Intel Core 5 120F CPU Breaks Cover For Budget Gaming PCs With These Specs

For high-end gaming PCs, many users will immediately flock to AMD's CPUs with 3D V-Cache, but for an entry-level machine, you can often do better for the money with prior-gen Intel hardware. A good example is the ten-core Core i5-12600K at $149, which gives you very similar performance to a Ryzen 5 7600X in games, yet runs you $50 less before we also talk about the fact that it can be purchased with a cheaper motherboard and DDR4 memory.


It's not actually clear whether this is Alder Lake or Raptor Lake silicon, though. The clearest clue would be in the L2 cache, which we don't know; the L3 cache per core did not change between generations. It is notable that the DDR5-4800 memory spec for the new chip matches Alder Lake and not Raptor Lake's 5600 MT/s memory recommendation, though.

Whatever the architecture, six P-cores with a maximum turbo frequency of 4.5 GHz and a base frequency of 2.5 GHz will certainly suffice for a pure gaming workload, particularly when paired with lower-end graphics cards like Intel's own Arc B570—Arc's documented CPU performance sensitivity notwithstanding. It's certainly not a "fast" processor by modern standards, though, and judging from the "F" in the model number, it entirely lacks integrated graphics.

Obviously, as Intel hasn't announced the chip yet, we don't know anything about pricing or availability, but one quirk is that Intel hasn't actually announced a desktop "Core 100" processor family yet. We know about the "Core Ultra 200" Arrow Lake and "Core 200" Bartlett Lake families, but "Core 5 120F" is a very unusual designation for a CPU. Perhaps Intel is going to launch a whole series of Core 100 CPUs—or perhaps this chip will be a one-off for OEMs and resellers. Either way, this part had better be priced to move.