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: Red Dead Redemption 2
It’s great to have another Rockstar benchmark in the mix, and the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) on the PC gives us a chance to do that. Building on the success of the original RDR, the second incarnation came to Steam in December 2019 having been released on consoles first. The PC version takes the open-world cowboy genre into the start of the modern age, with a wide array of impressive graphics and features that are eerily close to reality.
For RDR2, Rockstar kept the same benchmark philosophy as with Grand Theft Auto V, with the benchmark consisting of several cut scenes with different weather and lighting effects, with a final scene focusing on an on-rails environment, only this time with mugging a shop leading to a shootout on horseback before riding over a bridge into the great unknown. Luckily most of the command line options from GTA V are present here, and the game also supports resolution scaling. We have the following tests:
- 384p Minimum, 1440p Minimum, 8K Minimum, 1080p Max
For that 8K setting, I originally thought I had the settings file at 4K and 1.0x scaling, but it was actually set at 2.0x giving that 8K. For the sake of it, I decided to keep the 8K settings.
For our results, we run through each resolution and setting configuration for a minimum of 10 minutes, before averaging and parsing 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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Zoeff - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Now this is a welcome surprise!nandnandnand - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
This is actually Intel's best product launch ever. Because you can buy it and get in on the class action lawsuit later.Zoeff - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
To be clear, I was referring to the article itself.But yes the performance is also a surprise for me after going through the article. I expected a nice performance uplift, perhaps a bit faster than Ryzen 5000 but with a higher power draw as a trade off for being on the same Intel 14nm node still. Definitely did NOT expect it to be slower.
nandnandnand - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
To be clear, I was replying to you to get a reply at the top of the comments. Completely self-serving manipulation of AnandTech's comment section.Hopefully, terroradagio is right and an update will improve performance and efficiency slightly. Also, I wonder how the 11900K will look going ~200-300 MHz above this.
barich - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
I have a feeling that the additional power draw required to get that extra 2-300 MHz is going to be well out of proportion to the performance gained by it. This chip is already pushed past the edge just to not regress (usually) over the previous generation.whatthe123 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Considering this chip is already drawing way too much power the 11900's are probably binned like crazy and run a much lower voltage. Even then it'll probably still use more power than the 11700k. I think they should've just accepted that 14nm was not going to work for this backport. There's a market for cometlake in gamers but what market is there for this? Niche scientific computing?terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Games don't require the type of power people here are crying about. Honestly, do people just sit at their computers and run AVX benchmarks all day?barich - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
You're still looking at like an 80W difference and a requirement for the best air cooling available if you don't want temps to be out of control. I might be willing to tolerate the extra power draw if I got more performance out of it, but that's not the case.eva02langley - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
You mean LIQUID COOLING at this point. You need a good AIO with such power requirements.JimmyTheFish - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
No, power consumption is exactly as bad as people are "crying" about, this chips is a joke, hotter, slower and more expensive than even the quite Sub-Par cometlake chips on the market, nevermind the superb Zen 3 offerings, which are starting to see increased availability with the single CCD 6 and 8 core 5600X and 5800XTo even be remotely appealing the 10700K need to be cheap, sub $350 cheap, and thats just not gonna happen