Intel Core i5 11400F evaluation: the suitable mainstream gaming CPU

The Core i5 11400F has emerged as one thing of an now not really champion in the wake of Intel’s Rocket Lake S start. The upper dwell of Intel’s unique lineup is with out a doubt performant, nonetheless for loads of investors the price simply is rarely there whereas discounted 10th-gen equivalents are serene on hand (namely when the 10900K’s additional cores give it an outright lead over its successor for sigh material advent workloads). So it has been the low and mid-differ fraction of the stack that has garnered the most certain press, the effect Intel’s roughly 20 percent gen-on-gen performance beneficial properties and more characteristic-prosperous B560 motherboards appreciate created some quite unreal designate.

The pitch right here is quite easy: the Core i5 11400F funds around £150/$175, but its six core and twelve thread originate serene hits the hot candy enlighten for gaming and occasional sigh material advent. Or now not it is clocked just 400MHz slower than the Core i5 11600K (4.2GHz vs 4.6GHz for max all-core turbo), and each of its cores must be quite worthy, given its contemporary Cypress Cove originate. In the suitable case space, it may maybe well maybe well now not be atrocious to hope for performance in accordance with the Ryzen 5000 series – nonetheless at a considerably decrease asking designate than AMD’s £260/$300 entry-stage Ryzen 5 5600X. That sounds cherish the recipe for a designate champion, so we had been bright to fetch checking out.

As we’re easiest adding one CPU to our charts, we’ll motivate this introductory online page immediate – at least, that you just can be taught our corpulent 11900K and 11600K evaluation for a more detailed write-up of the unique factors arriving with Intel’s 11th-gen desktop chips and 500-series motherboards.

Offered that most of us obtained’t be pairing their 11400Fs with a £500+ Z590 motherboard, we have swapped in one thing more designate-appropriate for our valuable checking out: the £150/$175 MSI MAG B560M Mortar WiFi. As with other B560 boards, it supports two valuable unique factors: PCIe 4.0 parts (storage and graphics playing cards) and memory overclocking, with the latter previously reserved only for Intel’s best-dwell Z-series boards.

This has been paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Model, two 8GB sticks of G.Capacity Trident Z Royal RAM operating at 3600MHz CL16, a Gamer Storm 850W 80+ Gold energy provide and two coolers – our usual Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO for the bulk of our checking out, and the Intel box cooler that incorporates the 11400F for about a supplemental exams. Windows 10 and our games had been installed on a wide 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD from Box. As long-established, the most up-to-date Windows updates and Nvidia graphics drivers had been installed for checking out, with the Z590 board the exhaust of BIOS model 610 and the B560 board the exhaust of BIOS model 7D17v12.

We customarily exhaust the pleasing OpenBenchTable for checking out, nonetheless this time we faded Cooler Master’s $200 MasterFrame 700. This colossal aggregate take a look at bench and commence-air indicate case is de facto the reverse of the 11400F in every plan, and we’ll fraction a little evaluation of the unique take a look at bed at the conclusion to this evaluation.

Sooner than we fetch into the sigh material advent and gaming benchmark results, a immediate new about our RAM setup: non-Core i9 processors technically appreciate now not motivate RAM faster than 2933MHz when you happen to are the exhaust of the ‘Instruments 1’ surroundings to your BIOS, which uses a 1:1 ratio between the memory and memory controller. Alternatively, in practice, every the motherboards we tested the 11400F with faded 1:1 by default, even on our 3600MHz RAM, so this would now not seem like a aspect of the Intel guidance that’s carefully adhered to.

Lastly, valuable checking out used to be executed with energy limits successfully eradicated, which is executed by default when you happen to enlighten that you just can appreciate gotten an AiO or high-dwell air cooler upon first coming into the BIOS. This displays a regular exhaust case space the effect the actual person will be accepting the default motherboard alternatives to permit additional performance, and matches our outdated checking out methodology for CPUs. We also performed a handful of exams with the long-established box cooler and the default 65W restrict, which we’ll veil one after the other in this evaluation.

So, with that proviso out of the formulation – sigh material advent. We now appreciate opted for two barely immediate exams right here, to supply you with the wide strokes of how the 11400F performs for in model initiatives cherish 3D rendering and transcoding video from one layout to but another. The two specific apps are Cinebench R20, a benchmark application that mimics rendering a 3D scene in professional graphics equipment Cinema 4D, and Handbrake, the effect we encoded a high quality Patreon video into h.264 and h.265 (HEVC) codecs the exhaust of the free Handbrake application. We ran the exams twice, once the exhaust of the box cooler and the default 65W restrict, once with the 240mm AiO installed and its 255W energy target.

The single-core ratings for the 11400F had been 538 in every circumstances (as with the comfort of the cores inactive, we’re serene some distance from that 65W energy target). That is a wide result, as we’re roughly tied with the Core i9 10900K and considerably beyond the 493 ranking we recorded for the 11600K. That does mean we’re serene around 10 percent slower than the Ryzen 5600X and Core i5 11600K, nonetheless that’s a tighter margin than I expected and reveals the IPC advantage that Intel has been ready to acquire with their 11th-gen designs.

Transferring onto multi-core now, and right here we scrutinize a clear distinction between the 65W and 255W modes. The box cooler presents a valid ranking of 3600, nonetheless the unlimited energy result is set 10 percent faster at 3959. For reference, that places the 11400F just sooner than the 10600K at 3587, and just in the motivate of the Ryzen 3600X at 3705. The Ryzen 5600X is vastly faster at 4446, nonetheless this CPU funds virtually twice as critical. (By the formulation, we also ran Cinebench R20 with the box cooler and the energy limits disabled, which resulted in a multi-core ranking of 3953 – so as a minimal for barely immediate workloads, the box cooler is ample to retain CPU temperatures in ascertain at the expense of barely high noise ranges.)

The Handbrake encoding results indicate a comparable spread, with the 11400F gaining around 15 to 20 percent when it is unfettered by its 65W TDP. Its 28.47fps lead to the H.264 encoding take a look at places it sooner than the 10600K once again, and easiest 9 percent in the motivate of the Core i5 11600K and Ryzen 5 5600X. (Or now not it may maybe well maybe be basically tied with the ninth-gen i7!)

In HEVC encoding, the 11400F is virtually 10 percent faster than its closest Ryzen competitor, the 3600X, nonetheless it undoubtedly does eat more energy at its height: 242W used to be the very best corpulent draw readout we saw, in contrast to 149W for the 3600X (which used to be clearly the exhaust of a loads of motherboard, so appreciate now not be taught into that too critical.) With Intel’s default energy limits enabled, the 11400F draw maxed out at 207W, losing to 150W once the turbo restrict expired. So AMD retain the energy effectivity lead, nonetheless the 11400F as a minimal uses a long way much less energy for the length of HEVC encoding than the 11900K.

With the sigh material advent workloads executed, it is time to flip our attention to games. We tested the 11400F in 9 games, at the side of six titles that had been launched with our 11900K and 11600K evaluation earlier this year. Obtain your trudge from the alternatives below, or simply click on the Subsequent button to switch onwards.

Intel Core i5 11400F analysis

• Introduction, hardware breakdown, take a look at draw [This Page]
• Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, Hitman 3, Total Warfare Three Kingdoms
• Gaming benchmarks: CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege, Murky Ops Cool Warfare
• Gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Narrate 5, Crysis 3
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• Intel Core i5 11400F: the Digital Foundry verdict