The Core i5 11400F has emerged as something of an unlikely champion in the wake of Intel's Rocket Lake S launch. The upper end of Intel's new lineup is certainly performant, but for many buyers the value simply isn't there while discounted 10th-gen equivalents are still available (especially when the 10900K's extra cores give it an outright lead over its successor for content creation workloads). So it's been the low and mid-range part of the stack that has garnered the most positive press, where Intel's roughly 20 percent gen-on-gen performance gains and more feature-rich B560 motherboards have created some pretty unreal value.
The pitch here is pretty simple: the Core i5 11400F costs around £150/$175, yet its six core and twelve thread design still hits the current sweet spot for gaming and occasional content creation. It's clocked just 400MHz slower than the Core i5 11600K (4.2GHz vs 4.6GHz for max all-core turbo), and each of its cores ought to be quite powerful, given its modern Cypress Cove design. In the best case scenario, it wouldn't be outrageous to hope for performance in line with the Ryzen 5000 series – but at a considerably lower asking price than AMD's £260/$300 entry-level Ryzen 5 5600X. That sounds like the recipe for a value champion, so we were keen to get testing.
As we're only adding one CPU to our charts, we'll keep this introductory page brief – after all, you can read our full 11900K and 11600K review for a more detailed write-up of the new features arriving with Intel's 11th-gen desktop chips and 500-series motherboards.
