Intel Core i5-9400F CPU Review: Cutting On-Die Graphics For A Slightly Lower Price

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Office and Productivity

Adobe Creative Cloud

Even though this suite has a few parallelized workloads, its final score is heavily influenced by the lightly-threaded tasks common in most desktop applications.

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Although Intel processors tend to excel in lightly-threaded tasks, AMD's Ryzen 5 2600X carves out wins in both the single- and multi-threaded applications. Overclocking the Ryzen models yields nice performance improvements, too.

Web Browser

The Krakken suite evaluates JavaScript performance using audio, imaging, and cryptography workloads. Like most browser-based benchmarks, single-threaded performance reigns supreme.

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The Ryzen 5 2600X proves to be pretty nimble in the Krakken JavaScript performance test, which often relies heavily on per-core performance. Meanwhile, Intel's Core i5s lead in the MotionMark and WebXPRT tests.

Productivity

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The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem. Single-core performance largely determines responsiveness. Core i5-9400F trails the previous-gen -8400 by a number small enough that it falls within our expected margin of error.

Our video conferencing suite measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage. This workload responds well based on the number of cores and threads, so AMD's Ryzen fares well. Again, we see the Core i5-9400F offering such similar performance to its counterpart that it falls within this test's margin of error.

The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, giving Ryzen 5 models an easy lead over the Core i5-9400F and -8400. The Ryzen 5 2600X also benefits greatly from overclocking.


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Paul Alcorn
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.

27 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Dark Lord of Tech
    Still overpriced , waiting for new Ryzen.
    Reply
  • tennis2
    Would like to see some testing done to determine how core count affects games these days with the "core count race" going on. It still seems like 4-6 cores is where the cutoff is before frequency is the determining factor of frame rates.

    Also show if/how online multiplayer changes that conclusion.
    Reply
  • TechyInAZ
    Without a IGPU, this CPU makes barely any sense vs a 2600 or 2600X.
    Reply
  • R_1
    in the comparison chart you have the 9400f having graphics and the 9400 as not having graphics.
    Reply
  • NightHawkRMX
    9400f would be a good deal if it had a higher turbo or overclocking support. Z390 boards suitable for overclocking are expensive as well.
    Otherwise, Ryzen 5 2600x has 6 more threads, higher turbo, overclocking support, and cheap overclocking boards than negate the slightly higher chip price.
    Still waiting on Computex.
    Reply
  • Karadjgne
    I'm still wondering why there's even testing of single core performance. In the rendering test, multi-core, the Ryzens dominated Intel. Very next test was a single core performance test where as usual, Intel was stronger. Why? I can't think of any single core rendering, or games for that matter. It's kind of archaic to my mind. A multi-core test on software that that uses multiple cores makes perfect sense. It shows how well the software responds to the amount of threads. Saying an intel beats a Ryzen in single core rendering is.....
    (I'm not gonna use those words in polite company)
    Reply
  • pete_101
    I see the CPU has a base frequency of 2.9 and a turbo of 4.1 GHz, but this will be a single core maximum speed. Although it's locked, it should be possible in the mobo BIOS to set all 6 cores to run at this frequency.....if you have a good enough cooler.
    Reply
  • Lol. Good commentary
    Reply
  • NightHawkRMX
    There should be an 8 thread Cinebench test to compare CPUs. Most games only use around 8 threads or a little more (battlefield comes to mind). An 8 thread test would be the most accurate way to test gaming CPUs.
    Reply
  • Anubis666
    It's funny how prices are different in different countries.. In one thread ,a guy says 15-20$ less than Ryzen 2600 so just go with the i5 9400f..
    Here in India i5 9400f is 60$ cheaper than Ryzen 2600 and 95$ cheaper than 2600X..

    I'm still confused to go with i5 9400f over 2600 just for the multi thread.. As I wanted it for playing , recording Games,Edit and upload to YouTube and, probably streaming Dota 2 in near future.
    The price of i5 9400f is tempting but I'm not sure it can able to do stuff I mentioned above with close to ease..
    I'm sure coming Ryzen 3000 is even high price due to high demand in here.
    Reply