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: Far Cry 5
The fifth title in Ubisoft's Far Cry series lands us right into the unwelcoming arms of an armed militant cult in Montana, one of the many middles-of-nowhere in the United States. With a charismatic and enigmatic adversary, gorgeous landscapes of the northwestern American flavor, and lots of violence, it is classic Far Cry fare. Graphically intensive in an open-world environment, the game mixes in action and exploration with a lot of configurability.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t like us changing the resolution in the results file when using certain monitors, resorting to 1080p but keeping the quality settings. But resolution scaling does work, so we decided to fix the resolution at 1080p and use a variety of different scaling factors to give the following:
- 720p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1440p Max.
Far Cry 5 outputs a results file here, but that the file is a HTML file, which showcases a graph of the FPS detected. At no point in the HTML file does it contain the frame times for each frame, but it does show the frames per second, as a value once per second in the graph. The graph in HTML form is a series of (x,y) co-ordinates scaled to the min/max of the graph, rather than the raw (second, FPS) data, and so using regex I carefully tease out the values of the graph, convert them into a (second, FPS) format, and take our values of averages and percentiles that way.
If anyone from Ubisoft 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 gaming tests, we run each resolution/setting combination for a minimum of 10 minutes and take the relevant frame data for averages and percentiles.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
 |
| 95th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
 |
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
541 Comments
View All Comments
Makste - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Well.. if it was for the click bait, hre we are 😁half_mexican - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
This is from anandtech Dr. Ian Cutress"Latest beta BIOS from vendor, was told that they don't know when the next BIOS update will be and this contained everything to date. So unless you've got special information.
Note that this is always the risk of doing reviews even on launch day. At some point you have to lock in a BIOS version for published results. Vendors who send BIOSes 24 hours before embargo lift are told to go away."
terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
It has been well discussed that there is a forthcoming update coming. That is why the release and NDA is the way it is.Spunjji - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I'm sure it will make a huuuuge difference. Especially for all the poor sods who bought Z490 in anticipation of a compatible upgrade. /sOtritus - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I mean the leaks suggest that z590 motherboards having some problems resulting in performance regressions. So some poor sod who bought into z490 got to enjoy a fast cpu and can upgrade to an even faster one. AMD is obviously the best for non-avx-512 workloads, but where I am I can't find one for a reasonable price, so Intel is the only viable option. Perhaps the real travesty here is the lack of capacity in TSMC's 7nm node preventing us from buying excellent cpus and gpus at reasonable prices.Qasar - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
the question is, how many things actually use these special avx instructions ?? a handful ? unless you know you can use it, no point in them. seems intel creates these, just so it can win a benchmark.IanCutress - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
People forget that Anand posted our Sandy Bridge review several months early.terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
So that makes this right? If I were Intel, I'd be revoking your early samples.Ryan Smith - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Yes, this makes this right.AnandTech has always honored NDAs, and continues to honor this one. We adhere to the requirements of every agreement we sign, even when doing so is not in our best financial interests. We do this because we're honest people, and just as pragmatically, we need hardware vendors to be able to trust us.
The flip side to that, however, is that retail hardware always has (and always will be) fair game. This was a processor sold by a major European retailer, tested in a motherboard based on a chipset that has been selling at retail for the past couple of months.
Although Intel may not be happy with that retailer over their lapse, at the end of the day this is final silicon running on final silicon. We have done every bit of due diligence both to ensure the accuracy of our results, and to inform the necessary parties in advance about what we intend to do, in case they wish to raise any issues with us.
So we stand by this review both from a technical perspective and an ethical perspective. All of this material was handled in a fair manner that was entirely above the board and legal in all steps of the process.
terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Using a processor that isn't suppose to be sold is sketchy, plain and simple. And you know full well this. It is not to the benefit of anyone who may be interested in this part. You are thinking about yourselves, full tilt. And that is your choice. You have no idea what could happen with this update they are talking about. Will it be magic? Probably not. But will it have fixes for other things in your review? Perhaps. So therefore you are putting out an inaccurate piece for the purpose of getting out early that may very well be inaccurate in parts at the end of the month. And quite clearly from the comments here, feeding many hungry AMD fanboys.I'm not mad at you, just disappointed. Enjoy the attention.