Core i7 12700K and Core i5 12400F: performance analysis

As we mentioned earlier, our results are with DDR5-5200 CL38 on the 12th-gen side of things and DDR4-3600 CL16 RAM for our 11th-gen Intel and AMD platforms. Our CPUs are cooled with a large AiO (240mm or above). If you pair one of these CPUs with slower RAM or weaker cooling, then you are likely to see slightly worse performance - see page five for a look at RAM in particular. It's also worth noting that our Intel results have MCE enabled, which is the default on many high-end motherboards but may not be available on all models. This setting trades power usage and heat for increased performance, a trade-off that Intel has recently thrown their weight behind with updated guidance that removes turbo limits. It's worth testing with stricter power targets enabled and disabled in the games you play most often to see whether it's worthwhile, as you may discover that a more conservative setting only costs a few frames per second but reduces your energy costs and diminishes fan noise considerably.

In these tests, we'll examine how the 12700K and 12400F stack up in one of the most controversial games of last year, Cyberpunk 2077, as well as two recent releases from series that have featured prominently in our previous CPU benchmarks: Far Cry 6, renowned for its single-core reliance, and Crysis 3 Remastered, a Digital Foundry staple. We've opted for highly repeatable scenes here from a variety of sources here - an in-game cutscene, a brief open gameplay segment along a fixed route and an in-game benchmark.

Remember that you can mouse over the results in the tables below (as long as you're using a desktop browser rather than a phone) to get dynamically generated performance readouts for all processors we've tested. Meanwhile, clicking the graph swaps you into percentages, making it a bit easier to judge relative performance at a glance.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is our second RT benchmark, showing how RT performance can add even more load to the CPU and cause CPU bottlenecking in some scenarios. The 12700K does superbly here, more or less equalling the 12900K, while the 12400F manages to beat the outgoing 11900K by a four percent margin. We saw a 30 percent performance uplift from 11th-gen to 12th-gen in our previous testing, so it's good to see that the 11400F benefits even without extra E cores onboard.

Far Cry 6

Far Cry 6 retains its predecessors reliance on single-core speed, so it's not entirely surprising to see the 12700K and 12900K turning in very similar results. The 12400F is again faster than the 11900K, with an average of 98fps, but the 12600K offers a performance uplift of 10 percent over the cheaper Core i5. AMD's chips do less well here than in other titles, with the 5950X outperformed by the 12400F and the 5600X only equalling last year's 11600K when it comes to performance.

Crysis 3 Remastered

Crysis 3 Remastered allows us to revisit our favourite scene from early on in the original game's campaign, which oscillates between character closeups and complex distant geometry to load both CPU and GPU. The 12400F slots in behind the 12600K and alongside the 11900K, with an average frame-rate of 270fps with the RTX 3090. The 12400F is technically beaten by the 5600X here, but again there's not much in it considering the rather large gulf in price between the two mid-range processors. The Ryzen 3700X would offer a more similar price point, but is significantly slower in Crysis as we know from prior testing.

Now let's move onto something quite interesting - memory bandwidth analysis. Our DDR5 vs DDR4 testing is coming up later, but for now we'll see how in-game performance is affected by RAM from 4800MT/s to 5600MT/s.

Intel Core i7 12700K and Core i5 12400F analysis

• Introduction, test rig and content creation benchmarks
• Gaming benchmarks: Flight Simulator 2020, Hitman 3
• Gaming benchmarks: CS:GO, Metro Exodus EE, Black Ops Cold War
• Gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, Crysis 3 Remastered [This Page]
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis
• Intel Core i7 12700K and Core i5 12400F: the Digital Foundry verdict