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: Gears Tactics
Remembering the original Gears of War brings back a number of memories – some good, and some involving online gameplay. The latest iteration of the franchise was launched as I was putting this benchmark suite together, and Gears Tactics is a high-fidelity turn-based strategy game with an extensive single player mode. As with a lot of turn-based games, there is ample opportunity to crank up the visual effects, and here the developers have put a lot of effort into creating effects, a number of which seem to be CPU limited.
Gears Tactics has an in-game benchmark, roughly 2.5 minutes of AI gameplay starting from the same position but using a random seed for actions. Much like the racing games, this usually leads to some variation in the run-to-run data, so for this benchmark we are taking the geometric mean of the results. One of the biggest things that Gears Tactics can do is on the resolution scaling, supporting 8K, and so we are testing the following settings:
- 720p Low, 4K Low, 8K Low, 1080p Ultra
For results, the game showcases a mountain of data when the benchmark is finished, such as how much the benchmark was CPU limited and where, however none of that is ever exported into a file we can use. It’s just a screenshot which we have to read manually.
If anyone from the Gears Tactics team wants to chat about building a benchmark platform that would not only help me but also every other member of the tech press build our benchmark testing platform to help our readers decide what is the best hardware to use on your games, please reach out to ian@anandtech.com. Some of the suggestions I want to give you will take less than half a day and it’s easily free advertising to use the benchmark over the next couple of years (or more).
As with the other benchmarks, we do as many runs until 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination has passed. For this benchmark, we manually read each of the screenshots for each quality/setting/run combination. The benchmark does also give 95th percentiles and frame averages, so we can use both of these data points.
| 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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Gears is the one test where at our 1080p Maximum settings it shines ahead of the pack. Although at high resolution, low quality, although all five CPUs are essentially equal, it still sits behind AMD's Ryzen APU.
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