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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Timoo - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
"You are reviewing a device that is not ready to be sold yet."Sorry?
It came from a European retailer. Therefore it is ready to be sold.
"Not officially launched yet" would be more accurate.
ballsystemlord - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Nice one @Ryan . Keep up the good work.Spunjji - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Well said, Ryan.pentiuman - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
I understand AnandTech has honored their applicable NDA. And that you informed Intel of yourintentions or whatever. And that you didn't break any laws. And you also considered the early release OK because the chip was (what would be sold here in the US) retail. But I think I agree w/ User terroradagio and some others in that, Anandtech shouldn't have released their review early because they happened upon a favorable, early deal - (which itself may have been contrary to an Intel company policy w/ the retailer), not available to any other reviewer or consumer. It's taking advantage of a slip in how the system was supposed to work. You don't want to see it as wrong because it's almost like time doesn't really matter. In the end, you're still buying the product, doing the work, publishing and maintaining the website and revisiting the numbers and updating the motherboard and more and more work. You do all this hard work, and you're highly respected, (and for good reason), so for these good reasons, and more, I think this clouds your decision on this matter. I just feel that all tech sites should respect the same release review date! To not do so reminds me of the less ethical journalism methods used by some photographers, who then sell them legally to the newspapers. But integrity goes deep - more than 1 level.
The benefit Anandtech COULD take is the one that they have apparently become so used to, that it is assumed. The ability to buy the chip before consumers, test it, write their review, and click
the mouse to post it 1 second after the NDA says they could. (My point here is, some reviewers are either not able to buy them early, or not given the chips, don't have the connections to buy them, and have to wait to buy them like any other consumer, to test them, review them and then publish.)
In other words, you are already at an advantage over some reviewers by your early access to the
chip - and have weeks more than them to test it. Publishing it 3 weeks earlier than your standard
NDA (that may not apply), before nearly anyone else, is (in my opinion) an unfair advantage. You
are a well established website and reviewer - so I'm not saying you did it for the views. I just
feel it's not right. I get it - you must have a different ethical view. Thank you for the review otherwise.
Qasar - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
pentiuman, and would you be saying the same thing if another site did this, or were also able to get one of these cpus to test ? or maybe, like others have suggested, some just dont like to see intel in such a disappointing light ?Timoo - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Why has Anandtech here an advantage?If you wish to write an early review, you can too.
The CPU is simply for sale, apparently.
https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-core-i7-11700...
Timoo - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
*update: not anymore, apparently.Sold out or rebuked by Intel?
Spunjji - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Every other reviewer out there had the chance to take advantage of this "slip", so it's not unethical.Unethical would be taking advantage of insider contacts to produce an officially-sanctioned "preview" prior to release of a product and formal reviews that provides a misleading picture of the product's performance, like DF did with Nvidia and the RTX 3080.
lmcd - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Any coverage of Rocket Lake is good coverage at this point. "People know it exists so hopefully they'll buy it."movax2 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I really don't understand why You attack anadtech. Intel Rocket Lake sucks... not anadtech!!Get it right already!