Intel’s Alder Lake i5-12400F offers six hyper-threaded performance cores at an MSRP of just $180 USD. This represents excellent value for consumers and, in particular, gamers. It has a boost frequency of 4.4 GHz, 18 MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 65W. The F-version of the CPU does not have integrated graphics, however this will be of little concern to gamers with discrete GPUs. Whilst Intel’s overclockable i5-12600K has four additional efficiency cores and offers around 12% more performance than the 12400F, it also costs around 50% more. The 12400F offers great value, but to achieve optimal performance the requisite B660 motherboard (which supports 3200+ RAM) is, at least for now, difficult to find at reasonable ($150 USD) prices. AMD’s top value hex-core Ryzen 5 5600X offers similar performance for 50% more money. Despite Intel’s price / performance lead, AMD’s prolific marketers (forums, youtube, reddit etc.) have historically outsold Intel whilst carrying a similar handicap.[Jan '22CPUPro]
Ryzen 4000 Mobile CPUs offer benchmark busting multi-core performance on the go, but marketing hype aside, it’s unclear how this will translate to real world performance. Sixteen threads are great for beating benchmarks including UserBenchmark 64-core, Cinebench, Blender-CPU and Handbrake-CPU but gamers need performance in the games that they actually play. At launch, the top GPU available in a 4000 series laptop is the RTX 2060. Since the GPU is largely responsible for overall gaming performance, the Ryzen 4000 laptops will offer mid tier gaming performance at best. Pairing stronger GPUs would be suboptimal because the Ryzen gaming bottleneck becomes increasingly severe with more powerful GPUs. Streamers and media producers, who may have historically benefited from high core counts, are better off using the GPU (NVENC or QuickSync) for encoding. Leading media creation applications including both DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro are largely GPU bound. With low power consumption and high core counts, the 4000 range, on paper at least, is a perfect fit for the datacenter. AMD should focus on delivering a platform that offers performance where end users actually need it rather than targeting inexperienced gamers with the same old "moar cores" mantra. From a gamer’s perspective, the best feature of the 4000 series laptops is the absence of the equally hyped 5000 series GPUs. Prospective gaming laptop buyers will find lower latency (and therefore better gaming) CPUs combined with faster GPUs at similar price points. [Jun '20CPUPro]
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.