PC enthusiasts and gamers in the market for a new central processing unit (CPU) are going to have their gazes wrestled away from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Ryzen, as Intel's Core i5-8400 is now considered the best performance-per-dollar CPU.
The new Intel Core i5-8400 CPU from Intel's 8th generation "Coffee Lake" CPU-line is giving AMD a difficult time; benchmarks and reviews have been released stating that the i5-8400 is better than some of AMD's more expensive Ryzen CPUs. In the gaming benchmarks of PC Gamer, the average frame rate score of the i5-8400 clocked in at 113.9 frames per second (FPS) with an overclock score of 116.2 FPS, quite a significant margin from AMD's most expensive Ryzen CPU, Ryzen 7 1800X which only scored 101.7 FPS.
It is important to note that the benchmark tests by PC Gamer involved 15 games, a lot of which are CPU intensive like "Civilization VI," and "Ashes of the Singularity." The tests were also conducted with an Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti, which is currently the most powerful consumer graphics processing unit (GPU) in the market. Intel's Coffee Lake processors could be owing their performance gains over AMD Ryzen to the additional cores. Whereas the i5 models previously only had four cores and four threads, they now have six cores and six threads; the i5-8400 is no exception to this.
However, synthetic benchmarks are a different story, since the i5-8400 loses to the most expensive Ryzen CPU in synthetic benchmark averages. That said, i5-8400's price point is at $187, and it still beats its direct Ryzen competition, the Ryzen 5 1500X ($179) by a significant amount in synthetic CPU benchmarks.
This puts the Intel Core i5-8400 in the best overall mainstream CPU category, particularly for gamers who want the best performance numbers they can squeeze from their hardware.
However, despite the affordable cost of the i5-8400, the new Coffee Lake architecture requires a new motherboard, meaning that patrons will not be able to get one without the other, effectively increasing the cost needed to invest in the i5-8400.
This will not be a problem for people wanting to build a new PC from scratch. But PC owners looking to upgrade their CPUs will need to update their motherboard's as well.
