THE BEST 10th GEN CPU? – Intel i5 10400F Review
Intel may have gone off the deep end with their new 10th gen lineup, especially on the insane 10 core 10900K, but even amongst the madness, I think I’ve found a real gem. This is the i5 10400F – a chip I actually paid my own money for just so I could show it to you – and it’s possibly the best chip in the whole 10th gen lineup. So, if you want to see more videos like this every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, hit that subscribe button, and if you want to help me recoup my losses here, and make future purchases like this, check out the links in the description below.
Right, lets jump right in with the gaming numbers. Now I have to thank the brilliant F7GOS for running some numbers on his Ryzen 3300X for me – his channel is linked the description too, go check out his video on the 3300X. Also for clarity, we were testing with RX 5700XTs, and the games were tested at 1080p on high/ultra settings.
| COD MW | AVG | 1% Low FPS | 1% Low MS |
| 10400f | 152.64 | 124.3781095 | 8.04 |
| 3600X | 150.68 | 125.3132832 | 7.98 |
| 3300X | 147.4 | 112.7395716 | 8.87 |
| 8700K | 152.13 | 104.8218029 | 9.54 |
| PUBG | AVG | 1% Low FPS | 1% Low MS |
| 10400f | 147.26 | 104.9097776 | 9.532 |
| 3600X | 140.39 | 102.1659174 | 9.788 |
| 3300X | 134.85 | 86.58008658 | 11.55 |
| 8700K | 143.56 | 103.0078286 | 9.708 |
| Fortnite | AVG | 1% Low FPS | 1% Low MS |
| 10400f | 152.79 | 110.7051921 | 9.033 |
| 3600X | 160.23 | 98.31874939 | 10.171 |
| 3300X | 158 | 91.07468124 | 10.98 |
| 8700K | 159.17 | 92.77298451 | 10.779 |
So, all in all, the 10400F is a pretty decent chip. It’s almost exactly as fast as the 8700K – remember that was a flagship CPU just 2 generations ago – and generally keeps up with, or beats the Ryzen 3600X, a chip that’s currently a full £60 more. It’s price rival, the 3600, is a good 5% slower, meaning the 10400F has a convincing lead.
| Blender BMW (s) | Cinebench 1T | Cinebench nT | Premiere (s) | Power Draw (W) | Temp (°c) | |
| 10400f | 253 | 418 | 3115 | 1249 | 86 | 68 |
| 3600X | 225 | 505 | 3696 | 1095 | 88 | 74 |
| 3300X | 331 | 500 | 2613 | – | 76 | – |
| 8700K | 240 | 468 | 3400 | 1193 | 121 | 91 |
Now it’s not all good news. In productivity, ie if you want to video edit, 3d model or say stream with the x264 encoder (I’m planning on doing a video on that shortly), Ryzen is still a better bet. In Blender’s BMW render test, the 10400F was about 30 seconds, or 12% slower than the 3600X, while drawing almost the same amount of power at 86 and 88W respectively. One note here, while the power draw here is a lot more manageable than the 10 core beast, it’s still a worse power to performance ratio than the Ryzen chips, although not by too much.
Premiere is pretty similar, with the 3600X finishing a little over 2 and a half minutes quicker than the 10400F in my 10 minute CPU only render test, or again about 12% difference, depending on how you look at it. Cinebench seals the deal, with single threaded performance slower than even the 3300X, at a little over 16% slower, and around 16% slower on multithreaded too.
This is normally the point where I’d say, but it’s an Intel chip so we can just overclock it and squeeze some more pe…ah. Yeah. It’s not unlocked. Even on a Z series motherboard – which is honestly wasted on this chip, just get the lower tier (and cheaper) H series boards for this, the best you can do is base clock overclocking, which can be painstaking, tedious and unstable. If they offered an unlocked version of this for, say, £200, I think this would be an absolute no brainer, but as it stands it is a lot more of a close call. While you do get better in game FPS, it’s still at the cost of productivity performance, and potentially an overly expensive motherboard and aftermarket cooler that you don’t need if you go with Ryzen.
But, if all you care about is your in game FPS, you have a new go-to. It’s a decent chip, and I think it’s going to appeal to a lot of people – I just wish Intel wasn’t such a scrooge with their features. Of course, if you are willing to splash out nearly double the price, you can go with it’s bigger brother, the 10600K, which does overclock and has better performance out of the box, but I know a lot of people who are buying at this price range would rather get the next tier up GPU for that kind of money, or just flat out can’t afford that, so not for everyone.
10400F on Amazon: https://techteamgb.co.uk/10400f
10400F at OCUK: https://techteamgb.co.uk/10400focuk
3600X on Amazon: https://techteamgb.co.uk/3600x
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