Intel Core i7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
by Dr. Ian Cutress on March 5, 2021 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- 14nm
- Xe-LP
- Rocket Lake
- Cypress Cove
- i7-11700K
Gaming Tests: Borderlands 3
As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.
BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:
- 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass
BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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With the 9900K sitting at 5.0 GHz, the fact that the 11700K only does single core 5.0 GHz shouldn't matter if the IPC gains on the core help push the needle. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to do much in Borderlands.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I'd be saying this if they did with an AMD part too. This is something I would expect from someone unknown guy doing reviews, not Anandtech. Extremely disappointing they are going for the click bait.Otritus - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
We used to have performance previews all the time back in the day to let people have an idea of what is coming and if it is worth it to wait for the next generation. Consider this to be a performance preview, meaning final performance will be higher. In general workloads rocket lake is 10-15 % faster while being reasonable with power. In gaming it's trash, but that could be a consequence of the non-finalized nature of the product.By the time someone can reasonably buy this product it will be April/May. If I need a pc now, the performance uplift isn't that high to make me have buyers remorse. If I can wait, I can get a comet lake chip at probably a great discount, or if rocket lake's gaming is fixed, get that instead.
Performance previews like this are excellent journalism because the public is informed of things that are otherwise concealed. My only gripe with the article is calling it a "review" instead of "early review" or "preview" because someone may stumble on this article and mistakenly believe this is how the product will be shipped.
sonny73n - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
This is a REVIEW! Not early review or preview or any excuse you're making. You've lost touch with reality if you hope for a higher performance on official release date. If Intel haven't released these CPUs (before their announced release date), no way in hell Anandtech or anyone would be able to purchase them.Spunjji - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I'm amused by how many people have stumbled upon this and are mistakenly assuming that performance will be significantly better when it's shipped. This was a CPU bought at retail running on a retail motherboard. If they do noticeably improve performance (and it's a big if) consumers will have to install updates themselves to get it.Makste - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
This is not an engineering sample. If hundreds were being sold by a retailer then that is what Intel was intending to sell to its clients. If you are not satisfied with the performance don't blame it on Anandtechshady28 - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
This is labelled review, not performance preview.Cutress is officially a hack now. I'll wait for real reviews on systems that officially and properly support the chip.
schujj07 - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
It was a review. This was a retail CPU running on a motherboard with a BIOS that supports RKL. Just because RKL doesn't look good isn't surprising.shady28 - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
On a ++BETA++ BIOS.schujj07 - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Unless you have something like the X570 and Zen2 being released at the same time, quite often it is a Beta BIOS that gives initial support for new chips. Eventually with further validation that Beta BIOS becomes official. Perfect example of this is in October 2019 I was installing vSphere 6.7 onto some servers. With the initial BIOS release I was getting the Purple Screen of Death. The only BIOS that was available was a Beta BIOS and on that vSphere installed just fine. Push forward a month later and the official supported BIOS by VMware for that server was the Beta BIOS for vSphere 6.7. It took another 6 months before a non-beta BIOS was available for that server as well. Hence just because it is Beta doesn't mean it is bad. Things in Beta testing generally have full features and performance just hasn't been validated long enough to become the official release.Qasar - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
like that will change much, if anything shady28.