The Full review of best Intel Core i5-9400F Processor 6 Cores

The Full review of best Intel Core i5-9400F Processor 6 Cores

Intel Core i5-9400F Desktop Processor 6 Cores 4.1 GHz Turbo Without Graphics review

pros
Leading game performance
Discounted price compared to vanilla Core i5-9400
Flimsy bundled cooler is better than nothing

cons
Disabled graphics
Locked ratio multiplier
Big price-to-performance disadvantage compared to AMD in threaded workloads.

Intel CPUs it can be just a little difficult to find true value in light of Verizon right blue team options can look just a bit expensive and premium consider this you can buy a first gen Reisman v 1600 have a six core CPU with 12 threads you want the Intel route for that same budget you'd only be able to afford a core i3 something like the 80 350 K

which is only a 4 core CPU but that's all changed with the launch of this chip right here it says Intel's Core i5 9400 F and it just might be the best value gaming CPU on the market and no this is not a late April Fool's joke , so let's run through some of the specifications the core i5 94f is a 6 core 6 thread coffee-like cpu and tells ninth gen stuff is very similar to 8th gen and that core counts for the lower chips stay essentially the same I threes are hyper threaded four

cores I 5 to 6 cores and I 7s are either hyper threaded or non hyper threaded eight cores with outer-box frequencies reaching 5 gigahertz but what then makes this particular Core i5 special the answer is its price the CPU as of April 2nd when I wrote this this script for this review can be purchased and with it you also get a free coolermaster Devastator 3 if that matters to you it's little gaming mouse you can get if you buy it on Newegg

a nice added perk just something extra and the 9400 def is a 65 watt hexa core processor with a 4-pull and gigahertz turbo boost and until obtain support but then what the heck does the the after stand for we've never seen an F before I can't remember everything enough before I think this is a new thing well yeah that's kind of the catch you see the reason why these chips are occasionally cheaper than their non f counterparts is because these here lack integrated graphics this means you'll need a discreet graphics card in your system in order to have a

picture displayed on screen this is the case even if the motherboard in questions sports display out so don't be fooled by that now is this a big deal I mean not really most of us are boarding discrete graphics and they're usually a lot better than IGP so that's kind of the incentive they're almost all rice and CPUs by the way also like I GPS so if that's your reason for avoiding the 90 400 F you should probably stick to a risin apu or non F Intel ski when Intel first announced these things earlier this year they admittedly didn't look too hot to their kind they basically

they were trying to sell these for the same price as their non f counterparts what we'd expect the non F chips to be priced at so a core i5 this would be equipments like an 8400 I wouldn't pay a dime for it probably in the in the States that's what I'd expect to pay but they were trying to sell the F SKU for the same price as what we'd expect that non FC to go for and I wasn't a big fan of that but they came down in price

recently again for this I think a discount isn't decent for somebody that's already got his free graphics card already which is again probably most of us and then on top of that you can make some really great gaming performance out of this thing as we'll show you in a few minutes and look the whole pricing issue with the excuse in the beginning was probably response to Intel's own issues with supply and its current 14 nanometer process now that chipsets and CPUs are both being manufactured in the same node the supply chain is

bottleneck that's a big reason why prices for Intel CPUs in general aren't as hot competitive as arise ins but every now and then a gem like this one pops up and for a decent price for a core i5 that I mean a six core i5 it's pretty darn good and all honesty for the 90 400 F I'd say it's probably the best value gaming CPU on the market just gaming don't take my words out of context if you are just buying a CPU to game with you want to buy the core i5

9400 at just take my word for it actually you know what don't take my word for it I'll show you so here is what I did I put together an Intel platform using 16 gigs of DDR for a GTX 1660 TI graphics could I feel like you'd want to pair with the CPU and ABI 360 motherboard remember this is an on case Q so we really don't need an overclocking motherboards like a Z Cirie's chipset now for the sake of comparison I put together a similarly priced Rison platform using a B 450 motherboard the same 16 gigs of ram and arisin v 2600 the

AMD cpu has invented with multi-threading but intel's clock for clock edge and compute tasks and to an extent software optimization keep it in the ring again as you'll see shortly one thing to note I am manually overclocked in the 2600 of 4 gigahertz across all cores I don't care Intel fanboys I'm doing it because I can that's the point right you can with these rice and chips you can't with some Intel SKUs that's not our fault that's Intel's fault they have to suffer the consequences so I'm gonna give every advantage I can to the AMD CPU including the

overclock and also memory memory frequency because we were able to overclock our ddr4 with the B 450 I'm using here this is the tough B 450 gaming plus from a soos that I'm using here and that allowed me to overclock memory to 3,000 megahertz 3200 was unstable as getting blue screens quite randomly and frequently and so I drop things down to 3,000 megahertz and it was smooth as butter now with the B 360 motherboard 2666 was as high as I could go that goes without saying we could attain a higher clock with a Z or H series chipset if we wanted but

we'd be cutting into our budget and it would really make no sense again to pair either of those with a cheap CPU relatively speaking additionally Intel chips aren't hindered by a reduction in RAM frequency anywhere near to the extent which horizon chips are so it isn't like we're hurting the 94 death very much and all I had to do in order to get this be 360 board to work with a 90 400 F was flash and updated bios with an older coffee leg skew also a quick reference to the graphics card I chose the 1660 ti again because I felt it was a balanced card for these

CPUs I don't expect anyone to not saying that no one does but I just wouldn't recommend you pair at 20 atti with something like a core i5 90 400 F just to me doesn't make any sense same goes for the Rison v 2600 although I think in that case it's a little more justified just the test wouldn't be indicative of like real-world performance and so I ensure that the platforms that I was using were as balanced as possible especially given the fact that we're testing the 1080p resolution as well and I think the 1660 Ti is perfect for that so here are some numbers in

Cinebench are twenty not are fifteen but are twenty the i-59 400 FS scored a 23 18 CB that's not a bad for six locked cores the rise of five 2600 though takes the cake with a strong 27 36 it's what we should expect from this fab with simultaneous multithreading tucked in and it isn't up for debate I mean if we ran similar synthetic benchmarks we'd find that the 2600 is by far the better multitasker but what if we throw a synthetic test that leverages both discrete GPU and CPU horsepower most games are going to utilize every core that you throw at it times pi will

though so this is again a bit of an edge for the 2600 so in 3d more time spies at dx12 benchmark that 90 400 F elusive by a mere 91 points 6070 vs. 6161 the reason for the blue team loss fewer threads basically is what it comes down to again in applications that properly leverage more than say four or six cores the rise in platform reigns supreme and the value Department I know it sounds cliche at this point but it's important that we stress the differences and reveal all strengths and weaknesses of both platforms so you can make the most informed purchase

decision that is after all why this review exists let's move on to a few games now first up as always is GTA 5 this one has it's a bit of an Intel bias and it shows across the board 113 FPS on average for the blue team and 118 for the red team both gaming experiences were satisfactory mind you I mean you probably couldn't distinguish the two unless you knew that one was ahead of the other beforehand but when it comes to the fine details the Intel platform boasts a bit more wiggle room for the tweaking of in-game settings so you could possibly make your

game look a bit better at the expense of losing a few frames and you'd still get the performance that you get if you just chose an AMD CPU to begin with our lowest 1% and 0.1% of frames by the way reveal similar stories next up shadow of the Tomb Raider this one should close the gap a bit more or less due to the fact the game is a resource hog to say the least 68 FPS on average with a 2676 4890 400 F one thing to note here the AMD CPU surprisingly falls short in the lowest point 1% frame suggesting a fair degree of stutter throughout playback it's something

you would notice if you were just playing this game I don't know and in the real world that's kind of the point of all of this now the next game I tested was Resident Evil 2 which was actually bundled with some AMD graphics cards so we should expect maybe an AMD edge here and know it's a CPU versus a GPU but still in fact if you've looked at this metric alone you'd think performance between the two was identical it's a hundred and thirty six FPS versus 136 I kid you not in multiple runs of this the exact same scores however our lowest 1% of frames

reveals an 8 FPS gap that's over a 10% reduction from Intel to AMD and the story worsens for the lowest point 1% of frames where the gap widens to above 20% and before you jump on me for inconsistent testing the exact same routines were followed the exact same pass I reinstalled Windows in every single program in the same day in order to get totally untouched you know perfectly clean benchmarks of each platform ok I used the exact same hard drive right so that was where I stored all my Steam games but I completely wiped the end to dry that I used for

the boot drive between these tests because you don't want to take an intel SSD and then slap it into an AMD system and then have the windows drivers can update themselves you never really get a true experience one-to-one there's always gonna be some conflict on the software level that prevents the the new system from really performing at its best so it's important that you wipe the OS completely to have that clean slate and the next game I tested was f1 2017 which I did more or less for the sake of consistency this benchmark is pretty much indicative of what you

should expect in-game this actually favors single core performance which intel still dominates at a lackluster sub 4 gigahertz all core turbo boost 144 FPS on average for the core i5 135 for the r5 2600 am I surprised now not really though I am a bit stunned by the blue team's ability to keep 1% and 0.1% lows well above its competitors 77 fps verse 62 the lowest point 1% of frames is a huge Delta in my opinion and amounts to a clear and distinguishable disadvantage for the 2600 and the gamer using that CPU in this game but with all that said I want to stress that a lot of this comes down to what you do on your machine and that's why I'm not gonna

throw out a huge blanket statement like I did in this video right here although I was right look the truth is the 9400 f is good it's it's really good especially for that's my opinion no one's paying me to say that I literally just asked and tell to send this because I wanted to test it I thought it would be a good competitor in the gaming space and it is I mean III was kind of right about that but I could have been wrong and if I was wrong and the rise in 5/6 2600 or even the 1600 was better than this in games then my conclusion would be the opposite I'd say doesn't look like the core i5s are keeping up anymore in 2019 with most games granted I didn't test a

whole you know library of Steam games I know that there are some variants and depending on the game she play some might favor the AMD CP more I understand that I'm just saying of the 4 or 5 games that I just happen to test in my own Steam library every single one of them gave the victory to the core i5 I mean is that really a surprise though like we all kind of knew that Intel CPUs were better for gaming but that's just it who just games anymore you usually you stream or you do something else with it so I really only recommend the CPU for those who

game what I pay more than for it not really why would you pay the same price for a CPU without an AI GP that you could for one with an AI GP and that's really the only Achilles heel in the situation you have no IDE P will it affect gamers nope not most of them as long as you have a discrete graphics card you won't even notice you could say the same for the rise in CPU alright the 2600 doesn't have an AI GP either but a big advantage of Intel in the content creation department normally is the fact that it's IGP allows for quick sync and quick

sync software encoding which basically accelerates render tasks and things of the sort it actually is a really big help from a content gracious standpoint especially in Premiere Pro and that's why I kept coming back to Intel for my personal machine I would switch to Rison and come back because render times are significantly faster when both the IGP and discrete graphics are allowed to work together but apart from that the only other downside is streaming

it's a unique topic perhaps a bit niche though in 2019 a lot of people are streaming and so if that's a goal of yours in 2019 my recommendation is not the CPU it's the rise in 520 600 which is actually sitting in that box right there it just makes more sense for someone that legitimately multitasks however one could argue that using the Nvidia encoder with something like a r-tx 20 60 or 2070 would offset any cpu-bound scenario gaming ships like the 90 400 F the breathing room they need to dominate the gaming space as they've done for several years so it really

depends on your settings in steam excuse me not Steam but in OBS or whatever streaming platform you use so if you're an all-around gamer then and that's all you focus on I want to stress that's all you do you just play video games I recommend this CPU honestly I know that a budgets a bit high but if you could fit this into your budget and you're not going to overkill I think this is a great buy if you pair this with even a twenty eighty and twenty atti this is gonna pull its weight in most cases because most games are still barely if at all

utilizing six cores I know that sounds weird but it's true I mean we have the huge core push from AMD and that's kind of pushing in til do the same but just because your system has eight cores and 16 threads doesn't mean you're using the full potential of your CPU in fact I would argue most people are not even if they're on rise in seven CPUs or heck for that matter thread ripper or core i nines like the 79 80 X EE that's 7999 ATX II most people aren't utilizing all of those threads if they are good for them they bought the right CPU if you're doing some

programming some coding that requires the use of 32 threads 64 threads whatever that's great but I would say most people aren't and the sweet spot in my opinion is between 6 and 12 threads I think that 2600 is a really great value as well but it depends on what you're doing obviously so with that I will say I'm not sure how much longer the sale at will last for the 90 400 F that's not me trying to push you to buy it but if you do want to buy it I encourage you to use our affiliate link down below I appreciate that if you do we get small kickback it's

like 2/3 percent but it goes a long way for a few people do it in the end it really all just comes down to what you see yourself doing with your machine both platforms are great I'm not trying to knock on AMD you guys don't need to you know annihilate me in the comments section I'm just saying if you are strictly gaming then the 9400 f is a very solid contender didn't see myself saying that in 2019 but Intel actually priceless thing semi competitively .they are definitely targeting the risin 5 line up at that price and again all you're doing is gaming it's

worth a shot I mean if you're an AMD fanboy I'm not gonna be able convince you either way if you're an Intel fanboy I'm not going to convince you either way either you're gonna buy this you're gonna buy something even better than this from the blue team it's just important you guys keep an open mind it really is you know when I first got into this I always thought Intel as the superior platform I honestly did because at the time the they had the best CPUs we were stuck with bulldozer and pile drive architectures you know visera for six seven years with AMD

and intel was coming out with incremental updates I'll give them that I mean especially recently they've just been stretching that 14 nanometer node for as long as they can but you know when Haswell came out and then skylake it was actually a very compelling platform and if you had the money you bought Intel because you could because you knew it was better but today there are so many different use case scenarios for AMD and Intel CPUs competition is beautiful I love it I just love giving both sides an opportunity to speak their mind and that's why I tested

this CP it's why I asked until descendants because I thought it had a really good chance at outshining the rise in v platform the rise of five CPUs rather in games in the games that I tested that was the case I'm not speaking for all games but the ones I have no test it definitely held its own and outperformed the 2600 which is priced almost equally to the 9400 .