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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lmcd - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
As an Intel fan, this is abysmal. This is literally only good for an i3 or i5 SKU, for its upgraded iGPU. That's it.Slash3 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
The 11th gen i3 SKUs will not feature the new Xe core - they are still based on Comet Lake.lmcd - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
That makes this even sadder. This port was actually worthless. An i5 quad core might be manageable by a cooler that fits in an average case, but that's about it.Would've been better off releasing Tiger Lake 35W processors on an LGA package.
Slash3 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
The 6C/12T i5-11500 should be "fine," as it has the same 32CU Xe iGPU as the higher end parts. The part below it, the i5-11400, is also 6C/12T but has a cut down 24CU Xe core.The Xe upgrade is a nice change, at about a 33% uplift over the previous "Gen11" iGPU, but it's still just what I'd call "passable" for light gaming. Anything above 1080p and you'll want a discrete GPU for the best experience, and that goes for both teams.
lmcd - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I understand what you're saying but I still think the 6-core i5 is going to draw a boatload of power.Obviously for gaming a dGPU is preferable. In my experience with AMD's Ryzen 2400G, though, it isn't actually too stable with medium resolution monitor configurations (think 1080p + 1440p) and isn't all that well supported by drivers.
On the Intel side, uplift over Gen11 is cool but uplift over Gen9 is where it gets noticeable, and important. Gen9 was fine when it came out but that was quite some time ago. Shows its age when too many apps want GPU acceleration with that same multi-monitor setup I described.
lmcd - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Sorry, didn't complete my thought. Anyway, point is that a decent % of Intel's sales are for business desktops (maybe not right now, but, ya know, offices might open up sometime this calendar year, before Alder Lake ships in volume). Rocket Lake i5 would be perfect, if its real-world power consumption wasn't out the roof. Good enough graphics for multi-monitor, fine performance elsewhere.I guess that makes me wonder what performance would be if limited to a 65W avg/95W peak thermal output. That's about what those small Dell towers can handle.
Slash3 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Yep, I'm with you.I honestly don't expect the i5 models to have the same outlandish power usage characteristics as the reviewed i7, but will definitely be reading any day one reviews that may pop up. The existing i5-10400 is a pretty compelling product (and priced well), and if the 11400 or 11500 can manage to fit into the same ~100W PL2 envelope I think it'll find a home in a lot of desktops. For OEMs, they're sometimes board limited to the 65W PL1 via a BIOS option, and I'd expect that to continue with the 11th gen versions.
If they price the 11400 close to the 10400, it'll be a solid choice.
Makaveli - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
The Turbo for the 5800X should be 4850 that is what I see at stock. So the table is off by 50mhzSaturnusDK - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Not really. AMD changed the way they report boost frequency numbers. Before it was "up to xxxxMHz boost", now it's the more wordy "given adequate cooling the boost frequency is _at least_ xxxxMHz". This change was driven by the stick they got for the 3000-series only very rarely hitting the listed boost frequency. Now you can generally assume to get 50-100MHz _above_ the listed boost frequency if you have a half-decent cooler.Marlin1975 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
WTF!!! 291 watts?!?!?Intel REALLY needs to step up is manufacture game. Designs seem ok but the nodes are killing them.