About a month ago we purchased a Core i5-12400 for an in-depth review, and we found that for $180 (12400F), it represented excellent value, especially for gamers. The only hiccup at the time was motherboard pricing as the Intel B660 chipset had just launched and no boards were available.


Three weeks later and B660 motherboards are now rolling out. Though not as many as we'd have liked and pricing is still a bit inflated, you can buy a good looking budget B660 board for $140 such as the Gigabyte B660M DS3H AX or Asus Prime B660 Plus D4. In terms of pricing, the same happened with B560 for a few months and even AMD's B550 suffered a similar issue, so hopefully these will become even more affordable over the course of the year.

In our review we estimated that if we could get some decent B660 boards for around $160, the Core i5-12400F would be an excellent option to be unrivaled in the sub-$200 CPU market, and that does appear to be the case.


But what if you want to spend even less on your CPU?


Before we were recommending the Core i3-10100F, which was ~$120 back in October, but later in the holidays dropped to just $92, and now is down to $85, which is crazy considering how capable that CPU is. With decent B560 boards around $110, it’s a hard budget combo to beat.