Although the CPU has yet to be officially announced by Intel, the chip giant’s Alder Lake Core i5-12400F processor is already on sale at a Peruvian retailer.
XanxoGaming confirmed it purchased a retail version of the Core i5-12400F, which is a processor that was initially mentioned in rumors last month. According to the website, it paid 899 Sols (around $222) for the CPU.
Notably, the pictures shared by XanxoGaming showed the Core i5-12400F coming with Intel’s rumored Laminar RM1 CPU cooler. NotebookCheck points out that the RM1 is the company’s first substantial redesign of its stock cooler since the Sandy Bridge generation of processors. It’s been over a decade since Sandy Bridge launched, so a more modern look being applied to the cooler for Intel’s latest 12th-gen Alder Lake CPUs makes sense.
This isn’t the first time an Intel processor was sold before its official launch this year. As highlighted by VideoCardz, the Intel Core i7-11700K, part of the Rocket Lake-S series, was sold weeks before it was even unveiled by Intel.
The Core i5-12400F will be among the first non-K processors, with the chip belonging to the Alder Lake-S series. Although the Alder Lake chips that are currently available utilize a hybrid architecture of both performance and efficient cores, the Core i5-12400F will be one of the first Alder Lake desktop processors that only makes use of Golden Cove performance cores.
Despite the fact it won’t rely on the hybrid architecture that has helped Alder Lake silicon released thus far receive rave reviews, leaked benchmarks for the Intel Core i5-12400F indicate impressive performance when going up against competing CPUs. The processor is faster than AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X in both gaming and synthetic benchmarks, and it’s also faster than the Core i5-11400F in multi-threaded tests. Naturally, one processor it can’t outperform is the Core i7-11700K due to its higher clock speed and increased threads count.
As for other specifications, the Core i5-12400F features six cores and 12 threads, as well as a base clock of 2.5 GHz that can be boosted up to 4.4 GHz (4.0 GHz all-core). In terms of power consumption, the processor is said to sport a TDP of 65 watts.
With CES around the corner, Intel is expected to introduce its non-K Alder Lake processors at its conference on January 4.
