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: Borderlands 3
As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.
BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:
- 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass
BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.
AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
Average FPS | ||||
95th Percentile |
With the 9900K sitting at 5.0 GHz, the fact that the 11700K only does single core 5.0 GHz shouldn't matter if the IPC gains on the core help push the needle. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to do much in Borderlands.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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ottonis - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
How is Ryzen 5800x AMD's "best of the best"?It clearly is not but just about somewhere in the middle. If you want AMD's best consumer CPU, you gonna look at the 5950x.
From the perspective of AMD, completely outsourcing manufacturing was the only way to reap the benefits of latest and greatest process nodes.
Now, that everybody else, incl. the automobile industry, the consoles, Apple, and even Intel are booking production capacities at TMSC, has certainly contributed to Reaching capacity limits and thus to AMD CPU shortages.
It is predicted that shortages will be mostly (hopefully) sorted out by this summer.
But yes, now that AMD are earning quite a lot of money they should buy some TSMC stock and try to partner up, getting more production capacity in the future.
Fulljack - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
did you just forgetting why AMD spin-off it's fab on the first place?we don't know exactly how much AMD put out their desktop chips from TSMC plant, and as far as we know, the market are still growing in size. while AMD market share are still a long way from reaching 50%, they still have their processor sold out all over the place.
honestly I don't get what you're trying to say here.
shady28 - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Actually we do know, they made ~1M Zen 3 chips in Q4. 140M PCs were shipped. Based on their market share, about 3% of the chips AMD shipped in Q4 were Zen 3.Source:https://wccftech.com/amd-shipped-nearly-1-million-...
inighthawki - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
5800X = "Best of the best"11700K = "medium level SKU"
Your bias is showing.
Bluetooth - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Does any one know the details of Intels 10 nm node problems. Any article discussing that in technical details?dihartnell - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
I think adored tv did a few articles, videos on this. As I understand it thier main issues are they use a monolithic die (everything on on a single die) that gets harder to make as the process shrinks, IE more dies have defects... AMD got around this by going chiplet, lots of small dies which meant more of them are good. Until Intel chnages to chiplet or they find a way to improve the manufacturing process to lower the defect rate then they will struggle.Santoval - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Class action for what, excessive power bills? :) Imagine using this during a heatwave in an airless room. Since it doubles as a heater you would need to have the AC on all the time. If you have no AC there will be a competition between who dies first, you or the processor? ^.^sabot00 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Indeed! I have been reading nothing but wccftech and Tom's leaks. Absolutely amazing surprise this Friday night while searching Rocket LakeBeaver M. - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I would be very cautious testing or believing results with the Z590 platforms long before Rocket Lakes official release.Ive tested 3 of those boards with my Comet Lake (Asus, MSI and ASRock) and they all had pretty bad BIOS versions still, with PCIe/IO performance being low in SSD 4K benchmarks and getting weird frame time stutters from time to time (only noticeable when actually playing or looking at a realtime graph). Not to mention Intels drivers are still bad as well.
On none of them even very basic features like the sleep state worked!
Comparing this review with user benchmarks in German forums shows huge differences, so theres not much to add to this.
That said, I have to laugh when Americans or people from other countries with cheap power complain about the power draw.
And seeing fanboys downplay the performance of AVX and ignoring that it was always power hungry, even 6 years ago, is another obvious thing. Without it RKL actually runs pretty cool for being ancient 14nm.
And of course I love the geniuses who still think that you cant use the iGPU without it being connected to a monitor, or dont know about the new power saving/GPU switching feature. Not that this article didnt fail at pretty much everything, incl. explaining things like that.
Gigaplex - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
"That said, I have to laugh when Americans or people from other countries with cheap power complain about the power draw."Electricity is expensive where I live, but that's not why I want low power consumption. The more power it consumes, the louder the cooling solution will be. That's why my last system was Intel (Ivy Bridge) and my current system is AMD (Zen 3).