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 |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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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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Shorty_ - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
I'm not sure if you're being wilfully obtuse or ignorant.. the only reason Skylake is even remotely in the game is that intel's 14nm is refined enough to allow them to push raw clock speeds to the moon. Do you not recall how awful Ice Lake was because it couldn't clock? TGL is starting to clock a bit better but it's still pretty damn close. This is on 10nm "superfin" which is ~= TSMC N7(P).So Intel don't have some magic engineering pixie dust that would propel them beyond AMD if they were on the same node.
Thesubtlesnake - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Intel already have process equivalent to 7nm – 10nm SF. And they already designed a new architecture on it: Tiger Lake. And Zen 3 is perfectly competitive with Tiger Lake.Teckk - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Ultimately the latest desktop processors from Intel doesn’t perform well against AMD that’s what it is.They chose to release it on 14 nm as their 10nm was still work in progress. The numbers have meaning and not your conjecture about Intel using TSMC advanced node- it’ll be compared whenever that happens, with numbers.
Cooe - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
*Zen 3hfm - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
But we have to live in reality that they don't even have 10nm ready for desktop. Fantasies about creating an alternate reality where their core architecture exists on a smaller node for desktop are just that, fantasies. The reality is AMD clearly has the far better product right now aside from niche edge cases.I still agree with the conclusion though that given current circumstances, get what you can get if you need to upgrade or build new. But the reality there seems like the 5800X is available at MSRP in-stock at multiple storefronts.
blppt - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
A chip that is just released, the best Intel currently has to offer for the mainstream consumer, can't match a chip that has been out for months. While using more power.Thats not a good look for Intel. I hope the 11900K (or whatever they're going to call it) at least matches the 5900X in games.
This is the first time in a long time, with generations of chips current, that I cannot think of a single reason to recommend Intel's latest and greatest over AMD.
terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
The 11900k has always been what should be compared to the 5900x anyway. Not the i7-11700k.blppt - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
The point being, the 11700k doesn't even catch the 5800X, which has been out for a few months already. Given that this was supposed to be Intel's "response to Zen 3", its pretty disappointing.Fulljack - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
the only thing that could save Rocket Lake-S are availability and price. otherwise just get Ryzen 5000 processors.SaturnusDK - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Availability of Ryzen 5000 except 59xx parts is already a non-issue. You can get 5600X with a few days delay at worst, and 5800X is in abundant stock pretty much everywhere.The key is price, especially the platform price because Intel MBs are generally more expensive. On top of that you absolutely need a larger cooler, and most likely also need a beefier PSU for the Intel CPUs, so the CPU price for the intel parts have to be substantially lower than a performance equivalent AMD part to be competitive. And given the history of intel that seems very unlikely to happen.