Intel Core i5 12400

It’s the new Q6600, Dave James’ greatest compliment ever!

- By Dave James

SPECS

Socket: LGA1700

Process: Intel 7 10nm

Cores (P+E): 6 + 0

Threads: 12

Cache: 18MB L3, 7.5MB L2, 480KB L1

Clock: 2.5GHz (4.4GHz turbo)

Unlocked: Complicated

GPU: UHD Graphics 730, 24 EU, 300MHz (1.45GHz Max), OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 2.1

Memory: 128GB max, No ECC, 2-channel

Memory speed: DDR5 4800MT/s, DDR4 3200MT/s

PCIe lanes: 20 (16+4, 2x8+4)

Base power: 65W

Max power: 117W

The easy approach to this review would be to dismiss the Intel Core i5 12400 as one of the least interesting processors from the 12th Gen Alder Lake generation of CPUs. Yet if we did that, we’d be dismissing one of the best mainstream chips ever made.

The first clue is the Alder Lake silicon goodness beneath that broad heatspreader, but there are no hybrid cores here. Instead, it’s packing six of Intel’s Performance Core; Efficient cores are nowhere to be seen. This single core performance is right up there with the best processors around. Intel Thread Director tech is scheduled to hit the Kernel 5.17, but this processor won’t need it.