what is comfy Boot? A book to your computer's security investigate throughout startup

Intel's Core i5-11600K, Core i7-11700K and Core i9-11900K

Antony Leather

Today, Intel is releasing its 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs and PC enthusiasts will be particularly keen on the Core i9-11900K, Core i7-11700K and Core i5-11600K and how they stack up against AMD's latest Ryzen 5000-series CPUs. I'll be looking at all three so be sure to check out my other articles here on Forbes.

Check out my review of the Core i5-11600K and Core i7-11700K here.

MORE FROM FORBESIntel Core i5-11600K And Core i7-11700K Vs AMD Ryzen 5 5600X And Ryzen 7 5800X: Which Should You Buy?By Antony Leather

Intel's 11th Gen CPUs include the Core i9-11900K for $539, the Core i7-11700K for $399 and Core ... [+] i5-11600K for $262

Antony Leather

You can see my initial article with more information on the features and pricing below, but the CPUs are made using a 14nm manufacturing process, which has essentially been backported from the 11th Gen Sunny Cove architecture used in Intel's mobile CPUs as scaling the CPUs up to desktop performance caused issues. However, the Cypress Cove architecture used with Rocket Lake is still a brand new architecture and the first from Intel in five years. Irrespective of frequencies, manufacturing process or core counts, clock for clock, Rocket Lake CPUs should be faster than their predecessors.

MORE FROM FORBESIntel Announces 11th Gen Core i9-11900K, i7-11700K And i5-11600K Desktop CPU Details And PricingBy Antony Leather

There is one additional downside to this move, though, which is that the core count has fallen from a maximum of 10 with Comet Lake and its Core i9-10900K, to just eight with the Core i9-11900K flagship this time. This means that AMD will still retain an advantage in multi-threaded workloads with its Ryzen 9 5900X with 12 cores and Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 cores and leaves Intel with only an aging high-end desktop line-up of 10th-Gen CPUs to compete at the high-end.

Other features Intel is introducing today is a new range of 500-series motherboard chipsets including B560 and Z590, Thunderbolt 4 support and support for PCI-Express 4.0 graphics cards and M.2 SSDs. The latter will also be supported on many Z490 chipset motherboards if you use a Rocket Lake CPU, but you'll need to check your motherboard's individual status as this isn't guaranteed.

What's the difference between the new CPUs? Core i9-11900K

The Core i9-11900K that we'll be focussing on in this article is the flagship with a peak boost of up to 5.3GHz. Intel also announced a new boosting technology that's specific to this CPU too - Adaptive Boost Technology, which allows all eight cores to hit a massive 5.1GHz if cooling and motherboard power delivery allow. Interestingly, this is as far as I could overclock the CPU to as well so it seems there might be slim pickings for overclockers. As this feature was not enabled by default in the BIOS, I've included separate results for this CPU at stock speed, then with ABT enabled as well as overclocked.

It is set to retail for $539, which is $100 more than the AMDs Ryzen 7 5800X, which also has eight cores and 16 threads. I'm doing a comparison here with the Ryzen 9 5900X since it's usual retail price is also around $539, but as well as dire availability right now, that CPU has also been retailing for a lot more that, making a direct comparison difficult.

Core i7-11700K

Intel's Core i7-11700K has eight cores and 16 threads

Antony Leather

The Core i7-11700K retails for $399 and at face value doesn't seem to suffer much of a disadvantage considering it's nearly $150 less than the Core i9-11900K. It has lower frequencies, though, especially as it lacks Adaptive Boost Technology, so its likely to offer noticeably lower multi-threaded performance. My experience of overclocking it wasn't great either, only managing a 4.9GHz all-core overclock and plenty of my colleagues in the industry have reported the same. Still, it could offer competition to the more expensive Ryzen 7 5800X and offer much better value than the flagship Intel CPU.

Core i5-11600K

The six-core $262 model is potentially the most attractive CPU here seeing as it costs over $100 less than the Ryzen 5 5600X, but still offers the same six cores and 12 threads. I'll be taking a look at this CPU versus the 5600X in a separate article.

Test system and benchmarks

My test system includes an Nvidia RTX 3070, 16GB of Corsair 3,466MHz memory and a custom water ... [+] cooling system to eliminate any thermal limits.

Antony Leather

My test system uses drivers and Windows 10 updates that were up to date as of March 2021 and I've re-tested every CPU in the graphs too - I'd check every review out there to make sure they state the same as these things do make a big difference to the results. The hardware includes an Nvidia RTX 3070, custom water-cooling system featuring Corsair Hydro X components and a Barrow Ropilema test bench. I've also used 16GB of Corsair 3466MHz Vengeance Pro RGB memory along with an RM850i power supply. I used an MSI MEG Z490 Ace motherboard to test the 10th Gen Intel CPUs, an Asus Maximus XIII Hero motherboard to test the Intel 11th Gen CPUs and MSI MEG X570 Unify to test the AMD CPUs.

Overclocking settings:

Ryzen 9 5950X - 4.6GHz, 1.268V

Ryzen 9 5900X - 4.6GHz, 1.25V

Ryzen 7 5800X - 4.6GHz, 1.25V

Ryzen 5 5600X - 4.7GHz 1.25V

Core i9-11900K: 5.1GHz, 1.4V

Core i7-11700K: 4.9GHz, 1.38V

Core i5-11600K: 4.8GHz, 1.35V

Intel Core i9-10900K: 5.1GHz,1.3V

Core i9-10850K, 5.1GHz, 1.35V

Core i7-10700K: 5.1GHz, 1.325V

Core i5-10600K: 5.1GHz using 1.32V

Benchmarks

I've included both Cinebench R23 and the old R20, for the simple reason if you're familiar with Cinebench numbers, then your brain still likely works in R20 - I know mine does. As we can see below, AMD really does have a massive advantage on mainstream desktop in multi-threaded applications and Rocket Lake will do nothing to change that. However, it's further down the graph that we're interested in.

Here, the Core i9-11900K was noticeably quicker with ABT enabled, but even here it was barely much faster than the Ryzen 7 5800X and a long way short if either the Ryzen 9 3900X or 5900X. However, there wasn't much difference between it and the Core i9-10900K, which has two more cores (10 vs 8), which goes to show just how much faster Rocket Lake is than Comet Lake. The down side is that the Core i9-11900K doesn't offer any more performance than the Core i9-10900K but is set to be more expensive.

The single-threaded test below highlights the instructions per clock boost Rocket Lake brings and Intel has finally clawed the crown away from AMD here with the Core i9-11900K at the top of the chart.

The situation with the R20 and its multi-threaded test below is very similar to R23, with the Core i9-11900K failing offer a significant advantage over the Ryzen 7 5800X even with ABT enabled and all cores hitting 5.1GHz. Even when overclocked, it was just a 200 points faster.

AMD still held on to the top spot in R20's single-threaded test, but only by one point thanks to the Ryzen 9 5950X - the Core i9-11900K beat everything else by a wide margin.

The combined Lightroom and Photoshop workflow benchmark below is a new addition to my test suite and sadly I didn't have time to run all my usual CPUs through it and also only at stock speed. However, it's a win for Intel here with the Core i9-11900K outstripping the Ryzen 9 5900X and actually offering a decent amount more performance than the Core i9-10900K, although it's only when you step down to the Core i5-10600K and Ryzen 5 3600 that you see significantly less performance.

Below is a score-based HandBrake benchmark and again, AMD is so strong in this multi-threaded benchmark, needing Intel's very best CPUs to come close to matching the Ryzen 7 5800X. For multi-threaded work, the Core i7-11700K really isn't that far behind and if you can find a good deal with the Core i9-10850K, it too can offer decent performance for the cash if you mainly deal with multi-threaded workflows.

Our first game test and Watch Dogs: Legion proved to be only somewhat CPU-bound, even with an RTX 3070 and gaming at 1080p. It's not till we get to the Ryzen 3000 CPUs and Intel Core i5-10400F that we see a noticeable performance drop off with little between the rest of the stack.

Dirt 5 was a similar deal and interestingly, the Comet Lake CPUs were quicker here than their new Rocket Lake counterparts which is odd. But given there was just a handful of frames in it at over 100fps, it's not a big deal and higher resolutions will see next to no difference.

Far Cry 5 is definitely one game that's still very CPU-limited and loves cores and frequency. The Core i9-11900K managed the best result once overclocked and showed a noticeable improvement when ABT was enabled too. However, the Ryzen 7 5800X has always been strong here with eight cores seeming to be the sweet spot.

Power and thermals

Finally, the power test showed the down side to Active Boost Technology - an 80W increase to the power draw compared to stock speed. Still, given the Core i9-11900K manages to massively outperform the Core i7-10700K but has a similar power drawer without ABT, we're probably not looking at anything worse than Comet Lake here. The thermals weren't much hotter either. In multi-threaded workloads and ABT enabled, we saw temperatures occasionally topping 90 degrees, but with a 5.1GHz all-core frequency and voltage hike, that's maybe expected.

Conclusions

There are a few things to consider here. Firstly, is Rocket Lake a knock-out for Intel versus AMD? No. AMD is still king on desktop when it comes to multi-threaded workloads thanks to the fact it has a great performing architecture and more cores with the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X. Until Intel releases higher core counts or updates its aging 10th Gen high-end desktop CPUs, this will still be the case.

The middle ground mixing between six and 10 cores is more interesting. It has made up significant ground with Rocket Lake and in many tests the Core i9-11900K matched the Core i9-10900K despite having two fewer cores. That's a remarkable performance boost, but the fact remains that if you have a Core i9-10900K, the Core i9-11900K is no faster in multi-threaded workloads despite costing more.

Intel's Core i9-11900K packaging

Intel

Compared to the Ryzen 9 5900X, well, the issue with the latter is that firstly, it's rarely available at the moment and when it is, it's often retailing for a lot more than pre-pandemic levels and certainly a lot more than the Core i9-11900K. It's certainly faster than the Intel CPU in many multi-threaded tests, but the Intel CPU is a match in games and was also slightly quicker in the Adobe image editing tests.

Intel and AMD's current platforms have a limited shelf life too so if you're in the market for a multi-purpose high-end CPU, the Core i9-11900K could, due to stock and pricing issues, be a slightly better bet unless you're primarily concerned with multi-threaded content creation. Another issue for Intel, though, is the Core i7-11700K, which is much cheaper and rarely far behind, potentially offering a more wallet-friendly route into Rocket Lake. Overall, the Core i9-11900K is certainly a very fast CPU and like many things right now, a lot depends on whether you can actually buy it. If Intel can out-supply AMD and actually get the CPU on shelves for near RRP values, then it may have an unexpected advantage over the Ryzen 9 5900X.