- super cheap - super efficient - a great gaming chip - ridiculous performance with Windows 11

- not a 2.5ghz chip - good, but not great with productivity benchmarks.

Bought one to build a system for my daughter. Paired with the Asus B660 Plus 4 motherboard for less than the price of a 7600x. Bought low-latency DDR4 and got ~98% of the performance of DDR5 5200 for less than half the cost. Added a Noctua NH D15 with the savings. Wound up with a maximum temp on the hottest core at 52^C after 2 hours of continuous benchmarking. Lol, Average full system power draw at idle and light internet browsing under 30 watts. Just 4-7 watts for the CPU alone. That would be good numbers for a laptop.Super efficient even before bios tweaks. I claim false advertising though, because it claims to be a 2.5ghz processor. Never once saw 2.5ghz. Behavior with the Asus board with no bios changes (just update) gave single core boosts of over 4.5ghz and it would do 4.2ghz on all cores simultaneously, all day long when needed and then throttle to under 1ghz at idle for power savings. The 30 sec timer that is supposed to be there on the non-k chips for max clocks does not exist anymore. What a beauty! It's better than the 5600 non- x and the system costs are lower. Also LGA 1700 is a better, more modern platform with better memory bandwidth. It's a super deal.

Price, Bang for the buck. Multi-threaded.

None. Hard to beat at this price. And it costs more than a Raspberry Pi4, but how much is your time really worth today.

These entry-level i5 12th-gen Intel chips really put out the performance, now that each core is multi-threaded, especially considering the price point. (This one has 6 cores so that's 12 threads under optimum conditions). This one (the i5-12400) is great value and I was very impressed by just how quickly it ripped through my latest Linux kernel build utilizing all 6 cores (less time than it took to drink a cold beer). It's not overclockable, but hey, it'll keep your power bill down which will make your parents happier. Match this little baby up with some stock DDR5 ram, a decent PCIe SSD drive, a nice entry level graphics card, and a mobo that supports the Z690 chipset, then look out. Runs cool with the stock Intel fan right out the box (40 - 45 degrees C, on average) in a mid-sized case, so you know it's going to last. Nope, the integrated graphics chip (UHD-750) won't win any rabbit races, but for a $20 video chip, that's about all the performance Intel is going to give you - (and of course, get ready for their ARC video cards to start retailing any day now). If you want a faster rig, don't buy an overpriced bigger processor; save your dough and invest in a better graphics card, some fast memory and a slick SSD. This i5-12400 will make a lot of people happy at this price. It's dependable, cool, and priced right). And these Intel processors (compared to AMD) are a lot easier to hook up with almost any Linux build. This is a nice daily-driver that you may just want to take your girlfriend (or boyfriend) out at night with.