I don’t think it’s too unfair to say that Intel’s last couple of CPU generations
have been a little lackluster at best, and just straight-up boring at worst.
Compared to the last couple of Ryzen generations, it just felt like Intel
was trying to play catch-up while not really bringing anything all that new to the table.
Which is why I didn’t board the hype train when rumors about Intel’s 12th gen chips
started floating around. In fact, I never even bought a ticket. But now that they’re here,
and I’ve had some time to spend with it… I might have some regrets about not getting on board.
And that’s because in this review we’ll be taking a look at the Core i5 12400,
along with MSI’s new B660M Mortar, and a kit of Kingston’s FURY Beast
DDR5 modules and spoiler alert, Intel’s new platform is legitimately impressive.
And if by the end of this video you feel like picking up any of those parts,
or anything else for that matter, and want to help the channel while you’re at it,
feel free to do it via my Amazon affiliate links in the description down below.
Now, I assume that if you’re watching this video, then you might already have a pretty good idea of
what Intel’s 12th gen is all about, but even so, it’s probably worth taking another quick look.
Now, obviously, the headliner is that the higher-end chips in the 12th-gen lineup break
the desktop CPU mold a little by featuring both performance and efficiency cores. This means that
they have a set of cores dedicated to handling intensive tasks like gaming or creative work,
and a whole other set of cores focused on handling less intensive stuff like
background tasks or lending a hand when it comes to multithreaded tasks like
rendering, all managed by Intel’s built-in Thread Director that tells all the cores what to do.
Along with that, the Alder Lake chips also feature support for the new DDR5 standard
and DDR4 depending on what motherboard you decide to go with, support for Wi-Fi 6E,
and just as I’m getting used to PCIe 4.0, these chips herald the arrival of PCIe gen 5.
While cool new innovations and features are, well, cool, the most important and exciting improvement
to me at least, is that the new performance cores are according to Intel, their “highest performing
CPU core(s) ever”, which largely means a very healthy IPC or Instructions Per Clock boost.
That IPC boost is the real hero of the show when it comes to the 12400, since, while it does ship
with basically all of the other cool features of the higher-end chips, it only has P-cores and
no E-cores. Six of them to be exact, and with hyperthreading enabled so 12 threads in total.
The 12400 is rated for a base clock speed of 2.5 GHz, with a max turbo frequency
of 4.4 GHz, which might not seem all that impressive with a lot of the competition
including Intel’s own lineup sporting 5 GHz+ speeds,
but as we’ll see in the benchmarks, raw clock speed isn’t the only thing to look out for.
The chip has 18 MB of L3 cache, has a base power draw of 65W and a maximum turbo power draw
of 117W. It supports up to 128 GB of memory, and features native support for DDR4 up to 3200 MT/s,
or DDR5 up to 4800 MT/s though obviously, you can go much higher than that with overclocking.
Like I already mentioned, the new 12th gen chips support PCIe 4.0 and 5.0,
and the chip itself is equipped with 20 lanes,
with more lanes coming from whatever motherboard chipset you decide to go with.
As for the chip’s integrated graphics, you’re probably not going to be blown away by the UHD
730. It’s a decent iGPU that’ll get you by for most tasks, and will always come
in handy for troubleshooting, but you’re definitely not going to want to game on it,
as we’ll see when we get to the benchmarks.
The last and undoubtedly one of the most exciting specs to note here is pricing,
since that’s where I think the 12400 will really shine. The chip starts at around $192
and is currently selling for about $209 (or R3,500 here in South Africa),
which puts it at $84 cheaper than AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X, and around $12 cheaper than the 5600G
(which saw some really big price drops after Intel’s 12th-gen chips launched, thanks Intel).
This pricing could make the Core i5-12400 one of the most disruptive chips we’ve seen from Intel
in a good long while… if it performs as well as Intel claims it does, of course.
Now, before we see whether it does just that,
we should also take a quick look at two of the other new parts we’ll be using
in this review since we’re dealing with an entirely new platform over here.
First up is a 32 GB kit of Kingston’s new FURY Beast DDR5 modules,
and this specific kit clocks in at a mind-melting 5200 MHz
with CL 40 timings, and It looks pretty slick in a minimalist gamer kind of way.
I won’t get stuck into the finer details because I don’t want to,
but some of the key advantages coming with DDR5 include higher capacities,
lower power draw along with integrated power management built into the modules themselves,
and obviously faster data transfer rates. Unfortunately, because DDR5 is fresh on the scene,
latencies are pretty high compared to DDR4, but that will change as the standard matures.
Now, as I mentioned before, the board we’ll be slotting everything into is of the B660 variety,
or more specifically the DDR5 version of MSI’s new MAG B660M
Mortar WIFI (the “M” there meaning that it’s a Micro ATX boy). The B660 chipset is a great
match for the 12400 as neither the CPU nor chipset are unlocked for overclocking, and with it being
a more midrange chipset compared to the expensive Z690, pricing should be much more reasonable too.
And more reasonable it is, with the B660M Mortar WIFI DDR5 board landing around the 180 to $190
range. The board should also be more than capable of pushing our 12400 as fast as she’ll go
thanks to a robust 12 + 1 + 1 VRM configuration,
and an equally capable set of hefty heatsinks to keep temps in check too.
Okay, now that we’re all a little more informed about Intel’s new platform,
let’s throw it all together and see what it’s got under the hood.
Now, along with the motherboard and RAM we just looked at,
I also used MSI MAG Coreliquid 360R to cool the 12400, a Gen 4 M.2 as the main drive,
MSI’s RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio, and Antec’s 750W EAG pro to power all of the things.
So, let’s get started.
And to kick things off we’ve got a couple of productivity benchmarks to take a look at,
an area where I’d expected to see the 12400 fall behind significantly considering I only had 8-core
parts to compare it to, and fall behind it does, but surprisingly not by as much as I expected.
In Cinebench R23’s multithreaded test, the 12400 put up a good fight, landing relatively close to
the 3800XT’s score, a chip with four more threads to work with. Not bad at all. But when we switch
gears to the single-threaded test, the 12400 breaks into its stride, easily handing out Ls
to all of the other chips tested, and putting up the highest score I’ve ever personally gotten.
Unfortunately for the 12400, the rest of the productivity benchmarks are all focussed on
multithreaded performance, and just like the multi-test in Cinebench, the 12400 falters here
too posting slower render times, and lower scores than the rest of the stack across the board.
But again, that’s to be expected. No matter how fast Intel’s new performance cores are,
we can’t expect them to properly compete with chips that heavily
outnumber it with their cores and threads even though it still puts up a very good fight.
I’m sure if I was able to get one of AMD or Intel’s own previous-gen six-core chips for
benchmarking, this would’ve been a hell of a lot closer of a race.
Moving on to gaming benchmarks, we see a much closer race already in
Unigine’s Superposition benchmark with all of the chips managing very similar scores
but with the 12400 still losing out to the 8-core parts.
Something we see play out again in 3D Mark’s Time Spy benchmark,
where the 12400 posted a significantly lower score than the rest of the chips tested.
If you’ve ever run these benchmarks yourself, that shouldn’t be all that surprising considering both
tend to favor chips with higher core counts as well as raw single-threaded performance.
When it comes to actual games that we can actually play though,
we start to see a different story unfolding.
In the majority of the games tested, the 12400 easily and happily trades blows with
its higher core count and significantly more expensive competition, including the 5800X,
which is no small feat. This holds true for both average FPS and 1% low numbers. Impressive stuff.
But not as impressive as its scores in games like Hitman 3,
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Forza Horizon 5, and Far Cry New Dawn, where the 12400 comes
very close to straight-up embarrassing the competition from AMD and Intel’s own 11700K.
It does still falter in one or two titles like Cyberpunk 2077
where it landed on the bottom of the scoreboard, but even then it was
by only a handful of frames, and it looks to be the exception rather than the rule.
In case you weren’t paying attention,
these numbers show that the 12400 is one hell of a little gaming CPU,
even with its lower core count compare to the competition and locked clock speed. Some of
that gaming prowess also likely comes down to the kit of FURY Beast DDR5 memory it’s paired with,
but from what I’ve seen from benchmarks online, the current stack of DDR5 performs around the same
if only slightly better than something like the 3600 MHz, CL16 DDR4 kit used in my other systems.
The 12400 also proved to be one of the most efficient and cool under
pressure chips I’ve looked at in a long time.
Even under heavy load, the kind you’ll almost never encounter if you’re just gaming,
the chip only maxed out at a total package power of 107W, and maxed out at just 69 degrees. Nice.
And not to be outdone by the 12400, MSI’s B660M Mortar easily managed to beat the heat too,
with VRM temps never going higher than 45 degrees.
Now, earlier I mentioned that while the 12400
does come equipped with a great iGPU for general purpose use,
you shouldn’t expect to game on it, at least not if you actually want to enjoy doing it.
And that’s because even though I’ve only just started recording benchmarks for iGPUs so don’t
really have anything to compare it to, the UHD 730 just doesn’t have the horsepower to provide
a passable gaming experience unless you count Rocket league which runs on almost everything.
In all of the other games I tested, even at 720p
with all quality settings nuked, the iGPU had no chance of sticking to even a consistent 30 FPS.
But that’s to be expected, and an iGPU regardless of its gaming capabilities is still a nice-to-have
if you do ever find yourself without a dedicated graphics card.
So, with all of that wrapped up, is Intel’s new Core i5-12400 worth your time? Absolutely.
If you want a gaming chip that can duke it out with some of the best around,
that runs cool and sips power (for a desktop chip anyway),
enables cool new features like PCIE 5.0, DDR5, and WIFI 6E,
and to top it all off comes in at a legitimately disruptive price, then it’s kind of a no-brainer.
I only say “kind of” there because you’ll also have to add the cost of a new motherboard on
top of the cost of the 12400, which does knock a point off of its value proposition
when compared to Ryzen users who can essentially just drop a 5600G or X into their boards and get
reasonably close to the same level of performance.
But then again, I think most of you watching this video are planning a whole new build around
the 12400, in which case you can’t really do much better at this price range right
now… At least until we see what AMD’s next gen will be bringing to the table later this year.
And that’s all folks. Hit the like button if this video was any good,
get subscribed for more, and let me know in the comments down below whether you’re
jumping onboard the 12th-gen hype train or are you patiently waiting to see what AMD comes up with?
Also remember to buy all of the things using my affiliate links down below to support the channel,
and I’ll see you all in the next one.