Intel i5 12400F vs 11400F vs 10400F – Gaming & Productivity

After taking a look at Intel’s i5-12400F and this Asus B660 board in a recent video, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how far Intel have come on their ‘400’ series of chips in just a couple generations. I bought a 10400F back in 2020 to test, and Intel sent me both the 11400F and 12400F, so let’s see how they compare!

First let’s start with a spec comparison. All three are 6 core, 12 thread chips, and surprisingly the oldest 10400F actually runs at the highest base clock of 2.9GHz, with the 11400F dropping that to just 2.6GHz and the 12400F being even lower at 2.5GHz. The boost clocks however are opposite, with both the 11th and 12th gen chips running at 4.4GHz on boost, and the older 10400F slightly lower at 4.3GHz instead. All three chips are listed as having a 65W TDP, although the maximum turbo power figures differ pretty widely as the 10400F peaks at 134W on its PL2 limit, the 11400F is even higher at 154W, and the newer 12400F is lower at 117W. It’s also important to note that for both the 10th and 11th gen chips, that PL2 limit can only be active for 28 seconds before it drops back down off boost, whereas on the 12th gen chip it doesn’t need to drop down off of its boost at any point unless thermally constrained. That might be helped by the fact that the 12400F has finally moved off of Intel’s 14 nm process node and is now using their smaller “Intel 7” node.

It’d be fair to say just from reading the spec sheets these all seem rather similar, but I think you’ll be surprised just how differently they perform. I’m going to include my results for both the 12600K and Ryzen 5600X so you have a few extra points of comparison here, and I think I’ll start with the gaming results. These were all run with an RTX 3060 at 1080p on my ‘realistic’ settings, the preset I feel has the best balance of performance and visual quality which tends to be somewhere between medium and high.

Starting with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, all but the oldest 10400F maintain almost identical in-game performance here – the average FPS values are just 3 FPS apart, save for the 10400F which is about 10 FPS down on the rest. That shows quite clearly that, at least with a 3060, the GPU is the bottleneck for all but the 10th gen i5, but that isn’t the whole story. While the actual in-game FPS, what you see when you are playing, doesn’t change much, the CPU render data the built in benchmark returns is rather insightful. It shows very clearly that between the three generations the CPU performance has improved leaps and bounds, jumping from 229 FPS on 10th gen, to 263 FPS on 11th gen, and 299 FPS on 12th gen. That’s an impressive leap!

Microsoft Flight shows the same GPU bottleneck for all bar the 10400F, although this time it’s only 4 FPS shy of the pack, which is the same gap the 12400F has to the 12600K. Regardless, all the chips manage to offer a perfectly reasonable experience on the medium preset here.

CSGO, as always, shows possibly the most stark difference with a 250 FPS spread. Of the three generations of i5 chips, the 12400F still holds the lead, although the 11400F isn’t all that far behind at around 10% slower, although that is a full 20% faster than the oldest 10th gen i5 and even in the 1% lows it suffers too. Comparing to the 12400F, that manages an impressive 34% more performance over the 10400F. Although to be clear, it still runs at 282 FPS and even the 1% lows are 120 FPS to its perfectly, perfectly playable, it’s just not the 377 FPS the 12400F can offer, or the 537 FPS the 5600X offers.

Cyberpunk reigns things back in with a pretty tight spread across the board – even the 10400F is functionally identical to the rest of the pack, with the only catch being the 1% low figures which do suffer a little more than any other chip, although it’s only 5 FPS down on the next fastest chip so it’s not exactly terrible.

Fortnite, much to my surprise, actually shows a bit of a gap between the 12th gen chips and Ryzen 5600X, and the two older i5’s. Not a massive one, but you go from getting over 150FPS – up to 159.5 FPS on the 12600K – to 146 FPS on the 11400F and 144 FPS on the 10400F. Again this is still very close, and is literally running at 144 FPS making it a perfect match for a 144Hz 1080p display but I’m somewhat surprised to see much difference here.

And finally in Watchdogs Legion you get a bit more of a stark difference, with the newest 12th gen i5 averaging 115 FPS, the older 11th gen i5 gets 106 FPS average, and the oldest 1oth gen i5 can’t break 100 FPS average running at 97 FPS instead. Add to that the considerably lower 73 FPS 1% low figure compared to 89 FPS on the 12400F and I’d argue that’s a reasonable difference. Of course still hardly what I’d call unplayable but does indicate the CPU is the bottleneck there and may mean any higher end GPUs you’d want to pair with this or even newer more CPU demanding games may struggle on that older chip.

So, as it stands, if you have RTX 3060 levels of GPU power (or below), you likely don’t have that much of an issue running even the two generation old 10400F. It offers perfectly decent gaming performance even at 1080p on medium to high settings, although is starting to fall behind the newer 11th and especially newest 12th generation chips. How significant of an issue that is will mostly depend on how much GPU power you have on tap though, as like I said this RTX 3060 is just about enough to show a slight difference in most games, but something like a 3070 or 3080 would be much more likely to be hindered by the older and slower chips.

As for productivity tasks, while none of these are the sorts of chip I would instinctively recommend for something like video editing or rendering, they certainly can still perform well and is something you might want to dabble in on the side. Starting with Cinebench R23 single threaded, you can see the rather nice progression from the 10400F netting around 1100 points, the newer 11400F netting more like 1400 points, and the newest 12400F netting just shy of 1700 points. That’s a sizeable improvement gen on gen, or over 50% up from 10th to 12th gen! In the multithreaded test that single threaded performance translates well, with an even more impressive near 60% improvement going from 10th to 12th gen, or over 20% going from 10th to 11th gen.

Blender shows a similar trend, with the BMW scene rendering over a minute faster on the 12400F than on the 10400F, and interestingly the gap from the 11400F to the 12400F is a fair bit wider here, potentially thanks to the different boost behaviours of the two chips. Where the 11400F boosts high then drops after 28 seconds, the 12400F maintains a constant boost level without much difficulty. In the Gooseberry scene the 12th gen i5 renders the frame nearly 6 and a half minutes faster than the 10400F – 6 and a half minutes! That’s an immensely large difference, although even the 11400F takes just shy of 3 minutes longer which is still substantial.

Finally in the Adobe CC apps, using Puget Bench, Premiere pro shows a pretty stable improvement as you get newer. The score spread isn’t exactly a chasm, but the 12400F does score around 16% higher than the 10400F, or around 7% higher than the 11400F. After Effects is where the 10th gen chip struggles hard, as the 12400F scores around 38% higher, and even the 11400F nets an around 24% higher score. The gulf between the two older i5’s and the newest widens significantly in Photoshop though, with the 12400F scoring 34% higher than the 10400F, and 17% higher than the 11400F.

It’s worth noting that while the power limit figures for the 10th and 11th gen chips are pretty high at 134W and 154W respectively, I saw more like 75W under load from the 10400F and around 126W under load on the 11400F, whereas the 12400F is capped more firmly at 117W – although I don’t think I have accurate data for that one at the moment to see what it’s actually doing.

Wrapping up then, it’s clear the improvement gen on gen has been substantial in the productivity results – I mean a 60% improvement in multithreaded performance over two generations is excellent! In games it seems like your GPU is still a bigger factor, although higher end the card, the more your CPU will start to be a problem. If you are gaming on a 10400F right now with a mid range GPU – something like a 3060 or lower – I wouldn’t be too concerned. If you run a higher end card and still game at 1080p you might want to keep these results in mind the next time you are itching for an upgrade. If you have an 11400F, I’d be even less concerned, and if you don’t have any but are considering building a new system the 12400F does offer the best performance, albeit at the highest price tag especially when you include needing an LGA 1700 board like this B660 TUF board from Asus.