Intel 11400F
Redefining the budget CPU market.
11th Gen CPUs may not have upended the marketplace like we hoped they would, but that perception was framed by our review of the flagship 11900K. It’s powerful, but it was generally a let down due to its step backwards in core count and its runaway power consumption. The 11600K fares a lot better, but now it’s time to look at the budget end of the market. The Core i5-11400F is the most affordable Rocket Lake CPU. It’s a 6-core/12-thread design with a 65W TDP. It includes the improved IPC of Rocket Lake while doing away with the crazy power consumption of the 8-core models. Then there’s the price. At around $239 at the time of writing, the 11400F offers stunning value for money. Is it the new budget champion? To save you from skipping forward to the conclusion, the answer is definitely yes.
The F in 11400F denotes the lack of integrated graphics, meaning you’ll need a discrete GPU. It comes with a very basic cooler. In addition to the enhanced IPC and PCIe 4.0 support, you get hardware accelerated Deep Learning functions and AVX-512 instruction support, though the latter are of limited use to a budget buyer or gamer at this point in time. The 11400F features a 2.6GHz base clock and a 4.4GHz boost clock. These relatively low clocks are the reason it gets a 65W TDP. That’s the PL1 figure though. Under stock operation, the CPU can boost up to 4.4GHz for 28 seconds, with a peak of 154W which is high for a budget CPU. It would have been interesting to see how 10nm Rocket Lake performed! It’s well within the capabilities of a decent mid-range cooler though. Many motherboards will set longer boost durations by default and we decided to leave it like this for our testing. We saw a peak power consumption reading of 149W, which is higher than we’d like, but when compared to 8-core Rocket Lake, it’s downright thrifty.
The 11400F competes very well with Intel’s 8th, 9th and 10th generation 6-core models. It beats the 6C/12T i7-8700K and i510600K and it destroys the likes of the non-hyperthreaded 8600K and 9600K. AMD doesn’t have a logical competitor. The Ryzen 5 5600X is twice the price while the likes of the 3600 and 3600X are becoming more difficult to find. The global semiconductor shortage is not helping AMD. Intel is fortunate to own its own fabs, and as long as it can keep supply up, for now, it rules the budget CPU market. Can you believe it? AMD’s 5000 series are better buys at the high end while Intel’s 10th and 11th Gen i5s are the budget picks. How times have changed!
The 11400F offers amazing gaming performance, especially when you loosen the power limits and ditch the bundled cooler for something more capable. If you’re a gamer on a budget, you’re far better off saving a few hundred over a high-end CPU and putting it towards a better GPU or a bigger PCIe 4.0 SSD. It drives our reference RTX 3080 without breaking a sweat. It’s not perfect though. At full load, power consumption is still too high for a budget CPU, but it is manageable. That aside, the 11400F is the best budget CPU on the market.
The 11400F offers stunning performance for its price. It’s the new budget CPU champion.