Intel’s Core i5 is the best bargain in CPUs right now, but which should you get?

Fancy, expensive processors are fun, but for most people who just want to build a decent middle-of-the-road PC for gaming (and anything else), the best advice is usually to buy a Core i5 or Ryzen 5 for somewhere in the $200–$250 range and pair it with the fastest graphics card you can afford.

Intel’s Core i5-13400 (and the graphics-less 13400F) caught our eye when Intel announced it because it was adding a cluster of four E-cores to the Core i5-12400, which was one of Intel’s best mid-range desktop CPUs in years. E-cores don’t matter much for games, but they can help when you’re trying to run background tasks behind your game, and they can also provide a decent boost to heavily multithreaded CPU workloads like video encoding or CPU-based rendering.

This is nominally a review of the Core i5-13400, which is a good CPU and (when considered together with the cost of a motherboard and RAM) one of the better bargains you’ll find if you’re building a PC right now. The problem is that Intel sells a lot of very similar 12th- and 13th-generation Core i5 chips, and the prices are constantly bouncing around in that $160–$250 band. The one you should usually get depends on what you’re doing and which one happens to be the cheapest at the moment you’re buying.

Pricing and value

The prices in the table above will fluctuate and may already be out of date as you’re reading this, but the point is that the 13400 might not always be the best CPU to buy at any particular moment. The Core i5-12600K is architecturally identical and a little faster (not a lot, but enough to make a difference). And the i5-13500 has a higher clock speed and has four additional E-cores. The GPU-less i5-13400F and i5-12600KF are in that range, too. If the Core i5-13400 is the cheapest when you’re buying, it’s a good one to go with. If it’s around the same price as the i5-12600K or the i5-13500, buy those instead.

And there’s always the last-generation i5-12400, which is missing the E-cores but has almost the same P-cores as the i5-13400. Without a GPU, it can go as low as $160, about $50 less than the i5-13400F.

The latest Ryzen 5 processors also look competitive here, but it still costs more to assemble a socket AM5 PC. A decent AM5 motherboard with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the MSI Pro B650M-A Wi-Fi, currently runs $153, compared to $100 for a Gigabyte B660M DS3H AX. A 16GB kit of DDR5-5200 costs $59 (AMD says DDR5-6000 is the ideal speed, and it’s what we use for testing; you’ll pay $33 more for the extra bump) compared to about $34 for a kit of DDR4-3200.

At current pricing, that adds up to around $100 extra, giving you a small boost to gaming performance in some situations but mostly breaking even in non-gaming tasks. In a budget build, that money might be better spent on a bigger SSD, better power supply, or faster GPU.

That said, Intel’s LGA1700 socket is likely nearing the end of the line, and AM5 will be supported until at least 2025. If you’re the kind of person who upgrades CPUs every couple of years, you can spend a little more now and maybe save some money later when it’s time to step up to (an entirely theoretical) Ryzen 5 9600. I’d still go with the Intel build in this price range, but there’s a good argument to be made either way.

CPU architecture

When we reviewed the i5-13600K and i9-13900K, we detailed a handful of architectural tweaks Intel had made compared to the 12th-gen CPUs. Those improvements mostly came down to clock speed boosts and increased power limits (more on that in a moment), but Intel also added a bit more L3 cache.

That extra cache doesn’t trickle down to non-K-series 13th-gen Core i5 and i3 processors. For all intents and purposes, an i5-13400 is architecturally identical to an i5-12600K, with slightly different default clock speeds and power settings. Bear this in mind when choosing between the chips—in this case, the 13th generation is no newer than the 12th.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1926817