BenchPair

Core i5-9400 bottleneck & gaming FPS

Ranked 186 of 201 desktop processors for gaming in our database (7th percentile). It can sustain roughly 71 fps in a typical AAA title regardless of resolution — that ceiling is what decides whether a graphics card is worth pairing with it.

SpecificationsCoffee Lake · 2017
ArchitectureCoffee Lake
Cores6
Threads6
Boost clock4,100 MHz
L3 cache9 MB
TDP65 W
Released2017
Processor ceiling by game1080p, high

The frame rate this chip could sustain with an infinitely fast graphics card. It is almost the same at every resolution, because rendering more pixels gives the processor no extra work.

GameCPU ceilingWith Radeon RX 6750 XT
Cyberpunk 2077 68 fps 48 fps
Fortnite 92 fps 90 fps
Counter-Strike 2 115 fps 113 fps
Baldur's Gate 3 62 fps 61 fps
Red Dead Redemption 2 81 fps 54 fps
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 41 fps 40 fps
Best matched graphics cards1080p, high

Ranked by how little performance the pairing wastes. Anything much faster than the top entry will sit partly idle at this resolution — though it may still be worth it if you plan to move to 1440p or 4K.

Graphics cardEst. FPSUnused
Radeon RX 6750 XT 70 0.7%
Radeon RX 6750 GRE 12GB 69 1.4%
Radeon RX 6700 XT 69 1.4%
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 69 2.5%
GeForce RTX 3070 70 4.9%
Radeon RX 7600 XT 67 5.3%

Living with a Core i5-9400

This processor sits in the lower part of the range and will be the limiting component in most modern pairings. Frame rates will be capped by the chip well before the graphics card runs out of capacity, and no graphics upgrade will change that.

If frame rates are the problem, this is where the money goes. Raising the resolution will not help here in the way it does for a graphics-limited system.

A small cache holds this chip back

9 MB of L3 is modest by current standards, and it costs this chip more in games than its clock speed suggests. Game engines walk large, scattered data structures, so a small cache means more trips to main memory and more stalls on the render thread. Memory speed and timings matter unusually much on a part like this.

A note on age

Released in 2017, this chip is 9 years old. Beyond raw speed it is on an older platform, which usually means slower memory, fewer PCIe lanes and no path to a newer processor without replacing the motherboard. Factor that into any upgrade maths — the chip may not be the only thing you end up replacing.

Where it sits

Ranked 186 of 201 desktop processors for gaming. Nearest faster: Core i3-10300, Core i5-8500. Just below: Core i5-9400F, Core i3-10100. Full method on the methodology page.