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 |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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at_clucks - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Oh CiccioB, give it a break. That exact CPU was packaged by Intel for retail, it was meant to be sold as is, just a few weeks from now. Yet, that *exact* piece of hardware. You keep implying "it was not ready for retail" as if Intel was gonna start etching this CPU some more to turn it from a hot grill into a cool as a cucumber lightning fast CPU. Intel may tweak it a bit and have a new revision but it's not like they're just getting the line moving now, they've been building stock for a while so retailers are ready to sell this silicon.But let's be honest, this very CPU that AT put to the test would have been something that an end user would have bought days or weeks from now. A real customer would have used it as is.
The only straw you could grab is that the BIOS might be tweaked until launch. And while it's true, it also probably doesn't work in your favor. I doubt retail MoBos will have CPUs running at over 100C so likely they will limit power more aggressively, and there's very little microcode optimization that one can do to squeeze that much performance.
This is a retail CPU that was sold some days or weeks early. But still retail, and still exactly what consumers will get. Performance won't get better. Power will but only at the price of performance. Stop shilling, unlike many other articles, this one actually made it clear that the BIOS was not final. Any person who doesn't understand that the BIOS can't magically fix this CPU probably don't bother with reading AT anyway.
Makste - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Thank you very much for this comment. My thoughts exactly.To help change some people's perspectives regarding this review. Look at it as a review for those who bought those RL cpus who are about to buy them from that retailer. Otherwise, for the rest who can't handle such an early review, just look away and wait for the launch date and the reviews which will commence.
Billy Tallis - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
" you could also try PCI4 connected memory storage to see how good Intel implementation of the technology is."That's odd phrasing. Do you mean something other than off the shelf PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs? We do plan to test storage performance.
CiccioB - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I mean testing a whatever PCI4 SSD to see if they are working correctly.My suspects is that the BIOS used on that motherboard was so early that there was not PCI4 support at all and that's the reason there are not those test, which would have been a normal thing to add seen PCI4 is one of the new feature brought by these new CPUs, newer than the AVX-512 instruction set.
terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Why would they show PCI4 when its quite clear this review was not aimed to show any benefits - just to feed the AMD fanboys.Billy Tallis - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
PCIe Gen4 support is certainly a welcome improvement over Intel's previous desktop processors, but it can't be considered much of a benefit over AMD's alternatives. We will be investigating whether there are any measurable differences in PCIe 4 storage performance between Intel and AMD hosts, but given how limited the benefits of PCIe Gen4 over Gen3 are for NVMe storage, it's pretty clear that differences between PCIe Gen4 hosts will be insignificant.Spunjji - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
@Billy - they're demanding you validate Ryan Shrout's claimed benefits of Rocket Lake over Zen 3 in a synthetic storage benchmark. Who could possibly imagine why 🧐schujj07 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I don't see how a BIOS update will do much for performance. The motherboard is already running with unlimited turbo so the CPU is pegged at 4.6GHz for MT tests. That is the rated all core turbo frequency.haukionkannel - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Ofcourse bios updates will improve. Just like They have improve amd performance... but not buy much. 1% I prove is a big in these changes... bios upgrades Are more to clean up bugs.chrcoluk - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
He reviewed on available now retail parts, even if a microcode update iss issued, there will still be people using this cpu on same microcode as in this review, as its down to the user to manually update it.I have always hated specially coordinated review programs where everyone agrees to publish shame time (wtf?), and the reviewers are working with vendor to make sure review doesnt upset them, wild west reviews like this need to be more frequent.