Intel's Core i5 13400 is shaping up to be a killer budget gaming chip

pcgamer.com:

It's an exciting time to be a PC gaming enthusiast. After a quiet first half of 2022, we're getting set for a flood of PC hardware releases, and one of the specific items I have my eye on is Intel's upcoming 13th Gen Core i5 13400. The i5 12400 is already our favourite budget gaming CPU, but the 13400 is looking even better.

Check out our review of the i5 12400(opens in new tab). Dave James gave it a stratospheric 95/100, and the only way it could realistically score higher than that was if it cost 50 bucks and came with a free motherboard. It runs cool, sips power, and delivers enough horsepower to keep even high-end graphics cards fed. But one thing it lacked compared to the more expensive 12th Gen CPUs was efficiency cores. This meant that its multi-threading and multi-tasking prowess fell well behind the likes of the more expensive 12600K.

That's all set to change as the 13400 will include four Gracemont E cores meaning the 13400 will get a major multi-threaded performance boost. Though it won't be able to compete with the higher core count CPUs as you'd expect, 16-threads is more than enough for current gaming requirements, and the inclusion of E cores should mean the chip will deliver very low idle and light load power consumption.

According to a list of specs provided by WCCFTech(opens in new tab) (via sweclockers(opens in new tab)) the 13400's E cores will be clocked at 3.3GHz. That's quite low compared to the clocks of the higher tier models but if they're just going to be performing background tasks or utilized in idle situations, they won't need to deliver amazing performance.

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