Ryzen’s Budget Gaming Prowess The Intel Core i5-11400 belongs to the Rocket Lake family and is surprisingly affordable and nimble. It has six cores and 12 threads and costs just $182. You can also get the graphics-less F-series model for as little as $157. Surprisingly, AMD faces off against AMD’s two-year-old $199 Ryzen 5 3600, which is unable to compete with the 11400 in gaming. As a result, AMD faces off against the 11400. Because of this, the competition is one-sided, allowing Intel to dominate the entry-level PC gaming market unchallenged and earning the Core i5-11400 a spot on our list of the best CPUs.
In a market where quad-core chips used to dominate, models with six cores and twelve threads from AMD and Intel now offer incredible value in the $150 to $200 price range. However, AMD has mostly stopped making new products for this price range. Instead, it has focused on expanding its premium lineup by last year introducing a Ryzen-refresh XT series that doesn’t target the sub-$250 market. With the beastly Ryzen 5 5600X, AMD followed with the Ryzen 5000 series, which again did not update its sub-$200 lineup and had an extremely steep entry price of $300.
Even though it was released nearly two years ago, the Zen-powered Ryzen 5 3600 continues to be the best AMD competitor in this category. AMD has had to deal with supply issues as a result of the pandemic and unprecedented demand, which is unfortunate. As a result, it’s hard to find a Ryzen 5 3600 at a price that even comes close to being affordable.
The launch of Intel’s Rocket Lake architecture brought the company’s first new architecture to the desktop PC in six years. However, AMD’s core-heavy Ryzen 5000 flagships were unable to compete with the highest-end Rocket Lake models due to the burden of the aging 14nm process. However, the Rocket chips are able to compete with AMD’s best in single-threaded work thanks to the new Cypress Cove architecture’s 19% increase in IPC and the ultra-mature 14nm process’s ability to reach high boost clocks (albeit at the expense of power consumption).
Rocket Lake chips, on average, compete with Ryzen 5000 chips that have the same number of cores. Additionally, Intel’s aggressive pricing results in unexpectedly favorable deals for mainstream Intel chips. However, despite the fact that the Core i5-11600K is an appealing chip, the $262 price tag is too high for buyers who are more concerned with value. This is due to the fact that there is still a shortage of GPUs, which means that they will need to spend more of their budget on a graphics solution.
The Core i5-11400 is without a doubt the best entry-level gaming chip on the market, especially when paired with a B-series motherboard, as you’ll see in our testing below. In fact, the Core i5-11400 is a much better deal than the Core i5-11600K if you don’t want to overclock. You won’t be able to overclock the graphics or cores as much as you can with the 11600K, and the 11400 has a lower 65W TDP rating than the 11600K. However, you’ll save $80, which you can use for other accessories like a graphics card.
The Core i5-11400 still outperforms all CPUs in its price range that are comparable. Intel also added memory overclocking support to B-series motherboards for all SKUs, making it easy to push along the majority of available graphics cards, particularly at higher resolutions and fidelity settings. For threaded workloads, you can get a significant boost resembling an overclock by adjusting a few power settings in the BIOS, as we will demonstrate below.
AMD is currently limited to Zen 2 processors and desperately needs a Zen 3 chip in this price range to compete. AMD won’t have an answer for the Core i5-11400 until it sells its non-X 5600X or maybe a Ryzen 3 model with more power that you can actually buy (in contrast to the fictitious 3300X). Given the severe shortage of graphics cards, even AMD’s Ryzen 5000G “Cezanne” APUs might make some sense in this price range. However, AMD has restricted those chips to the OEM market until later this year, so they aren’t even available yet.
All of this indicates that, for the time being, AMD has completely lost the mainstream entry-level gaming market to Intel. See how the situation has changed.
In our launch-day review, we went over the Rocket Lake family in detail; therefore, if you want more in-depth information about the architecture and the entire product family, go there. While Comet Lake Refresh (CML-R) chips replace Core i3 and Pentium processors, Intel uses Rocket Lake (RKL-S) chips in the well-known Core i9, i7, and i5 families. These chips have slightly faster clock speeds than other Comet Lake chips, but they share the same architecture. Here, you can find out more about them.
There are now four distinct Turbo Boost flavors available from Intel’s chip frequencies, many of which have single- and multi-core ratios that vary by chip family. In the table below, we have limited these listings to the peak boost frequencies, with each frequency indicating the peak boosting technology used. Here, you can find more details about Rocket Lake’s boost technology and a more comprehensive list of all frequencies.
