First Comprehensive Review of the Core i7-11700K (ES) Surfaces

February 12, 2021 tarekgt

Lab501 posted the first comprehensive review of an Intel Core i7-11700K “Rocket Lake-S” engineering sample. The ES has clock speeds matching the rumored clock speeds of the retail version, and should give you a fair idea of how the finished product should perform. The i7-11700K, which is an 8-core/16-thread chip, was tested to be being consistently behind the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X in synthetics such as WPrime, rendering tests such as Blender, video-encoding tests such as Handbrake, and was negligibly trading blows with the 5800X at gaming ±1%. The chip does post leads over the previous-gen i7-10700K in all these areas, though.

Performance aside, the Core i7-11700K is shown to have significantly higher power draw, with the whole-system power draw being 27% higher than a 5800X-based whole-system, when measured using Prime95 (which only adds a CPU load). In a real-world scenario such as gaming, where GPU power draw is added, this whole-system power draw percentage difference should come down. Interestingly, the i7-11700K isn’t a “hot” processor, running up to 18°C cooler than a 5800X under Prime95 load. Check out this, and other invaluable early insights into “Rocket Lake” by hitting the source link below.