For gaming PCs, there is no better value CPU than the Core i5, and for most of 2022 we recommended the Core i5 12600K (open in new tab) as the best gaming CPU and the Core i5 12400 as the best gaming CPU on a budget. Last year, the Core i5 13600K (open in new tab) took the top spot. And today, the Core i5 13400F has pushed the Alder Lake out of the top spot, offering even more impressive specs at a lower price.

The Intel Core i5 13400F is a processor I've been patiently waiting to test since I first heard rumors of it last year. Read these specs and you'll see why: the Core i5 13400F is a 10-core processor consisting of six performance cores (P-cores) and four efficient cores (E-cores) with a total of 16 threads. The fastest core runs at up to 4.6 GHz right out of the box. This clock speed would have been right at home in a Core i7 box just a few years ago.

For these impressive specs, the Core i5 is given an Intel-recommended price of $196. Consider the other options: this is a few dollars more than last year's Core i5 12400 (open in new tab) and $33 less than AMD's Ryzen 5 7600.

In other words, as someone who has been happily running an Intel Core i7 6700K for the past 6 or 7 years, and whose Core i7 6700K is currently in a PC I built for a partner, this is the first time I have considered upgrading this chip to a new one first time.

On paper, it really looks great. The test bench continues to impress. [The Core i5 13400F is only a few frames behind the Core i9 13900K in Total War: Three Kingdoms, Metro Exodus, and F1 2021. In Far Cry 6, however, the chip is significantly slower than Intel's high-end processors, indicating that Far Cry 6 is a more CPU-limited game than others. The same can also be said for Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

However, even in these two games, where the Core i5 13400F falls off the pace of the faster 13th generation processors, it is still faster than the Core i5 12600K, which was the best gaming CPU last year. It is also significantly faster than the Core i5 12400, but consumes more power to do so.

Gaming Benchmarks

However, the Core i5 13400F does not support BCLK overclocking; Intel blocks multiplier overclocking on all chips except the K series, so neither the Core i5 13400F nor the Core i 5 12400 were not supposed to be overclockable either, but several motherboard manufacturers have made BCLK overclocking available for non-K series 12th generation processors. At 4.8 GHz, one such overclock, the Core i5 12400 actually manages to outperform the Core i5 13400F in several games.

Nevertheless, I would choose the Core i5 13400F with its higher core count any day, even if it meant giving up its predecessor's rogue overclocking capabilities.

AMD currently has a stack of Zen 4 chips that compete with Raptor Lake. Its 3D V-Cache chips seem to be the most competitive against Intel, but the price is too high to compare with this Core i5. Instead, the i5 13400F will be in direct competition with the $299 Ryzen 5 7600X and the $229 Ryzen 5 7600, which is about $250 in the current market.

Content Creation and Synthesis Benchmarks

In our tests, neither the Core i5 13400F nor the Ryzen 5 7600X could claim outright victory across the test suite. AMD-compatible motherboards also fall into the expensive category versus the less expensive Intel-compatible 600 series boards, so the overall cost would be about $100 more for the X Series AMD option. That said, a Core i5 13400F is about $210 on Newegg at the time of writing, while a Ryzen 5 7600 is only $229.

Intel's platform is surprisingly inexpensive for both the latest 700 series motherboards and the older 600 series motherboards. Likewise, we're saving a little cash here with the "F" designation model; the "F" indicates that the Core i5 13400F does not feature integrated graphics. In general, integrated GPUs are not very useful for gaming, and even the cheapest discrete graphics cards today will outperform this GPU hands down. [We recommend pairing this CPU with AMD's RX 6600 (open in new tab) or RX 6600 XT (open in new tab); Intel's Arc A750 (open in new tab) has also recently been reduced in price, so you can go all Intel on a budget and see 1080p impressive performance can also be seen. However, as shown in the benchmark results with the RTX 3080, the high-end GPU performs well on a Core i5 13400.

Heat and Power Consumption

There is one more thing to say about the Core i5 13400F. Unlike the other 13th generation processors we have reviewed, the Core i5 13400F does not take advantage of all the benefits of the new Raptor Lake architecture. It is complex.

Intel is using both the new Raptor Lake and older Alder Lake dies in the Core i5 13400F. The final product is the same regardless of which die is under the hood, which means that the increase in L2 cache that Intel introduced in Raptor Lake will not be seen in the Core i5 13400F. But before you think this is just a disguise for the Alder Lake chip, you are technically correct, the Core i5 13400F has more cache than the Core i5 12400F as a result of having more cores. However, it does not have more L2 cache per core like the higher-end Raptor Lake chips.

A reminder about the difference in cache per core between Alder Lake and Raptor Lake:

More plainly, the Core i5 13400F is either a downclocked Core i5 12600KF or pretends to be. Which one you actually receive is fairly unimportant, but you can find out whether you are getting a Raptor Lake or Alder Lake die from the CPU revisions listed in applications such as CPU-Z. B0 stepping is Raptor Lake and C0 stepping is Alder Lake. Our review sample is the C0 chip.

Now back to our main topic, the Core i5 13400F: the Core i5 13400F. There's a lot to like about this processor, from its speedy gaming performance to the 10 cores under the hood; the Core i5 13600K remains the pick for best gaming CPU, and while AMD is very competitive in the ~$275 market, Intel's Core i5 13400F is sure to be the best budget gaming CPU in 2023.