i5-12400F + B660 + RTX 3060 = AMAZING VALUE??

If you are looking for a new CPU – especially for a gaming PC – Intel’s i5-12400F and a B660 motherboard like this Asus TUF B660-PLUS WiFi D4 might just be your best bet. For your (currently) £390, you get 6 ‘full-fat’ cores and 12 threads, none of those pesky E-cores, a maximum turbo power limit of 117W and up to 4.4GHz of boost clocks, plus an LGA 1700 motherboard with a reduced, but still beefy, 10+1 phase VRM, 3 PCIe gen 4 M.2 slots, DDR4 memory support and even PCIe gen 5 to the top x16 slot! That sounds like a whole lot, but there’s a little more to it so let me explain.

The 12400F is one of the few chips in Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake lineup that doesn’t offer the hybrid architecture that was the big deal with these new chips. This only included 6 of the newest Golden Cove performance cores, and a big fat 0 of the Gracemont efficiency cores you’ll find in the primary launch SKUs like the bigger brother 12600K. The performance cores here are also underclocked (and locked) compared to the 12600K, with a max boost of just 4.4GHz, versus up to 4.9GHz on the unlocked chip. That’s also reflected in the maximum turbo power figure, as the E-core-less i5 peaks at 117W, versus 150W when you add in the E-cores and higher clock speeds.

As for the board, B660 is Intel’s mid-range offering, meaning you can’t use this to overclock even if you did use an “unlocked” CPU. In theory that is meant to be a helpful cost saving and to ensure B660 boards don’t need to build insane VRM solutions for high end overclocking, but in practice it’s an artificial limitation and B660 boards have had to build insane 10+1 phase VRMs like this because they need to be able to support someone dropping a 12900K in this which at stock can draw 241W non-stop, or even more with power limits unlocked.

Despite the monster VRMs, there are some cost savings by comparison to the high end Z690 chipset, namely in things like I/O where on this £220 motherboard you only get 5 USB A ports on the back. 5 isn’t exactly much… You are also missing a second X16 slot connected to the CPU for dual graphics. You do have a second X16 sized slot at the bottom, but it’s only wired for X4 at most and I believe still connects via the chipset anyway. Luckily you do still have three M.2 slots here, the top of which goes directly to the CPU at Gen 4 speeds, although of the two lower ones, only the left side runs at the full Gen 4 x4, as the right side slot runs at Gen 4 x2 instead. In theory that’s the same bandwidth as Gen 3 x4, but if it’s only wired electrically for x2 that doesn’t mean much. Still, beyond the limited USB ports, those are hardly massive concessions, although that’s likely because this is in the mid to high end price bracket for B660 boards, currently listed for £220. If you’d rather save a buck, other options start from more like £120 with reasonable options being more like £160 to £180.

Speaking of pricing, as best as I can tell, the 12400F will set you back around £170, a full £100 less than the 12600K, and £30 less than what the 5600X is listed for – although I should note that a like-for-like B550 board for the 5600X is £50 less than this one meaning overall the 5600X would be £20 cheaper.

And that’s probably a good thing, because on the whole it’s just slightly slower than the 12400F. In Cinebench R23 the 12400F holds a slight single threaded performance lead over the 5600X, although of course the higher end 12600K blows them both out of the water. In multi threaded it’s the same story, with the 12400F holding a slight advantage over the 5600X, and the 12600K off in the sunset by comparison thanks to its higher clocks and extra E cores.

In Blender and the BMW scene it’s very much the same story, although I’d argue the 6 second difference is unlikely to be a significant, noticeable difference in use, and realistically these aren’t really workhorse CPUs even if they do perform pretty well at it. In the Gooseberry scene though, the 5600X actually runs a little over 2 minutes faster, I think thanks to a mix of power handling, boost behaviour and if I remember correctly the Gooseberry render using a slightly different instruction set that AMD seems to have optimised for a little better.

In Premiere Pro, using Puget Bench, the 5600X remains a hair ahead of the 12400F, although still a sizeable gap to the 12600K. After Effects swings the other way in the i5’s favour and is a little tighter grouped overall, and in Photoshop the 5600X actually takes a surprise victory over both i5’s, by a reasonable margin too.

When it comes to power consumption, my readings for all three of these chips were all over the place and don’t line up with anyone else’s results – Asus I genuinely think you have a power reporting problem with these LGA 1700 boards… But going off of their actual power limits, at full load you can expect the 5600X to draw the least at 76W, the 12400F at 117W and the 12600K at 150W.

When it comes to gaming, I thought it’d be a good idea to test with a GPU you might actually pair with these sorts of chips, rather than absolute unobtainium itself, so I’m using an RTX 3060. I’m testing at 1080p on what I’d consider realistic settings, so generally medium to high. Starting with Shadow of the Tomb Raider on it’s “high” preset with no DLSS, you can see on average in-game FPS there is next to no difference – despite the sizeable change in the CPU Render average. Based on that metric you can see how the chips stack up quite nicely, but since the average FPS doesn’t follow that it’s clear this is GPU bottlenecked.

In Microsoft Flight it’s much the same story. The 12600K does skim a slight victory by just 2 FPS, but the spread is just 4 FPS overall so I wouldn’t exactly call any of these an outright “winner” there.

CSGO does show a significant difference, the same pattern I saw in my original reviews of these Alder Lake chips where much to my surprise the 5600X takes the lead here, and the 12400F actually falls behind a fair bit, although it’s still running at just shy of 400FPS average so it’s hardly a big deal in reality.

Cyberpunk is equally similar, just 3 FPS between the slowest, the 12400F, and the fastest, the 12600K, and exactly 0.1 FPS between the 12400F and the 5600X. Yeah, pretty crazy!

Fortnite has a slightly bigger spread, but only up to 8 FPS… Only the 5600X suffers slightly in the 1% lows at 104 FPS versus the other two at 113 FPS, but again it’s all really rather close.

And finally in Watchdogs Legion, what else can I say except it’s the same. 112 FPS average for Ryzen, 115 FPS for the locked i5 and 119 FPS for the unlocked i5, and much like Fortnite it’s the same pattern in the 1% low figures too.

So, when gaming with one of these chips – any of these chips – at 1080p medium/high settings with an RTX 3060 you’ll get pretty great performance, you’ll have a good time with it. It doesn’t matter much which chip you pick, because 9 times out of 10 you will still be GPU bottlenecked, so it’ll likely matter more about what else you want to do with your system, how much heat and power consumption matter to you and what price you can get them for. When it comes to heat, power and pricing, in theory anyway AMD has that one down with the lowest CPU + motherboard cost, and the lowest power consumption and therefore heat output too. If productivity matters to you, it’s still a very close match between the 12400F and the 5600X.

If you like the idea of futureproofing, the LGA 1700 socket and B660 is likely to support at least one future generation of CPUs, although there is a chance you will need to upgrade to a DDR5 board instead. Compare that to AM4, which save for the just-announced 5600 non-X that might be an even better deal when it becomes available to buy, is otherwise end-of-life and isn’t due to receive any new chips for it. It’s expected to be AM5, with DDR5 support, for the next generation so buying a 5600X now means beyond excellent upward mobility with up to 16 cores in the same socket is otherwise locked out of future releases and upgrades.

Which is best of you isn’t something I can tell you, although to interject my own opinion briefly, personally I’d be happy with either the 5600X or 12400F. The 12400F offers solid performance, a good feature set and when paired with a (perhaps cheaper) B660 board offers a reasonable value too. The 5600X is currently a touch cheaper overall, and I’d argue has more room to push an overclock either by PBO or even manually if you want, something I’m less sure is on offer with the i5. I am pretty happy to see the hybrid architecture missing here though, it doesn’t add complexity and therefore bugs to an otherwise impressive chip.