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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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.