The best Intel Core i5-8400 Processor 6 Cores review

The best Intel Core i5-8400  Processor 6 Cores  review

The best Intel Core i5-8400  Processor 6 Cores  review

pros
Incredible value
Six Cores
Strong performance in games and applications
Price
Bundled cooler

consNo B-Series motherboards at launch
Poor availability
Locked ratio multiplier

Test System & Configuration
Hardware	Germany Intel LGA 1151 (Z370):Intel Core i5-8600K, Core i5-8400MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC2x 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200 @ 2666AMD Socket AM4 WorkstationAMD Ryzen 5 1500X, Ryzen 5 1600X, Ryzen 5 1400MSI X370 Tomahawk4x 8GB G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 @ 2667 and 3200 Intel LGA 1151 (Z270)Intel Core i5-7600K, Core i5-7400MSI Z270 Gaming 72x 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200 @ 2400 and 3200All SystemsGeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition (Gaming)Nvidia Quadro P6000 (Workstation)1x 1TB Toshiba OCZ RD400 (M.2, System)2x 960GB Toshiba OCZ TR150 (Storage, Images)be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11, 850W Power SupplyWindows 10 Pro (Creators Update)U.S.Intel LGA 1151 (Z370):Intel Core i5-8600K, Core i5-8400MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC4x 8GB G.Skill RipJaws V DDR4-3200 @ 2666 and 3200 AMD Socket AM4 AMD Ryzen 5 1500X, Ryzen 5 1600X, Ryzen 5 1400MSI X370 Xpower Gaming Titanium2x 8GB G.Skill RipJaws V DDR4-3200 @ 2667 and 3200 Intel LGA 1151 (Z270)Intel Core i5-7600K, Core i5-7400 MSI Z270 Gaming M72x 8GB G.Skill RipJaws V DDR4-3200 @ 2666 and 3200 All EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FE 1TB Samsung PM863 SilverStone ST1500-TI, 1500W Windows 10 Creators Update Version 1703
Cooling	GermanyAlphacool Eiszeit 2000 ChillerAlphacool Eisblock XPXThermal Grizzly Kryonaut (For Cooler Switch)
Monitor	Eizo EV3237-BK
PC Case	Lian Li PC-T70 with Extension Kit and Mods Configurations: Open Benchtable, Closed Case
Power Consumption Measurement	Contact-free DC Measurement at PCIe Slot (Using a Riser Card) Contact-free DC Measurement at External Auxiliary Power Supply Cable Direct Voltage Measurement at Power Supply 2x Rohde & Schwarz HMO 3054, 500 MHz Digital Multi-Channel Oscilloscope with Storage Function4x Rohde & Schwarz HZO50 Current Probe (1mA - 30A, 100 kHz, DC) 4x Rohde & Schwarz HZ355 (10:1 Probes, 500 MHz) 1x Rohde & Schwarz HMC 8012 Digital Multimeter with Storage Function
Thermal Measurement	1x Optris PI640 80 Hz Infrared Camera + PI Connect Real-Time Infrared Monitoring and Recording
Acoustic Measurement	NTI Audio M2211 (with Calibration File, Low Cut at 50Hz) Steinberg UR12 (with Phantom Power for Microphones)Creative X7, Smaart v.7 Custom-Made Proprietary Measurement Chamber, 3.5 x 1.8 x 2.2m (L x D x H) Perpendicular to Center of Noise Source(s), Measurement Distance of 50cm Noise Level in dB(A) (Slow), Real-time Frequency Analyzer (RTA) Graphical Frequency Spectrum of Noise

okay so new CPUs are just around the corner as we know and I'm currently reading all of my cpu benchmarks with a gtx 980ti and thirty-two hundred megahertz ram and of course all the new updates and drivers which have been coming out and there's one CPU that has stood out to me quite a bit and that's the i5 8400 now it's been out for a few months now so what's the big deal well according to this chart and also some leaks online until has more affordable chipsets

 on the way such as B 360 and so the locked core i5 8400 is more relevant right now than ever because we will soon be able to pair it with a sensible motherboard option and not just said 370 which is targeted towards enthusiasts and makes no sense whatsoever to buy a locked CPU with a unlocked motherboard for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about let me rewind a few months ,back in early October last year Intel released their new lineup of coffee Lakes CPUs these 8th gen processors were a significant leap compared to the 

The best Intel Core i5-8400  Processor 6 Cores  review

incremental gains we've seen in previous generations and most notably were getting a 2 core bump compared to each CPU from a 7th generation which turned out to be a pretty big deal for both production workloads and gaming there were significant gains across the board however things were a little bit complicated for whatever reason whether Intel were rushed to the market to quickly answer back from the success of aim DS Rison processes or if this was actually planned Intel only released their enthusiast chipset said 317 along with all of these new eighth generation CPUs including the i3 s now this is no big deal if you were planning on 

buying an unlocked processor such as the 8600 K or 8700 caves since a jet 370 motherboard is required for overclocking at the end of the day but if you were planning on grabbing the new quad core i3 8100 or the new 6 Core i5 8400 this was kind of hard to justify the cheapest said 370 boards at the moment or so which I guess isn't too bad if you were planning on getting the i-5 8400 but the point here is that on these boards you are paying a premium for the ability to overclock and you will be losing value elsewhere on the 

board now some of you may be thinking no worries I'll buy a budget of 370 board and i3 8100 and then down the road I can upgrade to an 8700 K but the problem with these cheaper is that 370 boards despite being branded as Zed 370 and sort of targeted towards overclocking then are actually recommended for overclocking by the majority of the community most of the time you're only getting 4 vrm phases for the CPU which is not really enough for an 8700 K or an 80 600 K for that matter and the MOSFETs and chokes which make up the vrm phases are usually pretty poor in terms of efficiency as well and so personally I think that buying one of these 

cheaper at 370 boards with upgrade ability in mind for example planning to use an 8700 K down the road is sort of going to waste and it's kind of flawed thinking because you're not really gonna get any you know productive use out of an 8700 K on those boards anyway and so it really sucks if you were planning to buy you know an i3 8100 and then use the same budgets at 370 board you know for an eighty seven hundred K or something like that down the road it's just not going to happen now of course this is even more relevant with the i3 8100 which offers 

a great amount of performance but again there's not really any sensible boards on the market for the CPU at the time of filming which is a real shame the reason why I think the i5 8400 is a big deal is the amount of value that it comes with value that is soon to be increased when the B 360 boards are eventually released here we're getting a flat six cores running at a rather slow paced frequency of 2.8 gigahertz but a boost clock of 4 gigahertz now Intel state that this is a single core boost clock and during my testing I thought that the six core 

boost was more like 3.8 or 3.9 gigahertz other important notes are the nine megabytes of level 3 cache and a TDP of 65 watts in terms of pricing and MSRP I think is fairly reasonable for what you're getting here and thankfully you can actually pick it up for that price unlike some other PC hardware at the moment now I would be foolish not to consider what team read have to offer in the same price bracket and several months before Intel brought us the i5 8400 AMD brought us the horizon 5 1600 which packs a serious

 punch simply put if you were building a gaming PC in 2017 within a reasonable budget and you wanted a great gaming performance and also solid multi-threaded performance as well this was the processor to get and still today is the top option for many builders we're getting six cores 12 threads and in most cases you can overclock the Rison 5 1600 to around 4 gigahertz if you've got a half-decent motherboard and were somewhat lucky in the silicon lottery i've thrown the arisin 5 1600 into a few builds at this point I use it for case testing as well for 

thermals and I've got to say I'm really happy performance that it offers and I can definitely see what is the go-to CPU for a lot of people speaking simply on facts though Intel still has the upper hand when it comes to pure gaming performance something that we'll look at in just a little bit and since the i5 8400 is becoming a more relevant choice with the B 360 motherboards hopefully upon us quite soon we're going to see just how it stacks up today against a few other 

popular options now as I said in the beginning all testing was done over the last few days with the latest drivers and updates we're also using 32 hundred megahertz memory on both the Intel and AMD side of things just to make things fair and of course for the CPU testing we'll be using a GTX 1080 Ti we will also be looking at synthetic benchmarks and production workloads after the gaming results but for now let's look at how the performance was in player unknowns battlegrounds now it's important to note that this game has a 144 FPS cap and with the usual 

testing done at 1080p pretty much all CPUs would be hitting that with a 1080 Ti so we've bumped it up to 1440p so we're not bottlenecked by the game itself here the i5 8400 is landing itself in the middle of the chart but is within two to three FPS of a stock 8700 K now when it comes to pub key single third row performance is pretty much the endgame here and unfortunately that's why we're seeing the rise and processes towards the bottom of the charts also worth mentioning the i3 8100 is giving us some pretty solid valu


 in Rainbow six siege though there's not a massive difference between any of the processes in the stack at all Rison processes seem to be doing pretty well with the overclocked r7 1700 giving us the best result for the lowest 1% of frames and despite the negligible difference between each CPU I will still be leaving this in for the future testing for a couple of reasons firstly because it's a fairly popular game and secondly because it also highlights that in some games there's just not going to be a massive difference battlefield 1 on the other hand is a completely different story with about a 65 FPS difference between the i3 8100 at the bottom of the chart and the 

overclocked 8700 K at the top at 192 point 3 fps this is one test case where the i5 8400 really proves itself as credible value against other options like the overclockable 8600 K and 8700 K especially when you factor in the difference in the motherboard pricing switching gears let's look at Civilization six starting with the built-in graphics benchmark now arguably anything above 70 to 80 FPS is going to give you a fairly fluid gaming experience but of course with the PC master-race more is always better this game seems to love a nice blend between high multi-

threading performance and also a high clock speed what's interesting here is that the two mid tier processes  that a lot of people have their eyes on the r5 1600 and the i5 8400 are giving us pretty close performance when the r5 1600 is overclocked to 3.9 gigahertz in the AI test for civilization 6 we're looking at the average turn time here with the i5 8400 giving us an average of eleven point four seconds per turn and the r5 1600 with eleven point nine seven so a very similar result to what we saw in our graphics benchmark previously in Witcher 3 there's 

not a significant difference at all between the top five scores in terms of average framerate but there is when we're talking about the lowest one percent he the i5 8400 is clearly the best value option with average FPS pretty much on par with the overclocked 8700 K and the one percent low result of seventy seven point six isn't too bad either for the division the i5 8400 again is pretty much on par with the overclocks i 5 and i7 at the top of the stack with the i3 8100 also not far behind here with an average FPS of 132 point nine here the lowest single-threaded 

performance on the rosin five 1600 and the r7 1700 does hold them back a bit by about 10 to 15 FPS on average for AI intensive games like GTA 5 the i5 8400 does hold its own here against its bigger brothers with an average FPS of 119 point six so about three point five percent within the top score but for a significantly lower price in this particular game it's honestly hard to recommend something like the overclockable I 580 600 K or even the 8700 K for that matter when the i5 8400 is hitting the mark for a fraction of the cost that extra money

or so could easily be put towards more powerful PC hardware for example a better GPU and lastly Ghost Recon wildlands further demonstrates this point with the i5 8400 only a few FPS behind some of the most powerful gaming processes that you can buy it right now now as you can probably see the r5 at 1600 which is roughly the same price as the i5 8400 does match it in some games but for the most part you will see about 810 percent slower result in favor of the i-5 of course though there's a lot of other things that we do outside of gaming and I'm aware that 

people are using these mid-range processes for multi-threaded tasks and production workloads as well so what is the performance like there well starting off with Cinebench r15 using all threads available the r5 1600 shows us that it's an absolute multi threading beast when it's compared to the core i5 and most of you know this because it has six cores and twelve threads whereas the i5 8400 only has six cores and six threads when restricting the test to a single 

thread however the i5 8400 does have a significantly better score even when the Rison v 1600 is overclocked to 3.9 Kega hertz and this is a great indicator to why we see the i5 have a superior performance when it comes to gaming for file compression and decompression using the 7-zip benchmark the i5 8400 and the risin v 1600 are pretty close when it comes to compression only but for decompression the Rison cpu does take a significant lead one which is stretched further once overclocked it's also interesting to see here that across the board the Intel CPUs perform 

best with compression whereas the rise in CPUs are significantly better for decompression and finally let's look at how the i5 8400 does when it comes to video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro starting off with encoding times with a 1080p file and here we're getting slightly better performance than the stock 7700 K and the horizon v 1600 and we're also at a few seconds within the stock 8 core Rison 7 1700 of course though all three of those processes can be overclocked which improves the performance significantly and as a result the arisin v 1600 

overclocked to 3.9 gigahertz does export the file about 21 seconds faster with a 4k file though encoded at a higher bitrate we do see the i5 84 100 take the lead and show us that hi single thread performance is relevant with file encoding and with these specific settings ones that I would typically use to prepare a file for YouTube the i5 8400 is a good deal quicker than both the horizon 7 1700 and the r5 1600 even when they're both overclocked performance on the video editing timeline though is a different story with the multi-threading performance of the

 horizon CPUs clearly benefiting quite a bit here dropping virtually no friends at all and making for a buttery smooth timeline experience compared to the i5 8400 which is dropping over 30% of frames during playback and lastly video stabilization via the warp stabiliser effect was fairly quick on the i-5 8400 about 17 seconds quicker than the overclocked Rosen 5 1600 and that time definitely adds up when considering an entire video project not just 25 seconds that we see in the benchmark okay so for gaming the i5 8400 was hot on the heels of the 

overclocked 8,600 K and even the 8700 K as well and compared to its direct competitor the rosen 5 1600 it was about 10 percent faster even when that was overclocked to 3.9 gigahertz now I'm well aware that AMD have been brewing up the second generation rising CPUs named pinnacle Ridge we should be able to see those around mid April or around May according to some leaks and it'll be very interesting to see how they stack up to coffee like CPUs in gaming and I personally like to see a direct competitor to the i-5 8400 which as we've seen is pretty 

much insane value for the price so if you were planning on building a gaming PC you know as soon as possible I would definitely wait at least a month or two to see you know where everything settles on the Intel side of things it would be very interesting to see if these would be 360 motherboards are worth it in terms of price performance and on the AMD side of things of course rising to I think is going to be huge I'd love to see clock speeds up to four point three or 

four point four years I think at that point we're gonna have exceptional performance in gaming and so let me know down below after seeing the results of the i-5 8400 in gaming would you be planning to pick up a B 360 board along with the i-5 you know have that sort of budget combo will you be waiting for the rice and two CPUs are to hit the market and say what's on offer there .


 the beautiful I 580 408 gen coffee leg all right yeah right now we have to work with so if you get the k-series meaning the unlocked edition of these CPUs you will not get a heatsink you will have to buy your own heatsink because the stock heatsink is not good enough especially they got overclock most people if they're buying over Fox Edition unlock the dish and that's because they want to do some super crazy insane stuff with you know like liquid cooling and fans that 

are like the size of the case which I actually haven't in mine it's pretty cool anyway but that's it so it's in the box again this is the heatsink it already has a thermal paste thermal paste is so important do not forget thermal paste but with these that come with it you buy aftermarket heat sinks it's not gonna have that only usually and then there's the process it right that's that's 

it that's the puppy that's that's the money that's the money right there right there there's all the little ins all our beautiful little pins we can see that pretty well but that's it high five 8400 baby we get our little a little manual there's so much to learn and we got our beautiful do not forget the sticker what you gotta get you sticker that's the CPU you


Learn more about Core i5-8400

ModelBrandIntelProcessors TypeDesktopSeriesCore i5 8th GenNameCore i5-8400ModelBX80684I58400
DetailsCPU Socket TypeLGA 1151 (300 Series)Core NameCoffee Lake# of Cores6-Core# of Threads6Operating Frequency2.8 GHzMax Turbo Frequency4.0 GHzL2 Cache6 x 256KBL3 Cache9MBManufacturing Tech14nm64-Bit SupportYesHyper-Threading SupportNoMemory TypesDDR4 2666Memory Channel2Virtualization Technology SupportYesIntegrated GraphicsIntel UHD Graphics 630Graphics Base Frequency350 MHzGraphics Max Dynamic Frequency1.05 GHzPCI Express Revision3.0Max Number of PCI Express Lanes16Thermal Design Power65WCooling DeviceHeatsink and fan included.

The best Intel Core i5-8400  Processor 6 Cores  review

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