There’s an amazing deal on at Novatech, as they’ve reduced the excellent 11th-gen Intel Core i5 11400F processor to a meagre £100 – compared to a UK RRP of £150. In our 11400F review, we found that this particular CPU was just that perfect match of price and performance when it comes to PC gaming. While we paired it with the rather beefy RTX 2080 Ti graphics card, whatever you’ve got will be fine – especially at 1080p where your CPU is often the limiting factor for achieving higher frame-rates.
Here’s a link to the processor – and an example of a cheap CPU cooler that pairs well with this CPU. Even the stock Intel cooler works great if you’ve already got one, but note that this reduced price is for the CPU only – not the full retail box that costs £133 on Amazon presently.
Note that the ‘F’ in 11400F means that this CPU doesn’t come with integrated graphics, so you will need a separate graphics card in your build. The 11400F will work well with a wide range of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, but we’d recommend something in the region of an RTX 3060 or better to get the most out of the processor. Still, most people upgrade graphics cards more often than processors, so this is still a solid choice if you’re rocking an older graphics card and waiting for Nvidia and AMD’s next-generation GPUs to be released over the next year.
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