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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Fulljack - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I guess to his understanding either this CPU are engineering sample or/and that using beta BIOS, microcode, and firmware so this is not "full retail".romrunning - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
@terroradagio - "Using a CPU that wasn't supposed to be sold is a total backdoor and deceptive way of handling this. "You're really not making sense. They bought a retail boxed CPU from a retailer; they didn't test an engineering sample. The same box would have ended up in someone's hands when purchased by them, and the retailer's stock of RKL CPUs will also be sold to customers. To say Anandtech used "a CPU that wasn't supposed to be sold" is a complete lie. A retailer sells products; they don't stock products just for themselves.
If you're going to argue something, at least argue something with more validity.
CiccioB - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Not that I want to defend Intel, but to you and all others that have difficulties at understanding numbers (you just look at them and report the value without thinking about their meaning):The 290W power consumption was achieved by using AVX-512 instructions. In the test that uses them Intel is <b>6 times</b> faster at double the power consumption than AMD CPU.
So under the point of perf/W with AVX-512 compatible workload (responsible for those high power consumption) there no doubts that Intel is the winner with a very large margin.
So better to concentrate on other power consumption terms to make this chip appear the fail it actually is with respect to the new architecture that does not really improve on almost anything.
lmcd - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Frankly I think some of us (at least, I) got confused by the revision of CPU architecture going into this design. Tiger Lake's Cove version might've changed the outcome, even if the timeline didn't work. Maybe would've been way too big though.CiccioB - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I'm not a CPU architectural engineer so I just can guess that this compromise of architecture and process is the best Intel could come up also taking into account production limitations.Probably it is not the best thing Intel could have done in absolute terms, but it for sure will be available at big quantities (unlike "super fast advance mega efficient hyper many core" AMD CPUs, and worse APUs) and that could be enough to fill the market until Alder lake is presented.
You know, this generation is just a fill gap as it is not a 10nm generation and can't get all those Cove's improvements on the now obsolete (but still high performing and delivering) 14nm process.
Cooe - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Zen 3 in the form of the directly competing R7 5800X is widely available at MSRP. How many times must you be told this before it gets into your thick ass skull??? O_oSpunjji - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
The complaint here is that 290W exceeds the capabilities of the vast majority of air coolers. The Perf/W you get is irrelevant if you melt your CPU.In directly comparable tests where the same work.is being done, Intel's Perf/W is still roughly 50% worse than the 5800X.
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Cant handle Intel dumping arse all over the bed eh?terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Why are you guys making this an Intel vs AMD thing, when I am not? Get a life. This is about professionalism. Go take your AMD worshipping and Intel hating elsewhere.Makaveli - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
And who are you to question Anandtech professionalism you sound like a butt hurt fan boy. Quit the crying and just move on.