The Intel i5-12490F is an enhanced version of the Core i5-12400F, which is more powerful, more cost-effective and more suitable for gamers. The most attractive part is that it also has the “black skin” that was only available on the previous Supreme processor.
After Intel’s 13th-generation Raptor Lake family was launched, 12th-generation processors are still very competitive, but Intel seems to have continued the tradition of “China Special Edition”, and is expected to launch two new 13th-generation Core “black box” models in the near future.
Judging from the exposed Intel documents, Core i5-13490F and Core i7-13790F are very competitive, but it has not yet appeared in the Intel ARK database.
It is not difficult to see from the naming that i5-13490F is the successor model of i5-12490F, while i7-13790F is a brand new product. In addition, the Core i5-13490F and Core i7-13790F are positioned as F-series chips, which also means that they will not have integrated graphics, so you will need to pair them with a discrete graphics card to use them.
While the Core i5-12490F brings convenience to gamers, it’s essentially a way for Intel to maximize profits.
In simple terms, the chipmaker produces two dies for Alder Lake: C0 (8P+8E) and H0 (6P+0E), the former for high-end chips such as the Core i9 and i7, and the latter for Low end chips like i5 and i3.
Of course, this is also the advantage of mid-range SKUs, because Intel will repackage some C0 chips that do not meet high standards for lower-tier SKUs. Therefore, the Core i5-13490F and i7-13790F are likely to be the products of Intel’s recycling and reprocessing of some high-end wafers.
Coincidentally, a domestic netizen just gave some specifications of the i5-13490F, which seems to have undergone a major upgrade compared to the previous generation.
According to the CPU-Z screenshots, the Core i5-13490F uses a 10-core 16-thread configuration, which is the same as the regular i5-13400F configuration, but its performance can almost reach the level of the previous generation i5-12600K.
The Core i5-13490F has six P cores and four E cores, so the most significant difference compared to the previous generation is the addition of four E cores. Additionally, CPU-Z shows the chip has a boost frequency of 4.8GHz, a 200 MHz boost over the i5-12490F and i5-13400F.
It is worth mentioning that the i5-12490F also has 4MB more L3 cache than the i5-12400F and is on par with the i7-13700F.
The i5-13490F scored 779.7 points in the single-core test and 6,834.5 points in the multi-core test. For comparison, the i5-13400F scored 729.1 points and 6540 points in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. This means that the single-core performance of the i5-13490F is about 6.9% higher than the i5-13400F, 11.4% higher than the i5-12490F, and the multi-core performance is 4.5% higher than the i5-13400F, and 46.9% higher than the i5-12490F.
