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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terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I'd be saying this if they did with an AMD part too. This is something I would expect from someone unknown guy doing reviews, not Anandtech. Extremely disappointing they are going for the click bait.Otritus - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
We used to have performance previews all the time back in the day to let people have an idea of what is coming and if it is worth it to wait for the next generation. Consider this to be a performance preview, meaning final performance will be higher. In general workloads rocket lake is 10-15 % faster while being reasonable with power. In gaming it's trash, but that could be a consequence of the non-finalized nature of the product.By the time someone can reasonably buy this product it will be April/May. If I need a pc now, the performance uplift isn't that high to make me have buyers remorse. If I can wait, I can get a comet lake chip at probably a great discount, or if rocket lake's gaming is fixed, get that instead.
Performance previews like this are excellent journalism because the public is informed of things that are otherwise concealed. My only gripe with the article is calling it a "review" instead of "early review" or "preview" because someone may stumble on this article and mistakenly believe this is how the product will be shipped.
sonny73n - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
This is a REVIEW! Not early review or preview or any excuse you're making. You've lost touch with reality if you hope for a higher performance on official release date. If Intel haven't released these CPUs (before their announced release date), no way in hell Anandtech or anyone would be able to purchase them.Spunjji - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I'm amused by how many people have stumbled upon this and are mistakenly assuming that performance will be significantly better when it's shipped. This was a CPU bought at retail running on a retail motherboard. If they do noticeably improve performance (and it's a big if) consumers will have to install updates themselves to get it.Makste - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
This is not an engineering sample. If hundreds were being sold by a retailer then that is what Intel was intending to sell to its clients. If you are not satisfied with the performance don't blame it on Anandtechshady28 - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
This is labelled review, not performance preview.Cutress is officially a hack now. I'll wait for real reviews on systems that officially and properly support the chip.
schujj07 - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
It was a review. This was a retail CPU running on a motherboard with a BIOS that supports RKL. Just because RKL doesn't look good isn't surprising.shady28 - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
On a ++BETA++ BIOS.schujj07 - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Unless you have something like the X570 and Zen2 being released at the same time, quite often it is a Beta BIOS that gives initial support for new chips. Eventually with further validation that Beta BIOS becomes official. Perfect example of this is in October 2019 I was installing vSphere 6.7 onto some servers. With the initial BIOS release I was getting the Purple Screen of Death. The only BIOS that was available was a Beta BIOS and on that vSphere installed just fine. Push forward a month later and the official supported BIOS by VMware for that server was the Beta BIOS for vSphere 6.7. It took another 6 months before a non-beta BIOS was available for that server as well. Hence just because it is Beta doesn't mean it is bad. Things in Beta testing generally have full features and performance just hasn't been validated long enough to become the official release.Qasar - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
like that will change much, if anything shady28.