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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watzupken - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Interesting results, but I wasn't surprised by the heat and power consumption to be honest. I was expecting Intel to reclaim single core performance, but at least I don't see it in this independent review and also a credible one. I think I kind of understand why Intel had to rush Alder Lake out on the same year now. While Intel's 14nm has bought them a long time, it is really on its last leg, particularly when AMD and ARM are utilizing more advanced nodes.Santoval - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Wow, if this thing is *that* hot (as was expected) then the 11900K will probably double as an egg fryer, no matter how tightly it was binned. Those 292 W and 104 °C AVX-512 peaks were scary, really. I wonder how Zen 4 will fare with AVX-512 code. Will TSMC's 5nm process node help it keep power and thermals at reasonable levels?Hifihedgehog - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Under the absolute worst scenario, you might see AVX-512 on Zen 4 to hit the power level of AVX-2 on Intel. And that’s worst case, mind. Best case, the same power level as Zen 3 with AVX-2. Realistically, somewhere between those two extremes on that spectrum, leaning more towards Zen 3’s maximum power load.dirtyvu - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
the sad state of Intel... I'm still waiting for the 5900X to be available.Lord 666 - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
Would have preferred to see the Apple M1 cpu included in the comparisons.Klimax - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
Two things:Latency increase is most likely down to size of CPU.
Second, why are you using average FPS in games???? It is the worst part of reviews here, because it completely obscures any useful info.
Remember "Inside a second" by Techreport. And with modern CPUs and high variability of clocks, that methodology is bare minimum for even basic comparison between CPUs.
ANOVA would be a good start.
MDD1963 - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
"Second, why are you using average FPS in games?"Earth shattering concept reveal: faster processors often produce more min/average/max fps in games...; by seeing the 11700K producing lower results that the last two generations, folks are...disappointed, to say the least.
Zizy - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
You have 95 percentile results here, presented as FPS. This is standard fare these days: You get a number X ms where 95% of frames have lower or equal time vs previous frame than that. Then you convert those X ms frame time numbers to the more typical FPS (=1000/X).Yeah, there are no percentile graphs that illustrate some issues with CPUs or GPUs, but outside of extremely few cases those were mostly boring linear increase in frame time to ~99% then a sizeable spike for the last ~1% and that's it. Dragging a line between average (50%) and 95% and extrapolating to 99% would give you essentially all the same info.
FatalError - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
Comparing gaming benchmarks to my i7-5775c (reminder base 3.3 turbo 3.7) with DDR3 at to my surprise the i7-5775c wins a few benchmarks and loses to some. I get it more cores and better IO but why would someone that does not do heavy professional workloads buy this (and to some extent anything that AMD bought out).A CPU released in 2015.
FatalError - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
i7-11700k | i7-5775c(m-7) Strange Brigade DX12 - 1080p Ultra - Average FPS
219.6 | 225.9
Civilization VI - 4K Min - Average FPS
94.3 | 113.1
Gears Tactics - 4K Low - Average FPS
49.2 | 53
sure enough, these are handpicked and the 11700k wins some benchmarks with a big margin, but we have here 4 real cores less and 1.3 GHz less turbo and a mere DDR3 memory interface. I wonder if Intel went the wrong way by ending the L4 monster caches. At least they would have retained the gaming crown if they would introduce an "extreme" version with a decent-sized L4 low latency cache.