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: Strange Brigade
Strange Brigade is based in 1903’s Egypt, and follows a story which is very similar to that of the Mummy film franchise. This particular third-person shooter is developed by Rebellion Developments which is more widely known for games such as the Sniper Elite and Alien vs Predator series. The game follows the hunt for Seteki the Witch Queen, who has arose once again and the only ‘troop’ who can ultimately stop her. Gameplay is cooperative centric with a wide variety of different levels and many puzzles which need solving by the British colonial Secret Service agents sent to put an end to her reign of barbaric and brutality.
The game supports both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs and houses its own built-in benchmark as an on-rails experience through the game. For quality, the game offers various options up for customization including textures, anti-aliasing, reflections, draw distance and even allows users to enable or disable motion blur, ambient occlusion and tessellation among others. Strange Brigade supports Vulkan and DX12, and so we test on both.
- 720p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Ultra
The automation for Strange Brigade is one of the easiest in our suite – the settings and quality can be changed by pre-prepared .ini files, and the benchmark is called via the command line. The output includes all the frame time 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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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.