INTEL CORE i5-8400

More cores. Less cash. What’s not to like?

IT’S TAKEN the better part of a decade, but Intel has finally upped the core count of its mainstream PC processors. Give it up for the new Coffee Lake chips!

As we’ve explained elsewhere, the big news with the Coffee Lake generation is the jump from two cores and four cores to four cores and six cores. In other words, where once you got two cores, now you have four. And where you had four, you now get six. This new Core i5-8400 replaces the quadcore Core i5-7400. So, it’s a six-core beast. Like previous Core i5 models, it doesn’t support HyperThreading, so that’s six cores and just six threads. Also somewhat similar to before is the price. Intel lists the Core i5-8400 at $182; however, they’re currently retailing for $200, meaning 50 percent more cores for almost the same money. Nice.

What’s more, you don’t lose out much by way of clock speeds, either. OK, the base clock has dropped from 3GHz to 2.8GHz, but the top Turbo frequency is actually up fairly dramatically, from 3.5GHz to 4GHz. What’s more, the L3 cache memory pool has grown from 6MB to 9MB. What you don’t get, however, is a great deal by way of additional architectural enhancements. Intel hasn’t made much noise about improvements to the CPU cores themselves, for instance. The new Coffee Lake chips are also still made with 14nm transistors, just like other Intel processors dating back to the Broadwell generation in 2014, though Intel does state that Coffee Lake benefits from a revised production node known as “14nm+.”

Similarly, the integrated graphics core is essentially carried over. It now runs at 1.05GHz peak instead of 1GHz. And it has better support for outputting at 4K. But as a gaming proposition, Intel’s integrated graphics core seems to be stalling. It was never very convincing, of course, but it now looks entirely redundant. Better to remove it from the chip altogether and lower the price, or replace it with more CPU cores perhaps. After all, how many customers are going to run the likes of this new Core i5-8400 on integrated as opposed to even a low-end discrete GPU? Very few, we wager.

PLATFORM GAMES

Anyway, the final major factor to consider before we dive into performance involves platform support. If anything, this is the big disappointment with the new Coffee Lake chips. For starters, you need a new motherboard, despite Coffee Lake being pin-compatible with Sky Lake. Intel says that’s because the new chips require more power. Sadly, however, the new Z370 chipset appears to be a rebadge of the old Z270, with no new features. Likewise, the new chips don’t have additional PCI Express lanes in and out of the CPU die compared with their Sky Lake progenitors. Pity.

What isn’t disappointing is performance. As we’d expected from the detailed specifications, the 8400 clocks up to 3.8GHz with all six cores under heavy load. So, you’re getting a really nice combination of core count and operating frequency, especially considering the modest price point. That’s just as well, given this is not a “K” series model, so overclocking is not an option. But remember, these are proper, modern Intel CPU cores. In fact, they’re the best cores in the business—better even than AMD’s impressive new Ryzen cores. From a multithreading perspective, it absolutely blows away previous Core i5 models, and it’s close enough in terms of single-threaded performance that you’d never feel the difference.

Of course, where the old Core i5 really scored was as a gaming a CPU. Arguably, there are relatively few current games that really scale well beyond four cores. However, as more and more games appear that make the most of the multithreading capabilities of the new DX12 and Vulkan APIs, that could well change. With this fantastic six-core Core i5, you’re ready to cash in if and when that happens. In the meantime, you’ve got a great all-around CPU at a surprisingly affordable price. We like. We like a lot.

Intel Core i5-8400

SIX OF THE BEST More of Intel’s finest cores for less cash; decent clocks; superb all-around performance.

BIT OF A HEX Needs a new motherboard; doesn’t support overclocking; no new platform features.

$200, www.intel.com