Alder Lake-S GPUs will not feature Efficient cores, i5-12400F beats out i7 and AMD

While Intel’s 12th-generation Alder Lake-S processors are here, led by the Core i9-12900K, Team Blue hasn’t revealed the less powerful non-K variants. But now we have a better idea of what those will look like. 

Some leaked marketing materials for the Intel Core i3-12100F, Core i5-12400F, and Core i7-12700F have been spotted by VideoCardz. And the Core i3 and i5 may be the first of the desktop Alder Lake SKUs without Efficient cores.

The marketing materials include packaging for the three chips. They’ll apparently come with the Laminar RM1 stock cooler rated for 65W TDP, which was previously leaked, though it’s unconfirmed whether OEM packaging will be sold with the cooler.

According to the leaked materials, the Intel Core i3-12100F will have 4 cores and 8 threads, and will boost up to 4.3 GHz. Meanwhile the Core i5-12400F will feature 6 cores and 12 threads, while the i7-12700F is set to have the same specs as the already-released K variant but with a lower frequency and TDP.

None of this has been confirmed by Intel, though, so you should take it all with a grain of salt.

Benchmarks for Intel Core i5-12400F are already promising

The Intel Core i5-12400F already seems to be a powerhouse, if the latest benchmarks leaked by two content creators on Bilibili are anything to go by. Several tests, including one for gaming, show that it beats out the Core i7-11700K, Core i5-11400F, and the Ryzen 5 5600X in most tests and ties in a few others.

In the performance benchmarks, the i5-12400F is superior to the other chips in single-core performance within CPU-Z and faster than the 5600X and 11400F in multi-threaded tests. It only loses out to the Core i7, in which the latter has a much higher clock speed and thread count.

The Cinebench R23 benchmark reveals much of the same, with the i5 being 19% faster in multi-threaded tests and 11% faster in single-threaded tests. The TimeSpy CPU score proves this as well, with the Intel i5-12400F being around 13% faster than the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X.

The gaming benchmarks, in which all CPUs had been tested at 1080p also showcase the power of the little chip. In CSGO, the i5-12400F is 4% faster, in Shadow of The Tomb Raider the average frame rate is just about even with the Ryzen 5, and in Red Dead Redemption 2 the chip overtakes all of the others tested.