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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Netmsm - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
Hi Ian;I appreciate your work and also I have a suggestion hoping to be considered.
I think it's better not to mention processors by their formal or nominal power in benches. for us, it can be much more justifiable when we know how much a processor consumes power in each test separately.
I know there's a separate test for power consumption but, as you know, in such an old-fashioned yet common way, the efficacy of each processor for each test is not clear. and I'm afraid, it undermines your work's articulacy.
regards =)
Polacott - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
Charlie Demerjian was right long time ago, when he stated this was going to be a fiasco.Seems like a desperate move from intel, more than lift off, this rocket is hitting the ground.
eastcoast_pete - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
Thanks Ian! I actually applaud the decision to go ahead and put a legally purchased CPU through the paces before the official embargo date for the official, free-for-testing samples; you were very up front how and where you got your test candidate. And, once an authorized reseller sells them, they're "public" and fair game.These performance tests are also a unique opportunity to see by just how much the official sample Rocket Lake with the then-valid BIOS firmware might differ from this store-bought one.
Actually, if Intel would want to be smart about this, they'd send you a coupon to order a RL and MoBo from any authorized retailer, to avoid accusations of a "review edition" hand-selected to be the best binning possible.
Lastly, I wish you (AT) and other review sites would occasionally cross-check the results of their review samples (sent by the manufacturer) to the same unit bought through retail. I know that's not always feasible (costs $$$) , but doing so every once in while might help keep the manufacturers honest and assure us, their customers.
pman6 - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
hey, it comes with a free space heater.nice
pman6 - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
why wasn't there a comparison of the XE integrated graphics?Ryan Smith - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
Partially for timeliness reasons. Partially because we've already seen Xe in Tiger Lake. Rocket Lake's Xe-LP implementation is much slower than the mobile chips, since it has only one-third the number of EUs. So while we'll collect that data eventually, it's nothing terribly exciting.terroradagio - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
Intel Rocket Lake Core i7-11700K vs Core i9-10900K CPU Gaming Benchmarks Leaked – Reportedly Faster Than Comet Lake With New BIOShttps://wccftech.com/intel-rocket-lake-core-i7-117...
eastcoast_pete - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
The boost clock frequency in that WCCF article for the 11700K is especially interesting; according to the table in it, the boost clock goes up to 470 GHz (: Now, that's a clock speed worth writing about!Hifihedgehog - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
WCCFTech has been Intel’s lap dog ever since Zen 2 hit the scene with article after article with a spin in Intel’s favor and I would not be the least bit surprised if they are just like UserBenchmark. Their notorious Usman Pirzada in particular harped on Ian for showing peak power for Rocket Lake, claiming it was disingenuous and misleading since AVX-512 is the reason and that puts the processors on unequal footing. Well, Mr. Pirzada, you forget. AVX-512 also gives a performance uplift so you better also ask to note all the benchmarks where it is engaged so we are playing fair here. If you truly want to level the playing field and throw out AVX-512, you have to throw out a key item that has contributed to an uplift in performance and turn it off in both benchmarks and power tests alike. Either both ways or no ways, sonny Jim.Spunjji - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
"So coming to the benchmarks, only three titles were tested which include Crysis Remastered, Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, and Cyberpunk 2077. The test settings and resolution are not mentioned."It's bad enough that they only showed tests from games that Anandtech don't have in their test suite - so we can't compare directly - but it's even worse that we have no data about the settings used, so nobody else could possibly compare directly, either.
Honestly, at this point I consider myself to have a good indicator of final performance, and will draw final conclusions when the embargo lifts.