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: GTA 5
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA to help optimize the title. At this point GTA V is super old, but still super useful as a benchmark – it is a complicated test with many features that modern titles today still struggle with. With rumors of a GTA 6 on the horizon, I hope Rockstar make that benchmark as easy to use as this one is.
GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
We are using the following settings:
- 720p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Max
The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data. The benchmark can also be called from the command line, making it very easy to use.
There is one funny caveat with GTA. If the CPU is too slow, or has too few cores, the benchmark loads, but it doesn’t have enough time to put items in the correct position. As a result, for example when running our single core Sandy Bridge system, the jet ends up stuck at the middle of an intersection causing a traffic jam. Unfortunately this means the benchmark never ends, but still amusing.
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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).