Within minutes of the first, pre-release, 7000 series userbenchmark results, AMD’s marketers broadcast a 20% win over the 12900K via thousands of anonymous twitter, reddit, forum and youtube accounts. Buying new AMD products is like buying used cars: it takes time, experience and a taste for sales hype. It’s difficult for consumers to make rational choices while AMD completely dominates “sponsored news” and social media channels. Ten years ago, when AMD was the underdog, this type of marketing was understandable. Today, with a capitalization of $150 Billion USD, it’s disrespectful to AMD's own users. Even with Intel's marketing department asleep at the wheel, Ryzen will quickly end up in the same state as Radeon. Following a series of overhyped releases, consumers have little interest in the Radeon brand. The combined market share for all of AMD’s (discrete) Radeon RX 5000 and 6000 GPUs (Steam stats) is just 2%. Although the new 7000 series Zen4 CPUs are actually around 15% faster than their predecessors, they have hefty cooling requirements (TDP +60% vs 5000 series), 30 second BIOS post times, expensive DDR5 RAM requirements and only work with expensive motherboards. Despite the 7000 series struggling to match Intel’s outgoing 12th gen, AMD market it as a “future proof” platform! They want users to pay a premium for last gen performance in exchange for the shallow promise of upgrades in the future. Over the next few days, Intel’s 13th gen (Raptor Lake) will launch. Shoppers will do well to wait until then. Despite AMD’s Neanderthal marketing techniques, it’s hard not to admire their technical progress. AMD-Raptor4 and Intel-Zen13 would be better fitting product names. [Sep '22CPUPro]
The i5-8400 is a competitively priced hex-core processor from Intel’s 8th generation of Core processors (Coffee Lake). Along with the release of the unlocked i5-8600K, this is the first time that six-core processors have featured in the i5 line-up. Like the other Coffee Lake processors, the i5-8400 is based upon an improved version of Intel’s 14nm architecture which featured in both Skylake and Kaby Lake. Early benchmarks reveal that for average quad core usage (most games employ a maximum of four cores) the i5-8400 performs way above its pay grade. It achieves quad core mixed speeds close to Intel’s outgoing 2017 flagship the $300, quad-core, 8 thread i7-7700k, which to date has been a strong favourite for high-end gaming setups. On paper, the i5-8400 has a base clock of 2.8 GHz (Intel are significantly downplaying the performance of this SKU by giving it a relatively low nominal base clock), an all core boost of 3.8 GHz (this is the effective base clock figure that counts) and a single core boost of 4 GHz. This compares reasonably well to the i5-8600K which has a base clock of 3.6 GHz, all core boost of 4.1 GHz and a single core boost of 4.3 GHz. The i5-8400 also features 9MB of L3 cache and an energy-thrifty TDP of 65W. Priced at under $190, the i5-8400 offers fantastic value for money. Unfortunately, like the other Coffee Lake processors, the i5-8400 will require a new 300 series motherboard, and at the time of writing, the only available version is Intel’s high-end Z370 which isn't an ideal pairing for the i5-8400. The Z series motherboards are designed to cater for the unlocked and overclockable "K" SKUs. Cheaper 300 series motherboards will be available in 2018 at which time the 8400 will offer even better value for money. [Oct '17CPUPro]
We calculate effective speed which measures real world performance for typical users. Effective speed is adjusted by current prices to yield a value for money rating. Our calculated values are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top CPUs. [CPUPro]
Welcome to our PC speed test tool. UserBenchmark will test your PC and compare the results to other users with the same components. You can quickly size up your PC, identify hardware problems and explore the best value for money upgrades.