Intel Core i5 14400F CPU Review

Overall Game Average FPS

Testing a variety of games allows you to see how a particular piece of hardware performs in that title, but with the ability to look at overall game averages and how they perform across all titles, we can extrapolate the positioning of that hardware compared to similar hardware on the market.

So I’m pretty sure I said this when I looked at the 14900K, 14700K and 14600K. When looking at refreshes, it’s very hard not to lose my mind because the performance gains are generally pretty small. For the most part, we’re talking margin of error, with a few random anomalies that may see the margin increase and that’s exactly what we saw today. Some games are able to utilise the extra clock speed that the 14400F has, and when that happens, it makes a good, solid difference in performance, but most see it having no effect or to such a small degree that performance at the levels it was at was basically identical.

The productivity benchmarks speak for themselves, but we all know the main reason you’re here and that’s to see the gaming performance and I have to say that the most interesting part is definitely how things look when comparing Intel to AMD because AMD do have some strong products, and mainly on the gaming side of things and the stand-out chip was clearly the Ryzen 5 7600 which was consistently ahead and in some cases by quite a big difference. How much is easier to see when you look at the overall averages.

It’s here where we do see an uplift going from the 13th generation to the 14th generation of a smidge under 3% which overall equates to just 4 FPS and that’s funny because at the start I said about how the price was $4 more expensive and that the clock speeds were 4% faster, but also how that wouldn’t equate to 4% more performance, but at 3%, it’s not exactly far off. Sure we’d all love to see huge increases, but that’s never going to happen with a refresh and considering the small disparity between prices, it’s not actually too bad. This really is game-dependent as some games love cores, some love clock speeds, and some like a balance of the two. With the titles that can utilise the clock speed, the 14400F will come out stronger.

Now when compared to AMD and that Ryzen 5 7600, the 14400F does fall short. The Ryzen 5 7600 was already sitting 21% ahead of the Core i5 13400F, and while the 14400F does see a small bump in performance, it still means that the Ryzen 7600 is still 17% ahead, and for $10 less too.