Intel’s Core i5 12400F was and still is a capable budget gaming CPU. When I bought this chip at the end of summer 2022, DDR5 memory was still costly, and the benefit in gaming was not worth the price by a long shot. In 2023, Intel’s 13th-gen CPUs benefit significantly from faster memory, and DDR5 prices have reached their equilibrium where DDR4 was last year. I could have taken advantage of slotting in a Core-13000 model, maybe even a 14000 variant, but I am too much of a tech enthusiast to ignore the performance I could be leaving on the table with DDR4.

As you will see, I probably would not have noticed the difference and potentially benefitted the one game that triggered the upgrade thoughts. I recently took advantage of AMD’s Starfield bundles and received a new GPU with my game purchase. I knew of all the discussion around this game’s performance profile. Intel owns this game despite it being an AMD-sponsored title. Nevertheless, the 12400 had issues in the CPU-heavy areas, like New Atlantis.

(It appears that AMD or Bethesda forgot that AMD also makes CPUs, which is baffling since AMD makes the Xbox chips and Xbox owns Bethesda…)

Anyway.

The Ryzen 7600 should walk all over the 12400 with DDR4. The Intel chip is roughly equivalent to a Ryzen R5 5600X, and compared to that processor, the R5 7600 is 30% faster in games on average, according to Hardware Unboxed’s testing published on Techspot.

I performed several gaming benchmarks that compare the i5 12400F to the R5 7600 when paired with a Radeon RX 7900 XT.

Motivation

Hardware Unboxed’s numbers are based on the currently fastest GPU on the market. I do not have that GPU, and while the RX 7900 XT is no slouch, it is merely holding the 4090’s beer. I could not find any valuable numbers from which to correlate the CPU performance impact to a Radeon RX 7900 XT, and I hope my simple tests give you an idea of what to expect.

Disclaimer

I am not a professional reviewer who has days to spend on benchmarking. I also wanted to build my new system and play around with it. And without having components to spare, I had to disassemble the old configuration to breathe life into the new one.

I performed these tests to validate my purchase, and to that end, built-in benchmarks were good enough for me. I also did not run several tests and averaged the results. Lastly, I only discovered the usefulness of AMD’s Adrenalin Driver performance logging in the last game, Starfield, which did not have a benchmark. As such, not all tests will have meaningful 1% lows.

I also only had a few games to test, of which only two were recent. I would have liked to include something like Remnant 2 or Immortals of Aveum as representatives of Unreal Engine 5. Unfortunately, there’s only so much time for gaming that I have not yet purchased any of those titles.

Test Systems

Both systems ran Windows 11 with all updates available from Oct. 12th to 14th, and a Radeon RX 7900 XT painted the beautiful art onto the stalwart LG 27GL850 monitor.

The Core i5 12400F was paired with 16GB of 3200 MT/s CL16 DDR4 memory on an MSI B660M Mortar motherboard. The Ryzen R5 7600 calls an MSI B650 Tomahawk WIFI its home, and the bookshelves consist of 32 GB of G.Skill 6000 MT/s CL32 DDR5 memory sticks.

(Great analogy)

Benchmarks

Let me start with the older titles and work up to the recent ones. When games automatically enabled FSR upscaling as part of a preset, I turned it off – although I tend to enable it while gaming if it makes sense.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Sep. 2018)

This benchmark only accurately reports the average framerate. Minimum values are separated for CPU and GPU, and I did not write all of that down. Luckily, SotTR shows that Intel’s 12400F limited the GPU. It already was a high-refresh-rate experience, but with the Ryzen 7600, the refreshes got even higher. Of course, this only means something if you do not care about Vsync or have a 240+ Hz monitor.

	1080p		1440p
	Highest	High	Highest	High
i5 12400F	189	190	180	189
R5 7600	238	246	205	222

Horizon Zero Dawn (Aug. 2020)

Aloy’s first adventure on PC tells a similar story to Lara Croft’s last adventure. The Ryzen 7600 is 20 to 40 fps faster, depending on the resolution. Min values are also absent here, as they are reported separately for CPU and GPU.

	1080p		1440p
	Ultimate Quality	Favor Quality	Ultimate Quality	Favor Quality
i5 12400F	171	178	163	172
R5 7600	212	229	184	196

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Nov. 2020)

Ubisoft’s benchmark is the first and only in this list that reports average framerate and 1% lows. Nice! Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is mostly GPU-bound, and only the 1% lows at 1080p saw a slight uplift. The 1440p values did not move a bit.

	1080p		1440p
	Ultra High	Very High	Ultra High	Very High
i5 12400F	121/182	131/195	105/150	112/161
R5 7600	132/185	141/197	105/150	112/161

Cyberpunk 2077 v2.0 (Sep. 2023)

I tested Cyberpunk with the 2.0 update, but no Phantom Liberty extension. The lower values are minimum FPS, which do not say that much. It is noteworthy, however, that the AMD CPU consistently achieved higher min-fps, which would mean a much more comfortable above-60 experience. For science, I also ran 1440p-Ultra with FSR2 Quality. That would get me a lot closer to the 144 Hz of my monitor. But even at the native resolution, Cyberpunk would perform very smoothly.

Raytracing would also be an excellent way to test CPU performance. However, this would only make sense on an RTX 4080 or RTX 4090. AMD’s graphics cards are too much of a bottleneck for such a test to have any meaning.

	1080p		1440p
	Ultra	High	Ultra	High
i5 12400F	69/152	91/164	66/124	56/138
R5 7600	73/167	96/184	72/128	83/137
R5 7600 (FSR-Q)			78/145

Starfield (Sep. 2023)

Lastly, there is Starfield. In this game, I utilized the Adrenalin performance logging, which is a very useful tool to have built into the driver. Since this is a CPU benchmark, I used a stroll through New Atlantis to measure the performance. I started at the MAST subway station, walked up the ramp, turned right, ran past the Reliant Medical building on the left, up the small ramp, and through the “park”-like area.

As you can see, neither CPU can really guarantee above 60 fps in a large city like New Atlantis. With my custom settings, based on Hardware Unboxed’s recommendations and FSR at 90%, the GPU was almost bored while the CPU was close to throwing up. That is why I did not even try 1080p. The graphics card is not the bottleneck here.

	1440p
	Ultra	High
i5 12400F	54/67	56/70
R5 7600	58/70	62/74
R5 7600 (Custom)	63/74 79% GPU Usage, 97% CPU Usage

Famous Last Words

My reason for upgrading the CPU was the i5’s performance in Starfield. I knew this title favored Intel CPUs, but I still expected the R5 7600 to perform better than it did compared to the 12400F. Tough luck, I guess. Although the performance uplift is minuscule, I do think that hitching was reduced.

Only Horizon Zero Dawn and Shadow of the Tomb Raider saw a meaningful uplift in 1080p and 1440p. However, the framerates are already so high that the averages exceed my monitor’s refresh rate. Except for Starfield’s big city, the Core i5 12400F already delivered a high-enough-refresh-rate experience. The upgrade won’t do much for you unless you have a much more powerful GPU than a Radeon RX 7900 XT and a 240Hz+ monitor. For Starfield specifically, a drop-in 13600K replacement would have likely achieved more – despite DDR4. Do note that this is purely conjecture on my part.

If I wanted to summarize the upgrade in just a few words, I would say it was a waste of money.

However, being a tech enthusiast, I enjoyed the building process. This gave me a few hours of tech-Zen (no pun intended), helping me forget about work and the world. I also tell myself that I am playing the long game and hope to slot in a CPU that is the 5800X3D of the AM5 platform in a couple of years 😉.

I hope my benchmarks helped you somewhat in your research.

Thank you for reading.