Intel
Intel Core i5-9400F
Six-core, six-thread locked Coffee Lake Refresh with the integrated GPU fused off, sold as the cheapest way into 9th-gen gaming alongside a discrete card. In 2026 it turns up almost exclusively as a used or ex-OEM chip for a low-cost LGA1151-v2 build.
Pros
- Six full cores at up to 4.1 GHz with 3.9 GHz all-core, enough for 1080p gaming with a mid-range GPU
- 65 W base power and a stock cooler in the retail box, so no extra cooling spend
- Works in any 300-series board (B360/H310/H370/Z370/Z390) with a current BIOS, and those boards are cheap used
- 9 MB L3 and the same ring-bus latency as the pricier 9th-gen i5s
- Shares the socket with the i7-9700K and i9-9900K, so the board survives a later upgrade
Cons
- No integrated graphics whatsoever — the build is dead without a working discrete GPU
- Locked multiplier: a Z390 board buys only faster memory, not clocks
- Six threads is thin for 2026 game engines and hopeless against 6C/12T Ryzen in rendering or compiling
- PCIe 3.0 with 16 CPU lanes — no CPU-attached PCIe 4.0 SSD support
Below average
Computed from specs & benchmarks via our public methodology.
Full specifications
Everything we track for the Intel Core i5-9400F
General
- Announced
- 2019
- Socket
- LGA1151-v2
- Process
- 14 nm
- Base TDP
- 65 W
- Unlocked multiplier
- No
- Cooler included
- Yes
Cores & Clocks
- Cores
- 6
- Performance cores
- 6
- Efficiency cores
- 0
- Threads
- 6
- Base clock
- 2.9 GHz
- Boost clock
- 4.1 GHz
- L2 cache
- 2 MB
- L3 cache
- 9 MB
Memory
- Memory support
- DDR4-2666
- Max memory
- 128 GB
- Memory channels
- 2
Platform
- PCIe version
- 3
- CPU PCIe lanes
- 16
Benchmarks
- Geekbench 6 (single)
- 1,400
- Geekbench 6 (multi)
- 4,500
- Cinebench R23 (single)
- 1,080
- Cinebench R23 (multi)
- 5,900
- PassMark
- 9,300
Quick answers
Is the Intel Core i5-9400F good in 2026?
The Intel Core i5-9400F earns an Inno Score of 28.5/100 (“Below average”) based on its specs and benchmark results. Six-core, six-thread locked Coffee Lake Refresh with the integrated GPU fused off, sold as the cheapest way into 9th-gen gaming alongside a discrete card. In 2026 it turns up almost exclusively as a used or ex-OEM chip for a low-cost LGA1151-v2 build.
What are the key specs of the Intel Core i5-9400F?
Cores: 6 · Threads: 6 · Boost clock: 4.1 GHz · Socket: LGA1151-v2
What are the closest alternatives to the Intel Core i5-9400F?
Its closest rivals on InnoReviews are Intel Core i5-8400, Intel Core i7-5820K, Intel Core i7-4790K — open the comparison pages for a spec-by-spec breakdown.