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i5 12400 - worth it?

phinix

phinix

phinix

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13 Feb 2008
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Glasgow
I have i3 12100 right now and happy with it. I dont play games every day, only occasionally, however I play high demanding games, like Dead Space, Alone in the Dark, Last of Us, Silent Hill 2.
Just bought 9070XT. Have 16GB RAM. I play 4K.
I dont want anything like i7 or i9, I'm done with constant chasing highest spec, I believe there is no need for it as i3 gives me 60-70fps in games, which is enough for me.

I was only looking if upgrading it to better cpu would help in anything. Looks like i5 12400 is in a price range I could spend, but is it worth to do that?
I'm not looking for more fps, but maybe lower cpu usage or whatever it could bring.
Also, I may add more ram, 32GB may be beneficial, what do you guys think?

I'm looking at 12th gen as as far as I remember 13th and 14th are affected by some degradation issue, is that right?

CPU Mark showing 14056 vs 19237 (i3 vs i5).

Looking at relative performance in 4K gaming, getting i7 or i9 won't bring much difference, 5-10% of framerate isn't worth spending extra £200 on CPU.

relative-performance-games-38410-2160.png
 
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The 12600K is better value than the 12400, in my opinion. The 12400 is like £135? The 12600K gives you higher clocks and E-Cores for a few £ more. The 12400F is better value than the 12400 if you don't need the graphics.

phinix said:
I'm not looking for more fps, but maybe lower cpu usage or whatever it could bring.
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I'd expect the system to be more responsive while gaming with 2 extra cores, but if you're happy with the framerate consistency and don't multitask, there's not much point.

phinix said:
Also, I may add more ram, 32GB may be beneficial, what do you guys think?
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No brainer at current prices.

phinix said:
I'm looking at 12th gen as as far as I remember 13th and 14th are affected by some degradation issue, is that right?
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The 13th-14th CPUs that are believed to be based on the older 12th gen dies are not affected, but some CPUs (mainly F models) can use raptor lake dies and there's a possibility they may degrade.

Intel offers an extended 5 year warranty on all K 13th-14th gen CPUs and most of the reports were on the i7 and i9 models. I'd consider a 13400/F or 14400/F fairly safe to buy. The 13600K/14600K are very likely to be safe too.
 
Tetras said:
The 12600K is better value than the 12400, in my opinion. The 12400 is like £135? The 12600K gives you higher clocks and E-Cores for a few £ more. The 12400F is better value than the 12400 if you don't need the graphics.


I'd expect the system to be more responsive while gaming with 2 extra cores, but if you're happy with the framerate consistency and don't multitask, there's not much point.


No brainer at current prices.


The 13th-14th CPUs that are believed to be based on the older 12th gen dies are not affected, but some CPUs (mainly F models) can use raptor lake dies and there's a possibility they may degrade.

Intel offers an extended 5 year warranty on all K 13th-14th gen CPUs and most of the reports were on the i7 and i9 models. I'd consider a 13400/F or 14400/F fairly safe to buy. The 13600K/14600K are very likely to be safe too.
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Yes, I dont do multitasking, not using any cpu hungry software.
I do noticed that ******* chrome takes loads of ram, so may upgrade to 32GB.

When it comes to CPU-GPU relationship, do you think i3 is bottlenecking 9070XT in games? Would i5 make it better?
I may consider 12600K, like you suggested.
 
phinix said:
I'm looking at 12th gen as as far as I remember 13th and 14th are affected by some degradation issue, is that right?
Click to expand...

Aside from some early 13th gen production affected by a different oxidisation issue the voltage related issues mostly seem to affect a small number of 13900s and 14900s but it is unfortunately a bit of an unknown hanging over the 13th and 14th gen CPUs. (Personally I'm convinced the tech media got played by some disgruntled ex-Intel employees made redundant in recent rounds of lay-offs and have blown real issues out of all proportion - the failure rates at retail on these CPUs is not showing anything concerning even with a spike of reactive returns around the time the stories about the failures blew up in the media).

If you can stretch to the 12600K it is a better option IMO, seems to be a few deals around right now on the 12th gen.
 
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phinix said:
When it comes to CPU-GPU relationship, do you think i3 is bottlenecking 9070XT in games? Would i5 make it better?
I may consider 12600K, like you suggested.
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i3-12100 will be a decent bottleneck in some games, for sure (even at 4K!), but the AMD cards do seem to pull more performance from slower CPUs (...haven't seen any benchmarks specifically for that with RDNA4 yet).

The 12600K is where I'd go, since the 12400/F is pretty much just 2 cores extra and £150 seems like a fair price.

FYI: the graphics-less 13400F/14400F can be had fairly cheaply right now and they're very similar in performance to the 12600K
 
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The 12400s a good CPU, especially if you've got a board that allows BCLK OC (as many of them will go to 5GHz or higher all core, which is a substantial boost - 20%); but as I suspect you've not got access to that functionality, then at current pricing the 12600K would make more sense as it'll give you e-cores to offload background tasks, without them eating into your performance cores in many cases; and also comes with higher clocks to boot; now that the performance/efficiency core stuff has been around a while, windows seems to handle it reasonably well, with far fewer issues than at launch.
The move to 32GB also makes a lot of sense, as there are plenty of games that can now push past that 16GB barrier; and that can cause stuttering and other such fun; and in some cases improve general performance.

Honestly I considered upgrading my 12400 overclocked to a 12900K or similar, but didn't end up doing it in favour of holding it for a full rebuild as I was also still on DDR4; the 12400 is still running absolutely fine with a 3080 in my backup rig :)
If I was in a position however where my 12400 was limited to stock clocks, I would have been more tempted to either push for that rebuild or a chip upgrade sooner though, albeit you already know you won't be getting absolute best out of your 9070XT.

One thing to factor in is cooler however, you really don't want to be using an intel pancake stock cooler with these CPUs, and no idea what you currently have; so worth factoring in a cooler upgrade as well, if you're still using anything stock intel.

Good luck :)
 
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For you it looks like a good upgrade. I personally don't bother with overclocking so it'd be good for me too. But the common advice will be to get a K model.
 
I had a non K 12600 before my current build and it was a very capable cpu and handled everything I threw at it. It was cool running, great on power usage and was my first ever non K series cpu. It was also the first cpu I had used a air cooler on for some 17-18 years and the Thermalright Peerless Assassin SE120, a £30 cooler at the time, kept it in the mid 50's even under a heavy load. I had it paired with 16Gb DDR4 3600Mhz memory in a MSI Z690 Carbon motherboard. The reason for the Z690 board was my intention to upgrade to a K series cpu at a later date but when the 14th gen released the 14700K had such terrible power draw I dropped the idea which turned out to be a good move after the faulty cpu fiasco started.

I would say the 12400F at just £99 is a bit of a bargain in these days of overpriced components and would be a decent upgrade for you. Don't use the awful stock cooler though. Spend £20 or so on something like a Thermalright Assassin King.
 
phinix said:
Looks like i5 12400 is in a price range I could spend, but is it worth to do that?
Click to expand...

Yes. The extra cores will help, especially with background tasks, thus making your gaming experience much smoother. (IOW your 1% lows will improve.)


phinix said:
Also, I may add more ram, 32GB may be beneficial, what do you guys think?
Click to expand...

Be careful here: the preferred route is to replace because two sticks of RAM usually run faster than four.

I will echo the comments about getting a decent cooler.
 
One thing to be aware of is be aware that there is no guarantee you'll get anything above 3200MHz stable on a 12400 or 12600, unfortunately they lock some of the voltage controls, so you really need to get a K sku if you want to virtually guarantee DDR4 3600MHz.
My chip would never go beyond 3375 memory approximately without starting to generate random headaches, but it'd overclock to 5GHz all core, and I got it to boot at IIRC 5.3, just required more cooling and voltage than the configuration I had it in would allow for, so I settled for 5GHz for a balance of heat/voltage; the sad fact is the 12400 is a fairly weak binned chip, but with the right cooling and volts, they still can go considerably faster and were still being kneecapped substantially by Intel for market segmentation.
 
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I went from a 12100F to a 12600K and the performance uplift was great. I may be selling mine as i recently got a 14900KF :)

EDIT: Also dont forget to factor in a decent cooler if you go for a 12600K you can get some really good coolers that will suit from £20+
 
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Quartz said:
Yes. The extra cores will help, especially with background tasks, thus making your gaming experience much smoother. (IOW your 1% lows will improve.)




Be careful here: the preferred route is to replace because two sticks of RAM usually run faster than four.

I will echo the comments about getting a decent cooler.
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I would be swapping my 2x8GB to 2x16GB

I loved old Crucial ballistix Tracers, those with separate leds.
I dont know if you can get similar effect with any new ram sticks, maybe by taking off those ugly AF defusers.

602459_1645195804521.png
 
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pastymuncher said:
I had a non K 12600 before my current build and it was a very capable cpu and handled everything I threw at it. It was cool running, great on power usage and was my first ever non K series cpu. It was also the first cpu I had used a air cooler on for some 17-18 years and the Thermalright Peerless Assassin SE120, a £30 cooler at the time, kept it in the mid 50's even under a heavy load. I had it paired with 16Gb DDR4 3600Mhz memory in a MSI Z690 Carbon motherboard. The reason for the Z690 board was my intention to upgrade to a K series cpu at a later date but when the 14th gen released the 14700K had such terrible power draw I dropped the idea which turned out to be a good move after the faulty cpu fiasco started.

I would say the 12400F at just £99 is a bit of a bargain in these days of overpriced components and would be a decent upgrade for you. Don't use the awful stock cooler though. Spend £20 or so on something like a Thermalright Assassin King.
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oh no, i dont use stock coolers.

The one I have is Noctua low profile one, but planning on getting that tower cooler that will fit my nr200 - I think its called NH-U9S.
 
I played another game, The Last of Us - CPU usage was around 90%.
Strange, but so far it all looks like this i3 is enough for games I play.
Maybe upgrading isn't needed, just get better cooler and more ram...
I need to run more games to see what is happening.
 
The problem is that figure is looking at your total CPU power load assuming you're looking at the catch all CPU usage rather than on a per core basis; but its not giving you indication of the individual core loads which are arguably more important.
Games and other task arent fully multithreaded, so for example you might have the rendering on one thread (CPU), AI on another, sound on another etc, and what that can mean is although your CPU is not 100% maxed, its causing a heavy bottleneck as the likelyhood is several of your cores are maxed, and maybe the 4th one isnt; but that'll be dependent on the game being played; either way you could be crippling your game's performance, but one core/hyperthreads arent running at 100%, so it's not showing as 100% load; even though you are in fact bottlenecking whatever is trying to run on the CPUs.

Realistically you don't want your CPU to be running 100% on any core during a game, so no single core is bottlenecking performance, and also you have overhead to absorb any spikes in demand.
 
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Alexrose1uk said:
The problem is that figure is looking at your total CPU power load assuming you're looking at the catch all CPU usage rather than on a per core basis; but its not giving you indication of the individual core loads which are arguably more important.
Games and other task arent fully multithreaded, so for example you might have the rendering on one thread (CPU), AI on another, sound on another etc, and what that can mean is although your CPU is not 100% maxed, its causing a heavy bottleneck as the likelyhood is several of your cores are maxed, and maybe the 4th one isnt; but that'll be dependent on the game being played; either way you could be crippling your game's performance, but one core/hyperthreads arent running at 100%, so it's not showing as 100% load; even though you are in fact bottlenecking whatever is trying to run on the CPUs.

Realistically you don't want your CPU to be running 100% on any core during a game, so no single core is bottlenecking performance, and also you have overhead to absorb any spikes in demand.
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I understand what you mean, just thinking of time I spend on gaming nowadays (maybe once a week, 2-4 hours), cannot justify spending more on CPU when just so little would be gained.
Paying £569 for 9070XT was max I would pay nowadays for GPU, but it was 100% worth it :)
I see I need more RAM now, so will grab 2x16GB DDR5 sticks soon. I will also change my CPU cooler.
I think I will lurk around and get maybe used i5 12400F or 12600K (£90 vs £150). Even that 12400 should be better than my i3, like you said.
 
Higher clocks, more overhead, and realistically that i3 is going to be hurting you. If you monitor all your cores individually, it wouldnt surpise me if several of the cores are more or less pegged at 100% in more demanding games, and that there is your bottleneck.
I definately understand your point on relativisitic investment though :)
I've seen 12400s for sub 100 new now though (12400f is 98.99 on OcUK right now, 12600kf is 148.99) so hopefully you'll find something suitable, I mean you might even get a better deal on a 12xxx higher end chip if someone is upgrading. :)

There are games out there now, Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2, as 2 examples, which'll put good work on every core you throw at them; even if that's 20 of them (the 13700HX is basically a Raptor-Lake based 12900K, but with lower power limits and thermal constraints); I had to really tweak my laptops power limits, undervolt and decrease my multipliers, to stop them demanding so much the CPU would plummet to base clocks, or overheat; that's why I'm so strong on the i3 not really being enough looking forward, especially to get anything like the max out of your 9070XT.

It's especially relevant now games are finally being designed for the PS5/Series S/X, rather than being upgraded for them, as it means the minimum requirements/design specs have moved, and those machines have 8 cores. Admittedly Zen 2 cores, so not as fast as Alder Lake, but multicore is becoming more prevelant, and even if the Alder Lake cores are a little faster than Zen 2, realistically only so much 4 cores can do vs something designed for 6-8 :)
 
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