Gaming Performance
Time to do some gaming. As we saw previously with the 8700K, these high-end Intel CPUs are actually limited by the GTX 1080 Ti at 1080p using the ultra quality preset in Battlefield 1. Therefore the Core i5-8400 delivered the same 137 fps minimum and 157 fps average. We'll look at 720p performance in a moment, before that let's check the Vega 64 results.
Moving to Vega 64 Liquid Cooled the Ryzen 5 1600 is much more competitive and is now just 5% slower than the Core i5-8400. That said, as I just noted we are GPU limited at 1080p, so let's check the 720p numbers.
Moving on we're back at 1080p and this time checking out Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. Comparing the heavy batch figures the Core i5-8400 was 11% faster than the Ryzen 5 1600 and 21% faster than the 7600K while it was able to match the 7700K.
Swapping out the GTX 1080 Ti for the Vega 64 Liquid Cooled doesn't really change much as we see very similar performance margins.
Testing Civilization VI using the DirectX 12 API we see that the Core i5-8400 and Ryzen 5 1600 are quite similar in terms of performance, though neither were much faster than the R5 1500X or i5-7600K.
Now with Vega 64 Liquid Cooled installed the Core i5-8400 falls behind the Ryzen 5 150X and is considerably slower than the Ryzen 5 1600, 15% slower in fact when comparing the average frame rate.
Finally we have F1 2017, the last game I've tested for this review. The Core i5-8400 matched the 8700K here with an impressive 182 fps minimum making it 24% faster than the Ryzen 5 1600.
Much the same is seen with the Vega 64 Liquid Cooled graphics card installed. The margins do close up a little in this DX11 title but that's to be expected with a slower GPU.