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: World of Tanks
Albeit different to most of the other commonly played MMO or massively multiplayer online games, World of Tanks is set in the mid-20th century and allows players to take control of a range of military based armored vehicles. World of Tanks (WoT) is developed and published by Wargaming who are based in Belarus, with the game’s soundtrack being primarily composed by Belarusian composer Sergey Khmelevsky. The game offers multiple entry points including a free-to-play element as well as allowing players to pay a fee to open up more features. One of the most interesting things about this tank based MMO is that it achieved esports status when it debuted at the World Cyber Games back in 2012.
World of Tanks enCore is a demo application for its new graphics engine penned by the Wargaming development team. Over time the new core engine has been implemented into the full game upgrading the games visuals with key elements such as improved water, flora, shadows, lighting as well as other objects such as buildings. The World of Tanks enCore demo app not only offers up insight into the impending game engine changes, but allows users to check system performance to see if the new engine runs optimally on their system. There is technically a Ray Tracing version of the enCore benchmark now available, however because it can’t be deployed standalone without the installer, we decided against using it. If that gets fixed, then we can look into it.
The benchmark tool comes with a number of presets:
- 768p Minimum, 1080p Standard, 1080p Max, 4K Max (not a preset)
The odd one out is the 4K Max preset, because the benchmark doesn’t automatically have a 4K option – to get this we edit the acceptable resolutions ini file, and then we can select 4K. The benchmark outputs its own results file, with frame times, making it very easy to parse the data needed for average 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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WoT is a fun test to see 700 FPS+ numbers with the best CPUs. However the differences between the CPUs end up being minor, and in absolute terms the 11700K still has issues, often sitting at the lower end of the results.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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Shorty_ - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
I'm not sure if you're being wilfully obtuse or ignorant.. the only reason Skylake is even remotely in the game is that intel's 14nm is refined enough to allow them to push raw clock speeds to the moon. Do you not recall how awful Ice Lake was because it couldn't clock? TGL is starting to clock a bit better but it's still pretty damn close. This is on 10nm "superfin" which is ~= TSMC N7(P).So Intel don't have some magic engineering pixie dust that would propel them beyond AMD if they were on the same node.
Thesubtlesnake - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Intel already have process equivalent to 7nm – 10nm SF. And they already designed a new architecture on it: Tiger Lake. And Zen 3 is perfectly competitive with Tiger Lake.Teckk - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Ultimately the latest desktop processors from Intel doesn’t perform well against AMD that’s what it is.They chose to release it on 14 nm as their 10nm was still work in progress. The numbers have meaning and not your conjecture about Intel using TSMC advanced node- it’ll be compared whenever that happens, with numbers.
Cooe - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
*Zen 3hfm - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
But we have to live in reality that they don't even have 10nm ready for desktop. Fantasies about creating an alternate reality where their core architecture exists on a smaller node for desktop are just that, fantasies. The reality is AMD clearly has the far better product right now aside from niche edge cases.I still agree with the conclusion though that given current circumstances, get what you can get if you need to upgrade or build new. But the reality there seems like the 5800X is available at MSRP in-stock at multiple storefronts.
blppt - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
A chip that is just released, the best Intel currently has to offer for the mainstream consumer, can't match a chip that has been out for months. While using more power.Thats not a good look for Intel. I hope the 11900K (or whatever they're going to call it) at least matches the 5900X in games.
This is the first time in a long time, with generations of chips current, that I cannot think of a single reason to recommend Intel's latest and greatest over AMD.
terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
The 11900k has always been what should be compared to the 5900x anyway. Not the i7-11700k.blppt - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
The point being, the 11700k doesn't even catch the 5800X, which has been out for a few months already. Given that this was supposed to be Intel's "response to Zen 3", its pretty disappointing.Fulljack - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
the only thing that could save Rocket Lake-S are availability and price. otherwise just get Ryzen 5000 processors.SaturnusDK - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Availability of Ryzen 5000 except 59xx parts is already a non-issue. You can get 5600X with a few days delay at worst, and 5800X is in abundant stock pretty much everywhere.The key is price, especially the platform price because Intel MBs are generally more expensive. On top of that you absolutely need a larger cooler, and most likely also need a beefier PSU for the Intel CPUs, so the CPU price for the intel parts have to be substantially lower than a performance equivalent AMD part to be competitive. And given the history of intel that seems very unlikely to happen.