Intel Core i5-12400F DDR4 vs DDR5 Review

Features

Just before we went to press - oh the joys of companies restricting information and being out of office over the festive/New Year period - we finally got some more official information about what the Core i5-12400 and B660 are bringing to the table. Thankfully it's everything we'd already guessed at. Apparently if you work for over a decade on a site you learn to know what is going to be likely to be delivered.

The Core i5-12400F is 6 Performance (regular) cores and 12 threads with a Turbo boost of 4.4GHz. Exactly what we saw from our testing.

Like the Z690 before it the B660 is a slightly reduced version of its bigger brother, albeit one that still has all the features one would realistically use on any setup such as this. Nobody needs more than one PCI Express slot since multi-GPU setups were pretty much consigned to history, and with 20 PCIe lanes off the CPU there is more than enough to keep the M.2 slots fed.

Although we're looking at the two B660 motherboards here - also utterly identical besides their DDR4 or DDR5 support - there is a glimpse at how the various Alder Lake chipsets compare, and how they compare in turn with the ones that came before. It's a stark reminder of how far forwards Intel have leapt in a single move from the 11th to 12th Gen.