Intel Core i5 Coffee Lake Refresh i5-9400 BOX (BX80684I59400)

Time for improvements

The Core i5-9400 is perhaps the most interesting processor in the Coffee Lake Refresh family. And it's funny, because his younger brother i5-8400 looked like the most interesting chip in the line of the last generation. The i5-9400 has the same 6 physical cores without multithreading, but the frequencies have slightly increased: in normal mode we now have 2.8 GHz, and in boost 4.1 GHz. In fact, the power has grown to the level of the Core i5-8500.

The price decides

So what's so interesting about it? As in the case of the younger new generation Core i3, Intel decided to shock the market with low prices, in fact, killing most of the previous generation processors. Why buy an i5-8400 for almost $200 when a more powerful new one costs $160? Here we don't know. Plus, Coffee Lake Refresh has a strange pricing situation: the same version of the processor with integrated graphics and without it can make a significant difference in price. The i5-9400 with and without graphics has the same price tag, so the UHD Graphics 630 can be seen as a small bonus that allows you to watch 4K videos or run CS:GO or Dota at minimum.

Perfect for the optimal gaming PC

Now let's move on and see what AMD has. And here everything is interesting and not so unambiguous, because you can find a six-core Ryzen 5 2600 a little cheaper on the market, which, due to multithreading and overclocking, looks preferable in resource-intensive applications. In turn, the Core i5-9400 in modern games produces a higher level of FPS. Moreover, not only in comparison with the six-core Ryzen 5, but even in comparison with the eight-core Ryzen 7. Based on this, it is worth making a choice. Such a chip can pair well with a GTX 1070 or Radeon RX 590 for the ultimate gaming PC.