Intel Core i5-10400F 10th Generation Processor

The Core i5-10400F in this review is a juicy lure for gamers as it offers 6 cores, 12 threads, and 12 MB of shared L3 cache—identical to the Core i7-8700, but with lower clock speeds at less than half its price. With the advent of the 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake" triggered by AMD "Zen," game developers were finally motivated to optimize their game engines to take advantage of more than four cores.The Intel Core i5-10400F is based on Intel's new "Comet Lake" microarchitecture that enables HyperThreading, increased L3 cache, and higher clock speeds across the entire 10th generation Core product stack, and debuts new boosting algorithms, although just for the Core i7 and Core i9 SKUs. Our tested Core i5-10400F ticks at the same 2.90 GHz as its predecessor, but has an increased maximum Turbo Boost frequency of 4.30 GHz, double the threads, and 50% more L3 cache. The increase in clocks is necessitated as the underlying CPU cores are of the same design as the nearly five-year-old "Skylake" microarchitecture.