AMD Ryzen 5 9600X vs Intel Core i5-14400: Which gaming CPU is best?
AMD's Ryzen 5 9600X is set to release this month and it looks very promising going by the recent leaks as covered by TechRadar. It is͏ ͏based on ͏the newer Zen 5 a͏rchitecture, whic͏h͏ w͏oul͏d͏ come ͏wi͏t͏h a 16% i͏mprovement͏ ͏in performance o͏ver la͏s͏t-generation hardware.
The pri͏ces of the Ryzen 5 9600X as͏ well ͏as the Ryzen 7 9700X were mis͏takenly leaked by a Canadian ͏retailer. Ac͏co͏rd͏ing ͏to wccftech's report, the pro͏cessors will retail at $295 and $380, respectively, in USA mar͏kets. ͏Th͏is͏ is a very comparable ͏price͏ t͏o Inte͏l's͏ i5 144͏00, w͏hic͏h c͏urren͏tly͏ retails for $239.
So which͏ could be the better ͏gaming GPU between the two, and which c͏h͏i͏p giant wil͏l secur͏e the apex ͏spot͏? This a͏rti͏cle will ͏cover the specs and performance benchmarks͏ to come to a verdi͏ct. However, the answer ͏is quite evident even before comparing them. The ͏leade͏r͏boards͏ ͏will definitely be t͏u͏rning red after AMD's ͏laun͏ch thi͏s July.
Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the writer's opinions.
How far ahead is the new AMD Ryzen 5 9600X compared to the Intel i5 14400?
The Ryzen 5 9600X definitely beats the i5 14400 in gaming as well as productivity. AMD will not face any competition from Intel this summer. Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh series cannot compete with AMD's new and advanced Zen 5. Intel's Arrow Lake series will launch at the end of this year, so AMD is launching its chips in a competition-free market right now.
Specs comparison
Let's see how far ahead AMD stands compared to Intel in terms of specs. Both the Ryzen 5 9600X and the i5 14400 target the same mid-range price segment and will thus stand as rivals in the current market after AMD's launch.
The i5 14400 is nowhere near as efficient as the AMD chip despite having four dedicated efficiency cores. The former is manufactured on a 10nm process, while the latter on a 4nm process. The i5 14400 features 10 cores (6P cores and 4E cores) and 16 threads. Technically it features six cores for gaming, the same as the AMD chip.
The Ryzen 5 9600X beats the Intel chip in core clock speeds as well, featuring up to 5.4 GHz speeds compared to Intel's 4.7 GHz. The AMD chip even comes with support for faster DDR5 RAM. Based on the specs, the Ryzen chip flies ahead of the Intel i5 14400. The Zen 5 is so advanced that the comparison doesn't even look fair on paper. The 9600X will be much faster in both gaming and productivity.
Performance comparison
Actual leaks of the Ryzen 5 9600X's scores have surfaced on the Geekbench 6 website. These are the scores of the two CPUs compared. The data was fetched from Nanoreview.
The AMD chip puts up 20% to 40% higher scores than its competition in Geekbench 6. It stands very far ahead of the i5 14400 right now. For better context look at this Geekbench 6 single-core benchmarking scores of other CPUs.
The Ryzen 5 9600X scores 3284 in the single-core benchmarking tests, which is 5% better than Intel's flagship CPUs. A mid-range chip is beating last-gen flagships. Gaming is mainly a single core focused workload, and therefore these numbers mean that the Ryzen chip can outperform these CPUs in gaming and not just the i5 14400, stopped only by the X3D chips.
Ryzen 5 9600X vs i5 14400: Final take
The Ryzen 5 9600X is undoubtedly the best in gaming as per the Geekbench 6 scores. All we have to wait for now is the actual in-game FPS scores that will soon be online after the AMD chip's launch. It is set to fire up the gaming space and will definitely be featured in all upcoming mid-range gaming rigs.