In the first full review, Intel Core i7-11700K disappointed with its performance
Resource AnandTech managed to get one of Intel Core i7-11700K samples in the German store Mindfactory. Intel has yet to unveil the new series of CPUs officially and, despite numerous rumors, is reluctant to share details about the new desktop processors. Nevertheless, the specialized publication managed to conduct a comprehensive analysis of one of the new series of Rocket Lake-S processors representatives.
The resource did not provide full details about the platform on which the Core i7-11700K was tested since this information is partially under a nondisclosure agreement. AnandTech editor-in-chief Ian Cutress, the author of the review, says that he only provided information in the text that was already known thanks to Intel itself but added a few new details. Early rumors suggested that the manufacturer is still “polishing” the BIOS for new processors, which is why it will be possible to officially publish full reviews on Rocket Lake only from March 30th. The final version of the microcode will likely change the picture observed in the AnandTech review.
The full version of the review can be found on the website that published it. Here we will analyze only the most interesting information – the performance in games and the level of power consumption of the Core i7-11700K.
Processor gaming tests require the minimum resolution and minimum image quality settings. Thanks to this, the performance will not rest on the video card, and it will be possible to determine the smallest differences in the speed of one or another chip. The AnandTech test bench used the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics accelerator. It is also important to point out that the Intel Core i7-11700K and AMD Ryzen 9 5800X models were tested with DDR4-3200 RAM, while the Core i7-10700K and Core i9-9900KS models were tested with DDR4-2933 and DDR4-2666 memory, respectively. These are the maximum rates of RAM frequency that are directly supported by the processor architecture itself.
In gaming tests, the Rocket Lake-S was completely disappointing, which is quite surprising given Intel’s promise of a 19% increase in IPC (instructions per clock) relative to Comet Lake. The results can be found in the gallery below.
AnandTech seems to have found a possible explanation for why Rocket Lake-S performed so poorly in games. Apparently, the Intel Core i7-11700K suffers from increased L3 cache latency – from 43 clocks for Comet Lake-S to 51 clocks for Rocket Lake. The source notes that this probably led to increased data transfer latency between cores to 28-30 ns compared to 18-24 ns for Comet Lake-S. Intel has not yet said why it decided to change the structure of the third-level cache memory, or it has already said. Still, AnandTech cannot violate the ban on nondisclosure of this information.
Another interesting feature is the peak power consumption of the Core i7-11700K. The processor’s nominal TDP is 125W, but when executing tasks using AVX2 instructions, the chip’s power consumption figure increased to 225W. Under normal use conditions, the processor temperature was 60 degrees Celsius with a power consumption level of 130-155 watts.
A surprise was the 292W TDP when performing tasks using the AVX-512 instructions. As noted in the review, the processor at that moment automatically set the frequency for all cores at 4.6 GHz and warmed up at the peak of 104 degrees Celsius.
In the review, we used a productive Noctua air cooler designed for a similar TDP level.
