I’ve compared the last 5 generations of Intel i5 processor in both games and applications to
help you find out if it’s time to upgrade or if you can save some money getting an older model.
These are the differences in specs between these 5 generations of Intel i5 processors.
The main differences are of course the core and thread counts, cache sizes and clock speeds,
though the speeds aren’t everything as there are of course various IPC
improvements each generation. The newest 12th gen also changes things up by adding efficiency cores,
which is how they’ve been able to get the i5 to a 16 thread part.
This is the system that’s been used for all testing, so the same NZXT case,
MSI Core Liquid S360 AIO and Noctua NT-H2 thermal paste have been used for fair thermal results,
however the motherboard and RAM have been changed as required depending on the platform.
You can find all hardware that’s been tested in the description below the video.
Another difference is that Intel’s 12th gen was the first to add DDR5 support, and while DDR4
is also supported with some motherboards, I’ve only got a DDR5 board, so this is what I’ve used.
Now the reason why I’ve “only” done 5 i5 processors is because these are
what's currently officially supported by Windows 11. Sure, I probably could have
made Windows 11 work on older hardware, but fact is I don’t own any older i5’s anyway,
so I’ve cut it off at the last 5 i5’s, plus 5 i5’s just sounds better.
Alright let’s get into some application benchmarks followed by things like power draw and thermals,
then we’ll look at gaming afterwards as well as cost per frame to find out which is the best deal.
Let’s start out with Cinebench R23, as it’s an easy way to get a general idea of both single
threaded and multi threaded performance. I’ve got the newest 12th gen at the top, followed by 11th,
10th, 9th and 8th gen underneath, so sorted by newest to oldest down the bottom. Performance
gets better with each newer generation, as you’d expect, however single core scores hardly change
between 8th and 10th gen. 11th Gen offers a larger 21% boost there, and then 12th gen was 22%
ahead of 11th gen. The multicore difference between 8th and 9th gen was basically nothing,
while the difference going from 11th to 12th gen was a massive 54%,
and this is due to the addition of the E cores.
Linux kernel compilation is the only test I’ve done on Linux rather than Windows 11.
This is a multi threaded test, and as for the most part the thread count of the i5 has improved
over the years, so it’s no surprise to see the newer options completing the task faster. Again
the difference between 8th and 9th gen wasn’t that big, and 10th and 11th gen weren’t super different
either as both of these sets have the same core and thread count. 12th Gen is able to complete
the compilation task 38% faster than 11th gen as the addition of E cores boost total thread count.
Blender was tested with the Open Data benchmark. This is another multithreaded workload,
and again it’s really obvious that the jump between 9th and 10th gen was much bigger because
Intel started giving the i5s hyperthreading here, I guess they needed something to make
it different. Anyway 10th gen could complete the longer classroom render 44% faster than 9th gen,
while the newest 12th gen still has a healthy 34% lead compared to 11th gen just before it.
The V-Ray benchmark is another heavy multi-threaded rendering workload.
Once more only a very minor difference going from 8th to 9th gen. I know you
can at least do a drop in replacement as both processors should work on the same motherboard,
but going from the 8600K to the 9600K doesn’t really seem worth it,
maybe consider an i7 instead. Otherwise 10th gen can offer a 41% boost over 9th gen due to the
addition of hyperthreading. Going up to 11th gen was still able to score 18% higher than 10th gen,
but then 12th gen was again 41% ahead of 11th gen, so the same boost as going from 9th to 10th.
The Corona benchmark also uses the processor to render out a scene,
and again similar sort of deal. 8th and 9th gen are fairly close, and same with 10th and 11th gen,
only minor gains, while the latest 12th gen was completing the task 35% faster than 11th gen.
Handbrake was used to convert one of my 4K 60 FPS laptop review videos to 1080p. This workload also
relies on more cores and threads, but for some reason the 9th gen i5-9600K was 9 seconds slower
than the 8th gen i5-8600K. I didn’t expect this, and honestly in terms of a percentage difference
it’s kind of within margin of error anyway. 10th gen was only completing this task 12% faster
than 9th gen, less of a difference compared to a number of multithreaded workloads tested so far.
Interestingly the jump from 10th to 11th gen was actually larger at 27%, not too bad considering
how useless people say 11th gen is, granted 12th gen had a bigger 45% gain over 11th gen.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark tool, and this tests video editing tasks
like exporting, playback and more. Again highest score with the 12600K at the top, which was
24% ahead of the 11600K before it. The biggest generational improvement out of the last five.
The gap was a little smaller in DaVinci Resolve, another video editing suite,
where the 12600K was scoring 16% higher than the 11600K. Like many of the other tests,
only small improvements to be had going from 8th to 9th gen, but the difference between 8th and
12th gen was 57%, so much larger improvements to be had if you haven’t upgraded for a while.
I also usually test Adobe Photoshop, however Windows 11 plus Intel 12th gen has known
issues that prevented the test from running, so rather than just not include Photoshop data I
thought the other 4 generations were still useful and figured this helps illustrate
that 12th gen is still a new platform with some teething issues that need to be fixed.
Now for some office tasks, this is basically the new PCMark and covers Microsoft Excel,
Word, PowerPoint and Outlook, and the general trend is that 12th gen
offers the biggest boost compared to previous generational jumps.
I’ve used 7-Zip to test compression and decompression speeds. 8th and 9th gen are
just embarrassingly close, at least 11th gen has some obvious gains over 10th gen,
and then 12th gen also offers decent improvements comparatively.
AES encryption and decryption had the biggest improvements with 12th gen. 8th,
9th and 10th gen were all essentially the same, until 11th gen offered a 22%
boost, but then 12th gen destroys 11th gen with a 47% boost.
I don’t personally rely on Geekbench scores at all, but you guys ask for
it and the results are fairly similar to what we saw earlier with Cinebench.
Here’s how much better the 9th gen i5-9600K was compared to the 8th gen i5-8600K just before it,
so only Handbrake was slightly ahead on the 8600K, though the small difference is well
within the margin of error. On average the 9th gen i5 was 3.6% faster than 8th gen,
at least out of these specific workloads. These tests include a number of random single
and multi threaded tests, so this average only applies to this selection of tests.
There’s a much bigger difference when comparing the 10th gen i5 against the 9th gen i5, where the
10th gen 10600K was 24% ahead of the 9600K, and this is because 10th gen enabled hyperthreading,
resulting in big boosts to multithreaded workloads found near the top of the graph,
while single threaded gains were much lower down.
Then after that the jump with 11th gen was about 17% ahead of 10th gen,
again when comparing these specific applications.
While generally not much of a difference, the single threaded tests towards the top
did see fairly reasonable gains with 11th gen compared to the difference between 10th and 9th.
12th gen is where the biggest generational difference is though. We’re seeing the
i5-12600K nearly 32% ahead of the i5-11600K in these same tests,
the biggest overall difference when comparing each generation to the one that came out after it.
Although 12th gen clearly had the biggest generational improvement,
what I’ve done so far is compare each generation to the next, and fact is, most people don’t go
and buy one i5 and then the next i5 next year and the new one after that etc, so now let’s
find out how the older i5’s compare against 12th gen and find out if it’s worth upgrading.
If we compare 8th gen to 12th gen in the same applications, well the 12600K has
a massive 99% lead. While we only saw smaller differences comparing between each generation,
things really start to add up by the time you look back between 5 different generations.
12th gen still has a good lead over 9th gen too, as the differences between 8th and 9th gen were
quite small for the most part, with the 12600K performing around 91% better in these tests.
The 12600K was then around 55% ahead of the 10th gen i5, as 10th gen added
hyperthreading this closed the gap a bit, and then 12th gen was 32% ahead of 11th gen.
So we’ve established that the newest 12th gen i5 performs the best, but despite this
in Blender it actually wasn’t drawing as much power from the wall when compared to 11th gen.
Now it is important to note that I’m measuring total system power draw from the wall here,
and there are component changes between 11th and 12th gen including motherboard
and RAM. Still though, the fact that 12th gen isn’t using more power than 11th gen
while also completing this particular Blender task 34% faster really drives
home how much of an improvement Alder Lake is, or how crap Rocket Lake was, take your pick.
Although 12th gen was using less power than 11th gen, the 12600K was running at the same
temperature as the 11th gen 11600K, while the 10th gen 10600K was only a degree warmer,
basically the same. This is in contrast to what we saw with my previous i7 comparison, where 12th
gen was about 10 degrees warmer. I’m guessing 9th and 8th gen were around 10 degrees cooler owing
to them not having hyperthreading, but as we’ve seen the performance is much lower as a result.
Let’s check out some games next. We’re going to compare all 5 i5 processors
in 10 different games at 2 different resolutions.
Far Cry 6 was tested with the game’s benchmark. I’ve got the 1080p results on the bottom half
of the graph and the 1440p results above, again with oldest results down the bottom
moving up to newer processors above. In this game we can see that there are performance
improvements to average frame rates with newer processors, even at the higher 1440p resolution,
something which isn’t the case in a number of games as we’ll see. That said, the 1% lows on
11th gen actually took a nose dive compared to the older 10th gen before it. At 1080p, 12th gen
was reaching a 38% higher average FPS compared to 8th gen, 33% higher compared to 9th gen, 19%
higher compared to 10th gen and 9% higher compared to 11th gen just before it.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested in the same part of the game on all 5 processors. In this one the
performance difference is basically nothing when it comes to the higher 1440p resolution,
at least in terms of average FPS, because there’s a much more obvious difference noted in the 1%
lows where 10th gen and newer were at least 28% higher. These 1% low differences are also seen at
the lower 1080p resolution too. Going from 9th to 10th gen boosts 1% low performance by 48%,
so a much more stable experience on 10th gen or newer, and a big difference between a single
processor generation. Otherwise comparatively, the gains were smaller on the newer CPUs,
with 12th gen just 5% higher in average FPS compared to 10th gen and 3% higher than 11th gen.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was tested in the Sydney landing challenge. 12th gen was reaching
a 19% higher average frame rate compared to 8th gen at 1080p, 13% higher than 9th gen,
7% higher than 10th gen and just 1% or 1 FPS difference compared to 11th gen just before it,
with a similar sort of improvement between the generations at the higher 1440p resolution too.
Watch Dogs Legion was tested with the game’s benchmark, and this one had massive
gains going from 8th or 9th gen to something newer. At 1080p the 10600K was reaching 37%
higher average FPS than the 9600K that came out just before it, but check out the 1% lows,
even those from 10th gen were ahead of the average FPS coming out of the 9th gen i5.
12th gen was still able to offer a 13% boost over 11th gen, or 21%
more FPS compared to 10th gen, but compared to the lower 8th gen result, well 12th gen was 72% ahead,
a fairly big difference. I guess this game really needs more than 6 threads to perform well,
considering we’re getting about the same results at both 1080p and 1440p, implying a bottleneck.
Control on the other hand is a GPU heavy game, which is likely why we’re seeing some
of the smallest differences in this game out of all 10 titles tested. Best case,
the 12th gen processor was only able to offer a 4% higher average frame rate compared to 8th gen at
the lower 1080p resolution, so just goes to show that in some games like this a CPU upgrade isn’t
really going to help, you could definitely save money with a cheaper older generation,
and that would also apply at higher resolutions like 4k in most games.
F1 2021 was tested with the game’s benchmark, and was similar to some of the other games where
there were clear differences in 1% low performance between 9th and 10th generations, where the higher
thread count of 10th gen and newer seems to offer nice improvements. Even average FPS is lifted up,
as 10th gen was reaching a 20% higher average frame rate compared to 9th gen,
meanwhile 12th gen and 11th gen were basically the same, just a couple of frames difference,
honestly not something you’re likely to actually notice while playing.
Now let’s get into the weirder results. Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the game’s benchmark,
and the results aren’t too strange, though the 1% lows from 9th gen were
behind 8th gen for some reason, and then 11th gen was also behind 10th gen as well.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was also tested with the game’s benchmark. Again at 1080p the 9th gen i5
was doing worse than 8th gen, and this time 11th gen was slightly ahead of 12th gen, the only time
this happened in all 10 of the games tested. This was only at 1080p though, because at the higher
1440p resolution the results are looking about as expected, where newer processors perform better.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was also tested with the game’s benchmark,
and the results were just all over the place here. The 1% lows consistently improve with
newer processors, but the average frame rates don’t make a whole lot of sense. The 9th gen
9600K was actually giving the highest average FPS, something that I also noticed when I did
this same testing but between 5 generations of i7 processors, so I can only start to conclude that
fewer threads or something specific about 9th gen boosts average FPS in this test.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was again tested with the game’s benchmark, and again 1080p was looking
fine, progressively improving with newer CPUs as you’d expect, but once more the 1440p the
results get a little messier, with 9th gen coming out ahead of both 8th and 10th gen, though it is
only a 3 frame difference. Again this was also something that I noted in the i7 comparison too,
I’ll leave a link in the description to it if you want to check it out next.
Here are the average frame rates for all 5 processors at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions.
At both resolutions there’s always more frames to be had with a newer processor, but the difference
is better with some than others. Like the productivity workloads earlier, the difference
between 8th and 9th gen was much smaller than the others. Going up to 10th gen from 9th gen
offered the biggest performance improvement. At 1080p 11th gen then gave us about 8 FPS extra,
then 12th gen was another 8 FPS or so improvement on top of that. There’s a bit less of a difference
at the higher 1440p resolution as processors just matter less as we get more GPU bound.
Here’s how things look in terms of value once we factor in current prices at Newegg.
Right now the oldest 8th gen i5-8600K is actually the worst value at 1080p,
because it’s the second most expensive right now at $258 USD.
This is generally the case with older CPUs if you’re buying them new, when they’re not made
anymore stock becomes more limited, though there is also the second hand market. Anyway the 10th
gen 10600K was offering the best value at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions. Yeah 11th gen and
12th gen were generally performing better, but you’ve got to pay more for that performance.
Plus let’s not forget this is only accounting for processors only, it’s a different story
if you factor in a new motherboard and RAM, because right now 12th gen also requires z690.
The value is a bit different if we instead use one of the applications tested earlier. This
graph shows that the 12th gen i5 was offering much better value in terms of Cinebench R23
performance when it came to multi core, while it was in 2nd place in terms of single core
performance. Basically the point here is that in more productivity style workloads, generally
12th gen offers more value compared to older processors, which wasn’t what we saw in gaming.
So for the most part, there’s generally less of a difference between these 5 i5
processors when it comes to gaming, but as we saw earlier in productivity workloads,
the differences could be much greater. We also saw that CPU choice matters less in games at
higher resolutions like 1440p, and the difference would be even smaller at the higher 4K resolution.
But at the lower 1080p resolution, processor selection could make more of a difference,
though it depend on the game. From the gaming data that I collected, if you’ve already got 10th
or 11th gen it’s probably not worth upgrading to 12th gen, especially as you’ll have to upgrade the
motherboard and potentially the memory if you go to DDR5, and generally speaking in most games
the FPS difference wasn’t all that big. But on the other hand if you have 8th or 9th gen then
upgrading to 12th gen could offer some pretty nice gains. I mean in some games even going from
9th gen to 10th gen was quite a big jump, again it just depends on the game and setting levels.
At the end of the day, even if you are running an older CPU if your system does everything you need
of it then there’s no real reason to upgrade. It’s only really worth considering something
newer that performs better if your old system isn’t doing what you want of it anymore, and
if that’s the case and you’re looking for an i5 processor then this video should have you covered.
Now of course Intel is by now means the only CPU maker in town,
check out this video next if you want to see how the i5-12600K compares against the Ryzen 5 5600X,
and of course make sure you’re subscribed for when AMD’s new Ryzen processors with
V-Cache come out in early 2022, as I’ll be comparing those against Intel CPUs.