In general, i5 series processors are good for BeamNG. Some are much better than others though. Can you be more specific?
I have a i5-4460 and it runs at 3.20 GHz, which is slower than yours, and mine works fine. What graphics card do you have? If you are still using the integrated graphics from your processor, that could be the problem.
sorry, my bad hehe. Figure out what model if i5 you have. Then maybe we can help you. Look up a tutorial on how to find that out.
Haswell or newer i5 can run 2 cars per-core if it's above about 3.2ghz or higher and cooled well enough to maintain it's clockspeeds. That's 4xxx series or newer, for those not in-the-know with it. If building a new PC, Ryzen is a much, much, much superior option vs i5 or i7 if you love Beamng.drive.
I used to have an i5 750 before it died, with the cpu overclocked to 4GHZ I was able to have 5 cars on East Coast USA at 30 fps at high setting 1080p no AA . no SSAO, no HDR . (It would be possible to get 60FPS with max settings with this processor if you have a better video card than my GTX 570.