12400F to be 20% faster than the previous-generation i5-11400F and 25% faster than the 10400F. These are some serious improvements gen-over-gen. It's also able to match the 8-core/16-thread Core i7-10700K from two generations ago, and the 11600K Rocket Lake. Compared to AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X, the 12400F is a tiny bit slower, by 1.4%, which really isn't much. The 12600K is 18% faster at almost twice the pricing.

Gaming performance is equally as impressive. The high single-threaded performance enables the 12400F to punch above its weight. It matches the 11600K from last generation and is breathing down the neck of the 5600X with the same 1.4% gap we saw in applications at 1080p Full HD. As you increase the gaming resolution, the bottleneck shifts more and more away from the CPU, to the GPU. At 4K, most CPUs are very similar in the FPS rates they offer—here, it's actually better to buy a cheaper CPU to save money that can be spent on a faster GPU. The differences vary a lot between games, especially older titles using the DirectX 11 API benefit more from a faster CPU, while DX12 games are more often GPU limited.

Back in our launch-day coverage, the "big" K-model Alder Lake CPUs couldn't impress with their energy efficiency despite the improved 10 nanometer production process. The underlying reason is that Intel bumped their power limits up incredibly high to win a few showoff benchmarks, like Cinebench. On the 12400F, things are different. Here, Intel picked a much more reasonable setting of PL1=65 W and PL2=117 W. For this review I also did a full test run with the power limit completely removed and only saw minimal differences. Looks like Intel's choice is quite decent, especially if you don't run heavy apps all the time, like rendering. If you do, definitely bump up the power limit, which is easily done and supported on nearly all motherboards, even those with more affordable chipsets, which have no overclocking support.

With around 150 W system power draw when fully loaded, the i5-12400F is very gentle in its power requirements. When taking into account performance and power consumption to calculate the total energy used for a certain task, it actually reaches efficiency levels that are comparable to AMD's Zen 3 CPUs, and it doesn't even have any E-cores. This low power draw is also a blessing for the cooling requirements of the 12400F. Using our Noctua cooler, we measured only 41°C, 46°C with the power limits removed. Intel includes a stock heatsink with the 12400F, which reaches temperatures of around 60°C—very nice.

Intel has a long history of locking features on lower-end models, and not much has changed with Alder Lake. While AMD gives you free unlocked multipliers on all models, Intel wants you to pay up for that capability gated behind the "K"-suffix. Features are also segmented by chipset. For example, you can't overclock the memory on the cheaper H610 chipset, which also doesn't give you a CPU-attached M.2 NVMe slot even though the processor supports it technically. What I also find surprising is that Intel doesn't include their Turbo Boost 3.0 capability on these lower-end processors. It would have been an easy way to eke out a little bit of additional performance.

Priced at $180, the Core i5-12400F offers the best value of all the processors we've tested so far. Given that price point, it's really hard not to recommend this CPU. AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X is considerably more expensive. The Core i5-12400F at its current price point is exactly what Intel needed to restore competitiveness against AMD's Ryzen. Remember, this segment has huge volume, we're talking millions of CPUs. If you currently own an older Ryzen setup, then it makes little sense to switch to a new platform, but if you're buying new, definitely consider the Core i5-12400F. Make sure to pair it with an affordable B660 motherboard—Z690 doesn't offer anything in this segment that can justify the increased cost. You should also opt for DDR4 memory instead of DDR5, which is super expensive and hard to find—the performance increase in no way justifies the extra cost. My recommendation would be a DDR-3600 CL16 kit—easy to acquire and super affordable.