Review: Intel Core i5-13400F, the king of the entry level ?

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Raptor Lake Architecture:

Intel keeps with Raptor Lake a “hybrid” architecture since it mixes two types of cores. We still find the P-Core and E-Core. We will see that on this 13th generation, Intel has doubled the number of E-Core. They have of course different roles. The first ones, the Performance ones , are designed to perform tasks requiring computing power and the second ones, the Efficient ones, for what is more similar to office automation or background tasks. Now, the two types of cores will work together according to the task requested. This is what we were able to highlight in our test of the i9-13900K and i5-13600K.

What about this i5-13400F?

For our processor of the day, the Intel Core i5-13400F, it’s a little different from the previous generation and therefore from the Intel Core i5-12400F.
Here are the characteristics of these two processors.

As we can see the differences between the i5-12400F and the i5-13400F are numerous with mainly the arrival of 4 E-core which did not have the i5-12400. The addition of these 4 extra cores, even though they are not performance cores, may boost the multithreaded performance.

Here is the whole new range that was announced during CES 2023 by Intel.

On paper, this range of Intel Raptor Lake non-K processors seems very promising. As a reminder, the processors with the reference “K” or “KF” have an unlocked multiplier coefficient allowing to overclock the processor very easily. The i5-13400F that we are testing today has its coefficient blocked at 41.

We would also like to point out that to date, no card, whether from Asus, Gigabyte or MSI, is capable of overclocking non-K processors via the BCLK as some would have us believe.

Z790 and B760 chipset, retained LGA-1700 socket and backwards compatibility:

New processors mean new chipsets at Intel. At first, it is the Z790 chipset that has been launched. Good news because this one keeps the LGA-1700 socket and the backward compatibility. In other words, you will be able to use an i9-12900K on the Z790 chipset and conversely, an i9-13900K on the Z690 chipset. Intel will continue to support DDR4 on this chipset but this should be the last time since the switch will be made definitively to DDR5 in 2024.

The announcement of the new Intel processors at CES 2023 coincided with the announcement of the B760 chipset, which is an entry-level version that will be sold at a lower price than the Z790. We have also presented two ROG motherboards that will be tested in the coming days in gaming performance mode: the ROG B760 Gaming Wifi Strix-F DDR5 and Strix-A D4 DDR4.