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: Gears Tactics
Remembering the original Gears of War brings back a number of memories – some good, and some involving online gameplay. The latest iteration of the franchise was launched as I was putting this benchmark suite together, and Gears Tactics is a high-fidelity turn-based strategy game with an extensive single player mode. As with a lot of turn-based games, there is ample opportunity to crank up the visual effects, and here the developers have put a lot of effort into creating effects, a number of which seem to be CPU limited.
Gears Tactics has an in-game benchmark, roughly 2.5 minutes of AI gameplay starting from the same position but using a random seed for actions. Much like the racing games, this usually leads to some variation in the run-to-run data, so for this benchmark we are taking the geometric mean of the results. One of the biggest things that Gears Tactics can do is on the resolution scaling, supporting 8K, and so we are testing the following settings:
- 720p Low, 4K Low, 8K Low, 1080p Ultra
For results, the game showcases a mountain of data when the benchmark is finished, such as how much the benchmark was CPU limited and where, however none of that is ever exported into a file we can use. It’s just a screenshot which we have to read manually.
If anyone from the Gears Tactics team 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 benchmarks, we do as many runs until 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination has passed. For this benchmark, we manually read each of the screenshots for each quality/setting/run combination. The benchmark does also give 95th percentiles and frame averages, so we can use both of these data points.
| 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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Gears is the one test where at our 1080p Maximum settings it shines ahead of the pack. Although at high resolution, low quality, although all five CPUs are essentially equal, it still sits behind AMD's Ryzen APU.
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.