Intel Core i5 13400 Review

Intel Core i5-13400 Review

Introduction

If there is one thing we’re all guilty of it is dreaming about hardware that’s way out of our price league. It’s true in every sphere of interest. We dream of Ferraris, or Custom Shop Guitars, or McIntosh amplifiers.

Meanwhile back in the real world, everyone is feeling the squeeze of a cost of living crisis. So what do you do if you are feeling the pinch but still want to be able to escape from the horrors of daily life with a bit of gaming? Perhaps more to the point how affordable can you make the basis of your system whilst still getting good performance and saving a few extra pounds to put towards a more powerful graphics card? In the last generation that mantle was taken up by the Intel Core i5-12400, a processor which cost under £200 and had enough performance to push the polygons your GPU can never stop eating. It did, however, come at the cost of only middling performance in creation tasks.

Intel have now added a Core i5-13400 to their Raptor Lake range, and they’ve added four E-Cores to it over and above the 6C12T Core i5-12400. We’ve already seen how much of an assistance the E-Cores make to the newest Intel processors and so we’re naturally excited to discover if the Intel Core i5-13400 is just as great for gaming as its predecessor was. Especially as Intel have managed to keep the price below £200 which makes it an extremely attractive proposition, particularly if you plan to match it to one of the many B760 DDR4 motherboards that have just appeared on the market. Let’s find out how good it is.

Technical Specifications

You definitely need to embiggen this picture to make it legible. For those unable or unwilling to do so, the key elements of the Core i5-13400 are 6 hyperthreaded P-Cores and 4 E-Cores, giving 16 threads total, with 9.5MB of L2 cache and 20MB of L3 cache. It boosts up to 4.6 GHz on the P Cores whilst the E-Cores stick at 3.3 GHz. With a base frequency of 2.5 and 1.8 GHz respectively it should be nice in the low power situations. Finally supporting DDR4-3200 and DDR5-4800 you have some flexibility with your build.

Intel Core i5-13400 Review Â