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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
541 Comments
View All Comments
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
They're the same chip, the only difference is clock speeds. Dont get your hopes up, RKL is a total dud, much like Williamette was.Samus - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
blppt - my concern is that AMD may have a superior IPC, but the real fruit comes from the manufacturing process. Intel is still (somewhat) competitive at 14nm and that in itself is quite unbelievable. Imagine where this chip would be on 7nm or 10nm, at 6GHz+ and more cores with 2-3x the cache.That said, this victory may be short lived because AMD is basically taking advantage of the embarrassing execution Intel has repeated, much like they did 20 years ago with the P4 (albeit that was an architecture failure, not a manufacturing process failure)
Thesubtlesnake - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Intel's latest 10nm process delivers *slower* clocks than its 14nm one. So, no, 6 GHz is not on the table. I imagine that when the transition to 7nm, Intel will be able to achieve moderately faster clock speeds than with 14nm.Otritus - Sunday, March 14, 2021 - link
10nm SF is good enough for 5 GHz. 10nm ESF can clock higher, so Intel's latest (but unreleased) process should match 14nm. I would not expect 7nm to clock higher than 14nm because it is becoming very clear that 5Ghz+ is just a waste of power and transistors, so i would not expect 7nm architectures to be designed to clock higher. We either are getting lots of IPC or just over 5GHz.Slash3 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Mad lad.edved - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Nice write-up. Thank you.lucasdclopes - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Power efficiency is abysmal on this one.CiccioB - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
No, it is not. It lower than AMD's efficiency, but it not that bad for being based on such an old process.PixyMisa - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
So it's abysmal, but that's only to be expected?Spunjji - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Not bad for an old process is still abysmal by the standards of 2021. No wonder Apple dropped them like a hot rock.