Intel Core i5 Coffee Lake i5-8400 BOX (BX80684I58400)

There were four, now there are six

The Core i5-8400 is perhaps the most interesting processor in the Coffee Lake family. Unlike the i5 of previous generations, it has not four, but six physical cores at the same price of $180. As a result, the i5-8400 is even faster in games than the $350 quad-core but eight-thread Core i7-7700. Whereas in video editing and other professional tasks, eight threads are still faster than six cores.

Don't trust the numbers

At first glance, the i5-8400 has a low base frequency of only 2.8 GHz. And the claimed Turbo Boost frequency of 4 GHz is relevant only for one core. But in addition to single-core auto-overclocking, the i5-8400 also has a multi-core, but slightly less high-frequency one — up to 3.8 GHz. And unlike laptop low-voltage Core i5, auto overclocking is not limited in time. As long as there is enough motherboard power and a cooler heat sink (it is advisable to replace the boxed one with a tower one), Turbo Boost will work for all six cores.

The Smart Gamer's Choice

Like other Core Coffee Lakes, the i5-8400 has integrated UHD 630 graphics. But this processor is clearly not designed for it, but for discrete video cards like GeForce GTX 1060 or 1070 and Radeon RX 580 or Vega RX 56. The most resource-intensive games like Assassin's Creed Origins can no longer run smoothly on quad-core processors — give them at least six cores. The fault lies not so much with the game engines themselves, but rather with the Denuvo and VMProtect anti-piracy protection systems, which load the processor very heavily. As a result, at the moment, the i5-8400 can be considered the fundamental processor for assembling a gaming PC, which is capable of running any modern game and has a performance margin of at least a couple of years.