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Intel Core i5-12400
Six Golden Cove P-cores, no E-cores, and a 65 W base power budget — the chip that reset expectations for what a cheap 1080p gaming CPU should do. Its defining trait is that six fast cores are all most games ask for, so it lands within a handful of percent of parts costing three times more.
Pros
- Six full P-cores with Hyper-Threading at up to 4.4 GHz — enough for essentially every mainstream game
- 18 MB L3 gives noticeably better frame-time consistency than the 4-core i3 parts
- 65 W base / 117 W peak means a modest tower cooler is plenty, and the box cooler works
- UHD Graphics 730 iGPU covers display-out, QuickSync encoding, and GPU-less troubleshooting
- Same PCIe 5.0 x16 and DDR5-or-DDR4 flexibility as the expensive LGA1700 chips
Cons
- No E-cores, so heavily threaded rendering and compile jobs fall well behind a 12600K
- Locked multiplier — only memory tuning on Z-series, and even that is wasted money here
- 2.5 GHz base means sustained all-core work sits at modest clocks
- Superseded by the i5-13400 and its four extra E-cores at a similar street price
Below average
Computed from specs & benchmarks via our public methodology.
Full specifications
Everything we track for the Intel Core i5-12400
General
- Announced
- 2022
- Socket
- LGA1700
- Process
- 10 nm
- Base TDP
- 65 W
- Max turbo power
- 117 W
- Unlocked multiplier
- No
- Cooler included
- Yes
Cores & Clocks
- Cores
- 6
- Performance cores
- 6
- Efficiency cores
- 0
- Threads
- 12
- Base clock
- 2.5 GHz
- Boost clock
- 4.4 GHz
- L2 cache
- 7.5 MB
- L3 cache
- 18 MB
Integrated GPU
- iGPU
- Intel UHD Graphics 730
- iGPU clock
- 1,450 MHz
Memory
- Memory support
- DDR5-4800 / DDR4-3200
- Max memory
- 128 GB
- Memory channels
- 2
Platform
- PCIe version
- 5
- CPU PCIe lanes
- 20
Benchmarks
- Cinebench R23 (single)
- 1,690Top 49%
- Cinebench R23 (multi)
- 11,900Bottom 41%
- PassMark
- 18,823Bottom 40%
- PassMark (single thread)
- 3,466Top 45%
Quick answers
Is the Intel Core i5-12400 good in 2026?
The Intel Core i5-12400 earns an Inno Score of 47.5/100 (“Below average”) based on its specs and benchmark results. Six Golden Cove P-cores, no E-cores, and a 65 W base power budget — the chip that reset expectations for what a cheap 1080p gaming CPU should do. Its defining trait is that six fast cores are all most games ask for, so it lands within a handful of percent of parts costing three times more.
What are the key specs of the Intel Core i5-12400?
Cores: 6 · Threads: 12 · Boost clock: 4.4 GHz · Socket: LGA1700
What are the closest alternatives to the Intel Core i5-12400?
Its closest rivals on InnoReviews are Intel Core i5-12400F, Intel Core i9-10900KF, AMD Ryzen 7 5700 — open the comparison pages for a spec-by-spec breakdown.
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