Intel Core i5-13400F

The i5-13400F posts a single-thread PassMark of 3,628, good for the 88th percentile, and owners rate it 4.7 out of 5 across 1,203 reviews. It's efficient, cool-running, and handles gaming plus multitasking without breaking a sweat. The stock cooler is noisy and there's no iGPU, but at the right price this chip is hard to beat.

The single-thread score of 3,628 is the headline number. It's one of the best on the market for the money, and it's why this chip feels so responsive in games and light productivity. The 4.6GHz boost clock on the P-cores does the heavy lifting, while the 4 E-cores soak up background tasks so your main threads stay clean. In our database, that single-thread performance ranks above 88% of all desktop CPUs we track.

Multi-thread is where the 13400F shows its budget roots. 24,871 in PassMark is strong, well above average, but it won't embarrass a Ryzen 7 or a higher-end i7 in heavy all-core workloads. The 65W base TDP keeps things efficient, though it'll spike to 148W under turbo. Efficiency is actually this chip's best metric, landing in the 92nd percentile. It runs cool and sips power compared to the competition, which matters if you're building in a small case or paying your own electric bill.

Against the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the 13400F gets smoked in gaming, no contest. The X3D's cache advantage is enormous and it costs way more, so that's not really a fair fight. The more honest comparison is against other mid-range chips. The 13400F's single-thread score of 3,628 beats plenty of pricier options, and its efficiency ranking in the 92nd percentile means it runs cooler than most AMD alternatives at similar performance levels. Where it falls behind is all-core throughput. The multi-thread score of 24,871 is well above average but not leading, so if you're doing heavy video encoding or rendering all day, a Ryzen 7 or Core i7 will finish jobs faster. For gaming and general use, the 13400F holds its own against anything near its price.

The value story here is a bit complicated. Our budget score gives it 88.7 out of 100, and owners consistently call it one of the best price-to-performance chips you can buy. But the actual street price varies wildly. In the US, we're seeing listings from USD 149 to USD 235, a spread of USD 86 across four vendors. At USD 149 this thing is an absolute steal. At USD 235 it's still decent, but you're getting close to territory where a Ryzen 5 or even a used i7 starts looking tempting. Shop around, the cheapest US listing is where the real value lives. European buyers face an even bigger gap, EUR 235 to EUR 569 across three listings, which is frankly absurd. Don't pay anywhere near the top of that range.

The Core i5-13400F posts a PassMark multi-thread score of 24,871 and a single-thread score of 3,628. That single-thread number lands in the 88th percentile of every desktop CPU in our database, which means this chip punches way above its price class in games and everyday snappiness. The multi-thread score sits at the 80th percentile, solid but not earth-shattering, and that's exactly where this processor lives: it's the sensible middle child of Raptor Lake.

You get 10 cores split into 6 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, with 16 threads total. The P-cores boost to 4.6GHz while the E-cores handle background tasks without burning power. There's 20MB of L3 cache and 9.5MB of L2. No integrated graphics here, so you'll need a discrete GPU, but that's the trade-off for the F-series discount. Owners rate it 4.7 out of 5 across 1,203 reviews, and our sentiment analysis puts overall satisfaction at 88 out of 100.

Skip this if you need integrated graphics, the F-series has none and you'll be forced into buying a GPU even for basic display output. Heavy all-core users should also look elsewhere, the multi-thread score of 24,871 is solid but not leading, and a Ryzen 7 or Core i7 will finish rendering and encoding jobs noticeably faster. If you're planning to drop in a high-end GPU later, keep in mind that owners mention this chip could bottleneck future flagship cards. And if you hate tinkering, the potential BIOS update requirement on older 600 series boards might be an annoying first step.

The numbers back up what owners are saying: this is one of the best mid-range CPUs you can buy right now. A 4.7-star average across 1,203 reviews, an 88/100 sentiment score, and single-thread performance in the 88th percentile all point the same direction. The stock cooler is the one real annoyance, and the lack of integrated graphics means you're committing to a GPU. But if you're building a gaming rig or a general purpose machine on a sensible budget, the 13400F delivers where it counts. Just don't overpay, the price spread between vendors is significant.