Intel Core i5-8400 6-Core 6-Thread CPU Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark Firestrike

The Intel Core i5-8400 gets off to a good start for one of the mid-range CPUs, beating out the Ryzen offerings at stock, and setting a reasonable score while overclocked.

Stock

Overclocked

Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme

PCIe throughput is good, showing no signs of slow down in Unigine at stock clocks, and a small boost in performance while overclocked. Not that we were expecting the i5 to “bottleneck” a 1080 Ti, but it’s good to see what it really doesn’t slow things down.

Stock

Overclocked

PCMark 10 Express

Productivity is a big deal at home and in the office, and the 8400 certainly helps pick up the pace with its 6 core design, setting a score that pulled ahead of the Ryzen chips. Overclocking helped a lot too, putting the CPU in third place and almost as fast as the two Intel i7’s.

Stock

Overclocked

WPrime 32M and 1024M

This is where this CPU was always going to struggle to compete, as it doesn’t support hyper threading. More threads and more cores bring faster WPrime scores. That being said, it’s on par with the Ryzen 5 CPUs, give or take, which is where it’s priced too, so no big surprise there.

Stock

Overclocked

Cinebench R15

Cinebench performance is decent enough, but nothing amazing either. Overclocking certainly helped improve the score, but it helped every other CPU too, so the Ryzen chips are still looking more productive here. That being said, i5 isn’t designed for heavy video editing tasks, it’ll do it, but that’s the realm of the i7.

Stock

Overclocked

Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K

The same is true of Handbrake, it certainly benefits from the 6 core design and sets a respectable score that’s competitive with the 1600X. Overclocking really brought it some nice performance boosts though, managing to beat out the full range of Ryzen 7 CPUs.

Stock

Overclocked