Intel’s Core i5-10400 ($182) is not the company’s flagship six-core desktop CPU in its 10th Generation stack. (That honor goes to the unlocked Core i5-10600K, which we reviewed at launch last year.) But what the Core i5-10400 lacks in overclockability, it makes up for in tenacity. The chip stays in the race against AMD’s onslaught of Editors’ Choice-winning powerhouse six-core CPUs, like the Ryzen 5 5600X and last-generation 3600X. The Core is a solid value pick for those who already own an LGA 1200 motherboard and are looking to game with a discrete GPU. But strictly as a midrange upgrade, AMD’s Ryzen 5 chips make more sense in both cost-per-core and overall performance—if you can get one near list price. As a rare Intel value play, the Core i5-10400 is a decent bet for PC gamers and mainstream users if AMD Ryzen 3000 and 5000 chips stay hard to get and/or inflated in price.
Intel Core i5-10400 Specs: In the Middle With You
To elaborate on our introduction, Intel’s move to the LGA 1200 socket with its “Comet Lake” 10th Generation desktop chips saps much of the Core i5-10400’s value proposition, since you need to get a new motherboard for it. That’s in contrast with AMD’s ubiquitous support of Socket AM4 with its mainstream Ryzen CPUs.
Boards with that socket, through a host of chipsets, have been on the market for years now, and you may already own one. That is not likely in the case of Intel’s new boards, and that dampens the value proposition of lower-end chips. The Core i5’s performance doesn’t do enough to justify a standalone upgrade in an existing board unless, for some unlikely reason, you happen to own an LGA 1200 board equipped with a 2020-release of a Pentium Gold or Core i3 chip.
Speaking of the uphill battle that Intel has been fighting against AMD on the desktop, let’s start off our discussion of the Intel Core i5-10400 and where it sits against AMD’s lineup of entry-level and midrange CPUs, priced around $150 to $300, by looking at some of basic specs of both…
The six-core/12-thread Intel Core i5-10400 represents the low end of Intel’s midrange options, and finds itself competing across the aisle with processors like AMD’s Ryzen 3 3400G ($149), the Ryzen 3 3600 ($199), and the Ryzen 5 5600X ($299). The Ryzen 3 3400G is one of AMD’s only chips in the same price range with integrated graphics; the others need a discrete video card.
However, before we continue down the road of this review, we should mention some recent findings first. While it’s standard protocol to rate a CPU on its MSRP or RCP (“recommended customer price,” in Intel lingo), in the past few weeks (as of this writing in February 2021), the prices of 10th Generation Intel chips have been discounted somewhat at a number of online retailers. While the Intel Core i5-10400 lists for $182, you may find it between $150 and $160, depending on where you choose to shop.
Even still, in my eyes, price cuts for this chip and other lower-end 10th Generation models may not outweigh the ultimate cost of adoption, which includes an LGA 1200 motherboard. AMD’s continued lean into Socket AM4 has proven to be a boon for the company, giving a much wider swath of upgraders the opportunity to beef up their existing AMD systems with CPUs like the Ryzen 5 3600 at a fraction of the cost of getting an Intel Core i5-10400 system off the ground. Intel’s insistence on refreshing its desktop sockets with such regularity has once again shot the company’s budget-focused options in their metaphorical feet.
Intel did make one smart power move with this chip and some others in the Comet Lake line: The Core i5-10400 sees the reintroduction of Hyper-Threading to its spec sheet. It bumped up the number of threads available from the Intel Core i5-9400 (six cores/six threads), to 12 processing threads off the six cores of the Core i5-10400. That’s a big deal, to be sure, but practically a necessity to keep these Intel chips viable at this point versus the Ryzen juggernaut.
Like many of the other chips in the Intel 10th Generation stack, the Core i5-10400 includes an Intel UHD Graphics 630 integrated graphics processor (IGP). AMD currently doesn’t offer any processors with an IGP and more than four cores onboard in its 3000 or 5000 Series Ryzen lines, so the closest point of comparison on the Ryzen side is the four-core/eight-thread AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with its Vega 11 onboard graphics. That and its Ryzen 3 equivalent, the 3200G, haven’t seen a move to the Zen 3 architecture and the Ryzen 50000 series. (Yet, anyway.)
The Intel Core i5-10400 rests right around the cusp of where Intel stops including its stock coolers bundled in the box, and at this price point including one makes sense. This is not an overclocking CPU, so the fan in the box should suffice for almost everyone. At least everyone who doesn’t have to look at this now old-school design through a clear case window.
Testing the Core i5-10400: AMD’s Got Your Number
We tested the Core i5-10400 on an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero (Wi-Fi) motherboard (a Z490-chipset board), with 16GB of G.Skill memory clocked to 3,000MHz (for comparability with our earlier CPU reviews), and an Intel SATA boot SSD paired with an ADATA SATA M.2 secondary drive.
All this was packed in ADATA’s XPG Invader chassis, fitted with a Deepcool GamerStorm Captain 240 EX 240mm liquid cooler and a 750-watt Corsair power supply. For our gaming tests, we used an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, at Founders Edition clocks, as we have on all recent mainstream and high-end CPU reviews.
We test CPUs using a variety of synthetic benchmarks that offer proprietary scores, as well as real-world tests using consumer apps like 7-Zip, and 3D games such as Far Cry 5. For chips at the tier of the Intel Core i5-10400, we also run several games using the IGP alone, without a discrete video card. Included in the charts below is a variety of like-priced competing and sibling AMD and Intel CPUs.
CPU-Centric Tests: Not the Workhorse You Were Looking For
Over the last couple of years, Intel’s midrange options have struggled against AMD’s in productivity tasks. But how did the Core i5-10400, with its Hyper-Threading restored, fare once its threads were put to the test?
About the same as the rest, unfortunately. Like-priced or slightly pricier AMD silicon (at least, if you compare on launch prices) continues to dominate in content creation and productivity tasks.
The Ryzen 5 3600, the Ryzen 5 3600X, the Ryzen 5 3600XT, and the Ryzen 5 5600X are all superior six-core options for productivity when compared with the Core i5-10400 or even the Core i5-10600K, and key productivity benchmarks like 7-Zip plainly show the gap that exists between Intel and AMD in the six-core arena. The Core i5-10400 does decisively top the four-core, IGP-equipped Ryzen 5 3400G in all of the CPU tests; park that thought for moment.
Gaming at the Midrange: Intel Core i5-10400 Frame Rates With Discrete GPU
Here’s what we saw in our bank of gaming tests with our GeForce RTX 2080 Ti card running the show. This top-end consumer graphics card is the primary arbiter of performance at 4K with all of the CPUs that we have laid out below. At 1080p, though, the card gets out of the way a bit more and lets the CPU differences shine.
One of the primary buyers we see for the Core i5-10400 are midrange gamers who either already own a discrete GPU to pair with their processor, or who are planning to buy one alongside the Core i5-10400 as a part of their new build. And they’ll likely be running at 1080p, not 4K.
In this run of tests, the Core i5-10400 is competitive, if outshined by the Ryzen 3 3300X on value, and the Ryzen 5 5600X on performance. Compare the 5600X’s results against the Ryzen 5 3600X from last generation; you can see the huge gains AMD has made with frame rates with the Zen 3 architecture. The Core i5 chip does score some surprising wins in a few of our legacy game tests (the Bioshock: Infinite results are especially eyebrow-raising), but they are fewer than Intel needs to walk away with a decisive victory here.
Gaming on Integrated Graphics: Intel Core i5-10400 IGP Results
As a midrange chip, the Intel Core i5-10400 straddles the line as a chip that can power games along with a discrete GPU, as well as a chip that can run the show all on its own with the help of its onboard Intel UHD Graphics 630. We run lower-end CPUs that have IGPs through a series of games tuned to either near-lowest, or the lowest, settings at a 1,280-by-720-pixel resolution (720p), as well as at 1,920 by 1,080 pixels (1080p).
Well, at least the IGP here is better than what’s on a last-gen Pentium or Celeron. Intel’s venerable UHD Graphics 630 silicon has been showing its age for some time now, but nowhere is that contrast more obvious than when stacked up against AMD’s Radeon RX Vega integrated silicon.
Both the Vega 8 and Vega 11 IGPs (in the AMD Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G, respectively) have proven themselves to be solid options for anyone looking to work and play all off of the same chip on a very tight budget. While Intel’s coming 11th Generation “Rocket Lake” CPUs may bring the promise of fresh Iris Xe IGP silicon (and hopefully boosted frame rates) to go along with them, until then Intel’s UHD Graphics 630 should be avoided for pure gaming. UHD Graphics works fine for productivity use, but it’s far from a gaming solution.
Note that on the IGP, the Core i5-10400 did slightly worse against the Core i3-10100 in tests like Rainbow Six: Siege and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, an unexpected result given the price and performance difference between the two chips. (The much higher base clock on the Core i3, at 3.6GHz versus 2.9GHz on the Core i5, may have helped there.)
A Brief Look at Overclocking and Thermals
While the Intel Core i5-10400 never topped 57 degrees C in our testing, that’s likely down to our overkill cooling system used in our testbed. If you plan to cool the Core i5-10400 on air (which, unless you happen to have an idle AIO liquid cooler hanging around, we recommend at this price level), expect higher temperatures, though likely not by too much.
As the Core i5-10400 is a non-“K”-series chip (a “K” suffix designates an overclockable CPU in Intel’s line), we didn’t get a chance to see what the Core i5-10400 could do in an overclocked profile. Those looking for a six-core Intel-based option that can have its boost clocks pushed up will need to opt for the Intel Core i5-10600K mentioned up top.
Verdict: Fine in a Processor Pinch
As a cheaper alternative to the Intel Core i5-10600K, the Core i5-10400 slots right into its expected spot in the mainstream CPU hierarchy. If you want a six-core 10th Generation Intel processor with slightly more productivity potential and some overclockability, the Core i5-10600K is your chip. However, if you’re trying to shave down costs and don’t expect to overclock, the Core i5-10400 will still get the job done for about 35% less.
In a vacuum, the Intel Core i5-10400 is solid for what it is, but as is tradition these days, when stacked up against the bevy of options available from AMD, the Core i5-10400 wilts under the pressure. The Ryzen 5 3600X is superb, albeit pricey and tricky to get, but even the last-gen Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X are almost universally better picks than the Core i5-10400 (as well as the Core i5-10600K). That is both for their raw CPU performance and for their far-reaching motherboard compatibility. Meanwhile, budget-minded gamers playing on a discrete GPU will be better served by the $120 Ryzen 3 3300X (if you can find one for anywhere near that price, that is) or the $99 Ryzen 3 3100 (ditto that).
Finally, the Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G, despite having two fewer cores than the Core i5-10400, regularly outperform the Core i5 in gaming on their IGPs by a significant margin (and remember; they’re both compatible with AM4). If on-the-cheap, no-video-card gaming is what you are after, it is no contest.
The Intel Core i5-10400 doesn’t fit into any category as an outright winner, and even the recent price softness we have seen for some 10th Generation chips in Intel’s stack won’t be enough to elevate the chip beyond its station. The strong demand for, inflated prices of, and spotty availability of recent Ryzens keep the Core i5 viable at 3.5 stars here in early 2021. Let’s hope that Intel’s Rocket Lake-based equivalent (just spitballing here, let’s guess it’ll be a Core i5-11400?) can finally beat, or at least meet, AMD at its own game.
