We put Intel's eight-core Rocket Lake Core i7-11700K through its paces to see if it stands up to the competition.
Core i7-11700K Review: The Chip of Last Resort : Read more
Core i7-11700K Review: The Chip of Last Resort : Read more
Considering most everything has some form of multithreading except games, not so nice.So it's the fastest chip you can get in everything except heavily multi-threaded loads. Nice.
From the number in this review the 11700K can draw 50-100% (roughly 50-100W) more than a 5800X. That's at "stock" settings, i.e. with whatever power/boost limits the motherboard used in the review came with. Based on that I wouldn't assume any cooler capable of cooling a 5800X is necessarily capable of cooling a 11700K.With that said, the 11700K still performs admirably. It's not a bad CPU when you consider its performance is just a tick less than 5800X. Sure, it consumes twice the power, but are you going to be thinking about that on a day to day basis? The same heatsink and fan that keeps a 5800X cool will do fine with the 11700K at stock settings. 11700K doesn't require exotic cooling.
with heavy multi-threaded tasks the 11700K shows ~15% increase over the similar 10700K.I still think the 10700K is a better value. Hell, the 10850K is even better
even after overclocking to 5.2GHz, still only hitting 55-65°C with heavy tasks.if you main target is to be hot and slow
The 11700K is a well behaved processor as long as you keep it on a leash.article said:Keep in mind that increase in power yields less than 1% more performance, at least with our motherboard. That's a terrible tradeoff.
The Core i7-11700K's official top speed for the Gear 1 setting is DDR4-2933, and running DDR4-3200 in lower-latency Gear 1 mode is considered overclocking, which voids your warranty.
Our standard policy is to allow the motherboard to exceed Intel's recommended power limits, provided the chip remains within warrantied operating conditions.
We've found that Gear 1 provides the best all-around performance, so that's all you'll see in our testing for this review.
I don't want to come off as too harsh, as there is plenty of useful data here, but could you guys do a once over on your reviews? There is an iGPU listed as cache. You contradict yourselves:
I'll tell you what though, this is definitely the best CPU to get if you can get one for $0 as listed in your very first image. I appreciate the time and effort you put into this and every other article. I read that proofreaders or editors or whatever they called themselves went away during the recession. Reading old articles here and elsewhere compared to now that sounds plausible. /rant
Thanks for the feedback. A few points of clarification might be a bit helpful:
- The first image is an automated pricing widget that we have no direct control over. Sorry if that isn't scraping the correct pricing info, we'll report that.
- Thanks for reporting the error in the table, I'll fix that.
- Power limits are simple - these are Intel's recommendations, but motherboard makers are free to allow the motherboard to exceed them. The chip remains under warranty if the motherboard exceeds those recommended limits. Our requirement for 'stock' tests is that the chip remains under warrantied operating conditions. The ignored power limits do not void the warranty, and Intel doesn't consider it overclocking. This is an odd Intel policy that has been ranted about ad nauseam.
- As pointed out in the article, all testing is conducted in Gear 1. That means DDR4-2933 in Gear 1 for stock operation. The chip is also spec'd for DDR4-3200 in Gear 2, but if you run DDR4-3200 in Gear 1 it is considered overclocking. Put simply, Gear 2 is terrible. Everything is slower, so we test under warrantied DDR4-2933 in Gear 1 for the stock config. We also tested the overclocked config in Gear 1, but with memory at DDR4-3600.
I agree with the conclusion. Rocket Lake, especially with the 8 cores variants, are hard to recommend given the existence of the Ryzen 7 5800X. Its faster than its predecessor in some cases, but the advantage is not conclusive, i.e. it may regress is some cases. Compared to AMD, there is hardly any advantage, unless one utilizes the AI and AVX512 hardware on it. The worst thing in my opinion is the cost of decent motherboards which bumps prices up. For example, I recently purchased a i5 11500 thinking that I can try and fix up a ITX rig with just the iGPU since I am unable to find an AMD APU. While the 11500 wasn't that expensive, getting a decent ITX board that will not throttle cost almost as much as buying a 11400 on Amazon. In the end, I returned the CPU. The Rocket Lake i7 and i9 is actually very close to "The chip of last resort" in my opinion. Gamers are generally better off with a Comet Lake if they prefer Intel. Otherwise, I would recommend an AMD 5xxx chip which is better overall with half the power consumption.Thank for the review!
I think that the conclusion presented in this article is correct. The 11700K is overall less desirable than the 5800X. The 5800X is generally slightly faster and consumes roughly half the power.
With that said, the 11700K still performs admirably. It's not a bad CPU when you consider its performance is just a tick less than 5800X. Sure, it consumes twice the power, but are you going to be thinking about that on a day to day basis? The same heatsink and fan that keeps a 5800X cool will do fine with the 11700K at stock settings. 11700K doesn't require exotic cooling.
I think the "The Chip of Last Resort" title for this article is a little harsh. Maybe a better one would be "Its Pretty Good but You Should Probably Go for the Ryzen 7 5800X if its Available".
The two extra cores are a better investment for this EOL'ed platform. The per-core IPC/performance deficiency won't be as noticeable down the line as the extra 2 cores and 4 threads. You can still tweak the 10850K and still be a very good bargain for things that need the extra grunt and keep games within decent performance.with heavy multi-threaded tasks the 11700K shows ~15% increase over the similar 10700K.
and only a ~7% decrease vs the 10 core 10850K.
with single thread tasks, ~17% over the 10700K.
~20% over the 10850K.