Intel Core i5-11400 Review: Unseating Ryzen's Budget Gaming Dominance

Intel exploits the obvious hole in the Ryzen product stack

Intel Core i5-11400
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

It's no secret that Intel has dialed up the power with Rocket Lake to compete with AMD's vastly more efficient chips, so you'll have to ignore the higher power consumption if you choose to go with an 11th-gen Intel chip. As such, there are no real surprises here — the Core i5-11400 draws more power in every measurement than either the Zen 2 or Zen 3 chips.

However, it does fall into a lower power envelope than the Core i5-11600K at stock settings, which takes some of the sting off of Rocket Lake's generally excessive power consumption. Naturally, that changed when you remove the power limits. As you can see in our renders-per-day measurements, Intel's Rocket Lake isn't in the same league in terms of efficiency. 

Here we take a slightly different look at power consumption by calculating the cumulative amount of energy required to perform Blender and x264 and x265 HandBrake workloads, respectively. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart. 

These workloads are comprised of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the time required to finish the job (bottom axis), thus generating a really useful power chart. 

Bear in mind that faster compute times, and lower task energy requirements, are ideal. That means processors that fall the closest to the bottom left corner of the chart are best. That distinction still belongs to Ryzen. 

MORE: Best CPUs

MORE: CPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy

MORE: All CPUs Content

Paul Alcorn
Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech

Paul Alcorn is the Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.