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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arashi - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
He's probably just a salty competing review website owner upset that he didn't think to do this first.jonathan1683 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I am an intel fanboy, but I dont agree with you at all either, intel scewed up and they have to deal with that, they wont fix anything the motherboards are made the cpus are retail and being sold. Anand did me a solid. I literally was about to pre buy all my stuff for rocket lake now I am not. If intel does pull some kind of magic they can change the reviews. No harm if something changes, but I don't think it will. I don't want AMD either so I am without a home right now also not really interested in big little cores either unless it pulls off some magic. This is also just a hardware review site not some major corporation not sure why you hold them to such a high standard.SaturnusDK - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
big-little cores will help improve efficiency so the mobile parts may become competitive again but for desktop parts it will almost certainly decrease performance rather than increasing it. There is literally zero chance that the scheduler will always get it right which processes are assigned to which cores, and moving processes between different core types will always incur a performance hit.Cooe - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
"I don't want AMD either"Uhhh... why not? Deliberately not buying the best products available on the market because of the company that made them doesn't make ANY SENSE unless the company being referred to tends to be on the wrong side of basic business ethics/morality. You are cutting off your nose to spite your face here for no other reason than some misplaced stupid fanboy loyalty... -_-
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Criticism of intel for releasing a hot dung heap isnt "AMD worshipping".Spunjji - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Trying to make a moralistic critique out of your own personal objections is a desperate move.If Intel want to do pre-orders before they've even announced the product, yet they're going to release stock to a retailer, then personally I'm only too happy for one of the best CPU testing websites out there to buy one and put the screws to it.
scineram - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Why didn’t they buy one then?dsplover - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
What a waste of time.5xxx is the better Design.
3xxx series is when Intel should’ve noticed they were in trouble.
Lucky for them I don’t need the best, just the most mature hassle free CPU.
But I’m not buying anything until the server parts 480/1200 Xeons drop prices.
If AMD can deliver on the 5xxx APU before that, I’m going to jump ship.
blppt - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I'm not sure anybody saw the massive single thread or core performance jump from the 3 series to the 5 series. I remember being astonished at the geekbench and CB synthetics, thinking there was something bugged somewhere.3xxx Zen was good, but 5xxx series is outstanding.
Otritus - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Zen 2 was always market as a a zen++ that for some reason had a massive enough performance uplift to be comparable to a new microarchitecture. Zen 3 on the other hand was marketed as a newly designed microarchitecture with the largest ipc improvements (from AMD) since zen. AMD delivered exactly what was promised, a significantly faster and more efficient product on 7nm.The reason why you would have been astonished by the synthetics is because we haven't had a typical (15-30%) microarchitecture performance uplift since sandy bridge. Haswell was only ~11% faster than ivy bridge. The thing that we didnt see coming was zen 3 being called 5000 instead of 4000 and the price hikes.