Upgrade Dilemma: i5-12400 or 13400?

[68000]

Hello everyone,

 

This is my first post, and I'm diving straight in with a request for your advice.

 

I've been running a 10400 on an ASUS Z490 motherboard, complemented by 32GB RAM, an RTX 3060, and both NVMe and SSD storage for almost four years now. Lately, I've noticed its performance isn't quite what it used to be, especially in certain demanding applications. I'm considering an upgrade to either the 12400 or the 13400, paired with a new ASUS B760 motherboard. This setup should support 14th gen CPUs with a BIOS update, offering a nice path for future upgrades.

 

Here's where I'm hitting a snag: the cost difference between the two processors. The 12400 is priced at £112, while the 13400 comes in at £188. This has me wondering, are the four extra E cores in the 13400 worth the additional £76?

 

My typical usage includes flight simulation (which leverages both CPU and GPU, with my current setup beginning to falter on the CPU side), Microsoft Office tasks, browsing in Edge/Chrome with multiple tabs open, and some light photo editing.

 

One concern is whether opting for the more affordable 12400 might limit me down the line, especially if I decide to venture into streaming.

 

While I'm aware there are more powerful CPUs out there, my current financial situation, due to my wife's illness and us moving to a single income, requires a bit more frugality on my part.

 

Any advice or insights you could share would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

 

[8tg]

If a bit more frugality is a concern, I’d just stick with the 10400 and then do a cheaper 14th gen upgrade or whatever is relevant further down the line when the money to do so is there.
A 10400 to a 12400 isn’t that big of an overall performance jump considering the cost of s board, the 13400 is better but the cost increases still.

I would almost recommend tapping out Z490 if a cpu upgrade on the cheap is a necessity now, knowing you’re doing a whole new platform in the future. A used 11700F is around $160 on average and gets you in between the 12400f and 13400f in terms of overall performance, jumping to 8c/16t will help in general.

[Hinjima]

7 minutes ago, 68000 said:

Hello everyone,

 

This is my first post, and I'm diving straight in with a request for your advice.

 

I've been running a 10400 on an ASUS Z490 motherboard, complemented by 32GB RAM, an RTX 3060, and both NVMe and SSD storage for almost four years now. Lately, I've noticed its performance isn't quite what it used to be, especially in certain demanding applications. I'm considering an upgrade to either the 12400 or the 13400, paired with a new ASUS B760 motherboard. This setup should support 14th gen CPUs with a BIOS update, offering a nice path for future upgrades.

 

Here's where I'm hitting a snag: the cost difference between the two processors. The 12400 is priced at £112, while the 13400 comes in at £188. This has me wondering, are the four extra E cores in the 13400 worth the additional £76?

 

My typical usage includes flight simulation (which leverages both CPU and GPU, with my current setup beginning to falter on the CPU side), Microsoft Office tasks, browsing in Edge/Chrome with multiple tabs open, and some light photo editing.

 

One concern is whether opting for the more affordable 12400 might limit me down the line, especially if I decide to venture into streaming.

 

While I'm aware there are more powerful CPUs out there, my current financial situation, due to my wife's illness and us moving to a single income, requires a bit more frugality on my part.

 

Any advice or insights you could share would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

 

That is quite the price increase over the 12400.  I think the 12400 will be more than plenty for your use case and you should put the money saved into something else. You are GPU bound with the 12400 in terms of gaming performance with your 3060.

E-Cores are not used while gaming.

Have a look through this video.  You can skip through the video.

 

[68000]

Thank you for the replies!

 

I wanted to mention that my current motherboard supports up to the tenth-generation CPUs, with no BIOS update available for later models. I'm considering the ASUS TUF B760, priced at £159, as a potential upgrade.

 

I've also contemplated upgrading to a 10700 on my current board. However, despite the identical IPC, it demands significantly more power. Consequently, this would necessitate a new cooler since my current Noctua NH9-US wouldn't provide adequate cooling.

 

[bal723]

16 minutes ago, 68000 said:

Hello everyone,

 

This is my first post, and I'm diving straight in with a request for your advice.

 

I've been running a 10400 on an ASUS Z490 motherboard, complemented by 32GB RAM, an RTX 3060, and both NVMe and SSD storage for almost four years now. Lately, I've noticed its performance isn't quite what it used to be, especially in certain demanding applications. I'm considering an upgrade to either the 12400 or the 13400, paired with a new ASUS B760 motherboard. This setup should support 14th gen CPUs with a BIOS update, offering a nice path for future upgrades.

 

Here's where I'm hitting a snag: the cost difference between the two processors. The 12400 is priced at £112, while the 13400 comes in at £188. This has me wondering, are the four extra E cores in the 13400 worth the additional £76?

 

My typical usage includes flight simulation (which leverages both CPU and GPU, with my current setup beginning to falter on the CPU side), Microsoft Office tasks, browsing in Edge/Chrome with multiple tabs open, and some light photo editing.

 

One concern is whether opting for the more affordable 12400 might limit me down the line, especially if I decide to venture into streaming.

 

While I'm aware there are more powerful CPUs out there, my current financial situation, due to my wife's illness and us moving to a single income, requires a bit more frugality on my part.

 

Any advice or insights you could share would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

 

for 200$ u can get something better than 13400

[Tetras]

13 minutes ago, 68000 said:

While I'm aware there are more powerful CPUs out there, my current financial situation, due to my wife's illness and us moving to a single income, requires a bit more frugality on my part.

 

Any advice or insights you could share would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

The problem with the 13th & 14th gen non-K i5s is that they share the old cache config from 12th gen CPUs (except for the 14600), so unless you're doing something which benefits from the E-Cores (e.g. heavily multithreaded), their performance isn't much better than the 12th gen CPUs.

 

The 12600K has often had large discounts lately and I'd say it is superior to the 13400 on price/performance in most regions.

 

Since you're on a tight budget and already have a high-end Z490 motherboard, I'd suggest keeping your existing motherboard and upgrading to a 11600K, which although 11th gen CPUs got widely panned, their application performance is pretty good and at the right price they're not a bad upgrade.

 

3 minutes ago, 68000 said:

I wanted to mention that my current motherboard supports up to the tenth-generation CPUs, with no BIOS update available for later models. I'm considering the ASUS TUF B760, priced at £159, as a potential upgrade.

I'm not aware of any Z490 motherboard that can't support 11th gen.

 

3 minutes ago, 68000 said:

I've also contemplated upgrading to a 10700 on my current board. However, despite the identical IPC, it demands significantly more power. Consequently, this would necessitate a new cooler since my current Noctua NH9-US wouldn't provide adequate cooling.

The Noctua would handle it, but you may need to power limit the CPU.

[podkall]

21 minutes ago, 68000 said:

I've noticed its performance isn't quite what it used to be, especially in certain demanding applications.

which "certain demanding applications"?

[podkall]

7 minutes ago, 68000 said:

Thank you for the replies!

 

I wanted to mention that my current motherboard supports up to the tenth-generation CPUs, with no BIOS update available for later models. I'm considering the ASUS TUF B760, priced at £159, as a potential upgrade.

 

I've also contemplated upgrading to a 10700 on my current board. However, despite the identical IPC, it demands significantly more power. Consequently, this would necessitate a new cooler since my current Noctua NH9-US wouldn't provide adequate cooling.

 

with bios update it should support 11th gen Intel CPUs

[8tg]

3 minutes ago, Tetras said:

I'm not aware of any Z490 motherboard that can't support 11th gen.

This is my inquiry as well, I haven’t heard of anything like that.

An 11700 would be ideal here, as a cheap upgrade to extend the life of the system.

[68000]

"I'm not aware of any Z490 motherboard that can't support 11th gen."

 

Actually, there are Z490 motherboards with limitations on 11th gen support. For example, my ASUS PRIME Z490M-PLUS explicitly lists support up to 10th gen CPUs without mention of 11th gen compatibility. More details here: 

 

https://www.asus.com/uk/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime-z490m-plus/helpdesk_cpu?model2Name=PRIME-Z490M-PLUS

 

"which "certain demanding applications"?"

 

I'm referring to running X-Plane 12, especially with high-density OSM objects in densely built areas. In scenarios like these, my GPU's workload can reach 70%, underscoring my need for better IPC to handle such demanding applications more efficiently.

 

Thanks again

 

[Tetras]

18 minutes ago, 68000 said:

Actually, there are Z490 motherboards with limitations on 11th gen support. For example, my ASUS PRIME Z490M-PLUS explicitly lists support up to 10th gen CPUs without mention of 11th gen compatibility.

Hmm, interesting, had never heard of that. That makes the decision trickier, because the improved app performance of the 11th gen CPUs is nice to have.

 

From what you have described of your usage, a 10600 or 10700 is still likely to be a decent upgrade, but since you're upgrading within the same generation and the improvement of newer CPUs is greater, it would have to be @ a good price (the retail price is usually poor).

 

The single thread tends to be most relevant to games and apps that are single core/thread heavy:

 

(CPU, PassMark single thread, multi thread, link)

10400: 2572, 12135
11600K: 3357, 19654
12400: 3531, 19430
10700: 2909, 16495
13400: 3695, 24975

[68000]

9 minutes ago, Tetras said:

Hmm, interesting, had never heard of that. That makes the decision trickier, because the improved app performance of the 11th gen CPUs is nice to have.

 

From what you have described of your usage, a 10600 or 10700 is still likely to be a decent upgrade, but since you're upgrading within the same generation and the improvement of newer CPUs is greater, it would have to be @ a good price (the retail price is usually poor).

 

The single thread tends to be most relevant to games and apps that are single core/thread heavy:

 

(CPU, PassMark single thread, multi thread, link)

10400: 2572, 12135
11600K: 3357, 19654
12400: 3531, 19430
10700: 2909, 16495
13400: 3695, 24975

Thank you for taking the time to put that all down.

 

The single-threaded performance of the 12400 indeed appears to be quite respectable.

 

Going by the data on PassMark, the 12400 shows a 37.3% improvement in single-threaded performance and a 60.1% improvement in overall performance compared to the 10400. 

 

Reflecting on the core of my original query, the question now seems to be whether the addition of the four E cores justifies the extra £76.

 

At £112, the 12400 presents a significant improvement in IPC compared to my trusty 10400. Moreover, the B760 motherboard under consideration would also offer a solid upgrade path moving forward.

[Tetras]

2 minutes ago, 68000 said:

Reflecting on the core of my original query, the question now seems to be whether the addition of the four E cores justifies the extra £76.

The best way of verifying that, I think, would be to monitor your applications while they're running and see if they're loading up all your cores, or if your CPU is sitting at max single core turbo.

 

If your applications do use all the cores, then a 12600K or 13400 (whichever is cheaper, they have the same core counts), would give you a nice improvement for multithreaded apps. You do have to be careful how much you pay for the 13400, because the 13500 is a superior CPU (better IGP with two encoding engines and 4 more E-Cores) which is often only $15-$30 more than the 13400.

 

I know that this argument of $15-$30 can go on forever until you're at the price of a $700 CPU, but I'm of the opinion that if you're primarily single core/thread then the 12400 makes the most sense, but if you're not, then the 13500 is likely to be a better buy.

 

When the 12600K is discounted to around £170, that is a better middle ground and I'd consider it a better price for the 4 E-Cores, than when the 13400 is e.g. £220+.

[68000]

3 minutes ago, Tetras said:

The best way of verifying that, I think, would be to monitor your applications while they're running and see if they're loading up all your cores, or if your CPU is sitting at max single core turbo.

 

If your applications do use all the cores, then a 12600K or 13400 (whichever is cheaper, they have the same core counts), would give you a nice improvement for multithreaded apps. You do have to be careful how much you pay for the 13400, because the 13500 is a superior CPU (better IGP with two encoding engines and 4 more E-Cores) which is often only $15-$30 more than the 13400.

 

I know that this argument of $15-$30 can go on forever until you're at the price of a $700 CPU, but I'm of the opinion that if you're primarily single core/thread then the 12400 makes the most sense, but if you're not, then the 13500 is likely to be a better buy.

 

When the 12600K is discounted to around £170, that is a better middle ground and I'd consider it a better price for the 4 E-Cores, than when the 13400 is e.g. £220+.

Thank you for the detailed advice and the considerations you've outlined. Monitoring my applications as you suggested seems like a practical approach to gauge my needs accurately. Your points about the CPU options and pricing tiers are very insightful and will definitely guide my decision.

 

Very much appreciated