Intel’s Core i5-12400F is already on sale, even before the CPU has been announced, according to reports anyway.
This comes from VideoCardz which highlights that over in Peru, XanxoGaming claims to have bought one of these mid-range Alder Lake processors (a boxed copy at a retailer). Apparently it cost 899 Sols which is about $220 (or around £170, AU$310).
This is an interesting processor because it’s an Alder Lake model which doesn’t have any efficiency cores, meaning that there’s no hybrid tech here – it’s just a straight 6-core CPU (all of them performance or standard cores).
Now having the chip in their hands, XanxoGaming has promised some benchmarks in the near future, so we can expect some leakage around the performance of this processor – assuming this whole affair is genuine. (We need the usual caution applied here, though the pics supplied, including the box and that new stock cooler – an outdated affair which looks like a poor effort as we’ve observed recently – seem authentic to us).
Also, as VideoCardz points out, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a CPU on sale before it’s actually launched by Intel, because this happened with Rocket Lake too, when the Core i7-11700K was purchased by punters before it was released over in Germany.
Analysis: This mid-range chip could boast startling performance levels
It’ll be really interesting to see how this purported Core i5-12400F performs (the ‘F’ refers to the CPU having no integrated graphics, in case you were wondering). A previous leak pointed to some quite startling performance for the price bracket this processor will be in, with Cinebench scores suggesting that it could be a Ryzen 5 5600X beater (hefty condiments sprinkled about with any pre-release performance metrics, though, as ever).
While the Core i5-12400F looks like it will end up considerably undercutting the 5600X on price, we have to bear in mind that Alder Lake requires a new motherboard, and therefore potentially more overall expense in terms of upgrading (depending on the buyer’s exact situation, of course).
Furthermore, AMD may have something new to replace the 5600X in the form of a beefed-up 3D V-cache toting new spin on the current chip, or so rumor has it, coming at CES 2022 – or at least being revealed. And CES is indeed where we should see Intel launch this Core i5-12400F, and other non-K Alder Lake silicon, going by speculation.
There were no 12400F specs spilled by XanxoGaming, but previous leakage has pointed to boost speeds of up to 4.4GHz single-core (4GHz all-core).
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