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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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).