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: Far Cry 5
The fifth title in Ubisoft's Far Cry series lands us right into the unwelcoming arms of an armed militant cult in Montana, one of the many middles-of-nowhere in the United States. With a charismatic and enigmatic adversary, gorgeous landscapes of the northwestern American flavor, and lots of violence, it is classic Far Cry fare. Graphically intensive in an open-world environment, the game mixes in action and exploration with a lot of configurability.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t like us changing the resolution in the results file when using certain monitors, resorting to 1080p but keeping the quality settings. But resolution scaling does work, so we decided to fix the resolution at 1080p and use a variety of different scaling factors to give the following:
- 720p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1440p Max.
Far Cry 5 outputs a results file here, but that the file is a HTML file, which showcases a graph of the FPS detected. At no point in the HTML file does it contain the frame times for each frame, but it does show the frames per second, as a value once per second in the graph. The graph in HTML form is a series of (x,y) co-ordinates scaled to the min/max of the graph, rather than the raw (second, FPS) data, and so using regex I carefully tease out the values of the graph, convert them into a (second, FPS) format, and take our values of averages and percentiles that way.
If anyone from Ubisoft wants to chat about building a benchmark platform that would not only help me but also every other member of the tech press build our benchmark testing platform to help our readers decide what is the best hardware to use on your games, please reach out to ian@anandtech.com. Some of the suggestions I want to give you will take less than half a day and it’s easily free advertising to use the benchmark over the next couple of years (or more).
As with the other gaming tests, we run each resolution/setting combination for a minimum of 10 minutes and take the relevant frame data for averages and percentiles.
| 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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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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zakelwe - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
terroradagio, your argument would have had more weight and be less hypocritical if you had not read the article that was posted. You lost the moral high ground when you did.brunosalezze - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
If you dont like it dont read it. Just wait for the NDA lift and be happy. I'm still waiting for the STH Milan early reviewterroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I will wait, because I will read the reviews that waited like everyone else and for the microcode update that very well may fix some of the issues. Anandtech has just given the middle finger to a bunch of other sites and channels who are doing the right thing and waiting to see what happens.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Yeah a microcode update is going to magically fix 290W power draw. LMFAOterroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I didn't say that. I don't know what it will do. And neither do you. And that is why you wait to see before the official launch. Using a CPU that wasn't supposed to be sold is a total backdoor and deceptive way of handling this. Totally unprofessional.lmcd - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Dude this isn't a new CPU core or a new GPU core. They've both already been released. There's no magic microcode fix. There is only an upcoming die shrink for desktop. That is all.terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
It is entirely possible a new update could fix issues. For example, in this review, the latency issues they were seeing. Look at AMD. AMD has put things out many times that have later been fixed with updates.schujj07 - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Those updates allowed for better turbo or memory frequency. Microcode updates won't fix cache latency issues if the physical SRAM is already slower. Same as it won't fix intercore latency as that deals with the mesh fabric.chrcoluk - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
microcode updates are extremely rarely anything to do with performance, they are usually to fix erattas. Since there was no instability in this review there is nothing for a microcode update to fix.If you think a microcode update is going to give any kind of performance boost or power usage drop you going to be disappointed.
Qasar - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
terroradagio please explain HOW this cpu wasnt supposed to be sold ? it was bought AT RETAIL.