The company’s flagship six-core desktop CPU, the Core i5-10400 ($182), is not the best in its 10th Generation stack. The unlocked Core i5-10600K, which we reviewed at its launch last year, takes that title.) However, tenacity makes up for the Core i5-10400’s lack of overclockability. The Core is a good value option for people who already own an LGA 1200 motherboard and want to play games with a discrete GPU. It competes with AMD’s avalanche of Editors’ Choice-winning powerhouse six-core CPUs, such as the Ryzen 5 5600X and the 3600X of the previous generation. However, AMD’s Ryzen 5 chips are more cost-effective and more efficient as a midrange upgrade—if you can find one at or near the list price. If AMD Ryzen 3000 and 5000 chips continue to be difficult to obtain and/or pricey, the Core i5-10400, a rare Intel value play, is a decent bet for PC gamers and general users.
Specs for the Intel Core i5-10400: In the Middle With You To elaborate on our introduction, the Core i5-10400’s value is significantly diminished by Intel’s switch to the LGA 1200 socket for its “Comet Lake” 10th Generation desktop chips, as you will need a new motherboard. That contrasts with AMD’s widespread Socket AM4 support for its mainstream Ryzen CPUs.
Through a variety of chipsets, boards with that socket have been available for years, and you may already own one. That reduces the value proposition of lower-end chips because that is unlikely with Intel’s new boards. Unless, for some improbable reason, you happen to own an LGA 1200 board that is equipped with a 2020-release of a Pentium Gold or Core i3 chip, the Core i5’s performance is insufficient to justify a standalone upgrade in an existing board.
Let’s start our discussion of the Intel Core i5-10400 and where it sits against AMD’s lineup of entry-level and midrange CPUs, priced around $150 to $300, by looking at some of the basic specs of both. The six-core/12-thread Intel Core i5-10400 represents the low end of Intel’s midrange options and finds itself competing across the aisle with processors like AMD’s Ryzen 3 3400G for 149 dollars, the Ryzen 3 3600 for 199 dollars One of only a few AMD chips with integrated graphics in the same price range is the Ryzen 3 3400G; The remainder require a discrete video card.
However, we should first mention some recent findings before moving forward with this review. As of this writing in February 2021, the prices of 10th Generation Intel chips have been somewhat discounted at a number of online retailers, despite the standard protocol of rating a CPU based on its MSRP or RCP (in Intel lingo, “recommended customer price”). The Intel Core i5-10400 costs $182, but depending on where you shop, you could find it for $150 to $160.
Intel Core i5-10400 Top Despite this, price reductions for this chip and other lower-end 10th Generation models may not be sufficient to offset the final cost of adoption—which includes an LGA 1200 motherboard. AMD’s continued focus on Socket AM4 has been beneficial to the company because it has made it possible for a much wider range of upgraders to upgrade their AMD systems with CPUs like the Ryzen 5 3600 for a fraction of the cost of starting up an Intel Core i5-10400 system. Once more, Intel’s budget-friendly options have been literally kicked in the shins by the company’s insistence on regularly refreshing its desktop sockets.
With this chip and others in the Comet Lake line, Intel did make one smart power move: Hyper-Threading has been reinstated in the spec sheet of the Core i5-10400. It increased the number of processing threads available from the Intel Core i5-9400 (six cores/six threads) to 12 from the Core i5-10400’s six cores. That’s a big deal, but it’s practically necessary to keep these Intel chips competitive with Ryzen viable at this point.
Intel Core i5-10400 Under The Core i5-10400, like many other chips in the Intel 10th Generation stack, has an integrated graphics processor (IGP) called Intel UHD Graphics 630. The closest comparison on the Ryzen side is the four-core/eight-thread AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with its Vega 11 onboard graphics because AMD does not currently offer any processors with an IGP and more than four cores onboard in its 3000 or 5000 Series Ryzen lines. The Ryzen 50000 series and Zen 3 architecture have not been applied to that or the 3200G, which is its Ryzen 3 counterpart. But still.)
