A couple of weeks ago I bought a 11900F on a whim as they were going cheap (£220 new), and I hadn't built an Intel system for 10 years so wanted to get back in the fold. Paired it with a cheap mobo (MSI B560 Bazooka, £62 new after rebate) and a decent cooler Arctic Freezer 34 eSports Duo (£31 new). Adding 32GB of 3200mhz C16 RAM this totalled just under £400.
I'm not that well educated on this but I'd read that a common issue with B560 is VRM performance and being able to supply sufficient power to boost effectively. The Bazooka was one of the coolest in hardware unboxed's B560 round up from a VRM temp perspective but is also known to deliver lacklustre performance at stock due to not sustaining high clock speeds. This was one reason I bought an aftermarket cooler, so I could crank up the power limits in the BIOS and take advantage of the relatively high boost clock of 5.2ghz. With it being a locked chip, I really needed to take advantage of the boosting.
I already have a decent system (5900X) so was curious to see how it handles gaming/single core workloads given Intel's traditional rep for strong single core performance against the modern backdrop of Zen3 supposedly having excellent IPC. What I found was that it performs very well, dispatching SuperPi 1M in about 6.5s compared to 7.5s for the 5900X. In my preferred eSports game it also delivers around 10-15% higher framerates in benchmarks. This was kind of what I was hoping for, but wasn't sure if it would actually materialise.
Of course this doesn't tell the full story and unsurprisingly the extra cores on the 5900X mean it runs away with heavily threaded benchmarks. The 11900F also uses a LOT of power. Overall the 5900X is the better chip but considering it cost £445 on its own (more than double I paid for the 11900F and more than the Intel cpu, mobo, ram and cooler combined) the 11900F certainly doesn't disgrace itself. I guess a 'fairer' comparison is with the 5800X coming in around £300.
In summation I think the 11900F is a bit of an overlooked chip due to rocket lake generally being viewed as a failure and it being a locked chip. I feel 'locked' doesn't really tell the whole story with cpus these days however due to all the various clock boosting that goes on - the stock speed of 2.5ghz is clearly terrible, but the reality is with the lid lifted on power limits, when loaded it runs at 4.7-5.2ghz dependent on load. Something like a 11900K may not stack up due to the cost - may as well buy Alderlake or Zen 3 - but putting this system together reminded me a bit of 10+ years ago where I felt I was getting something approaching value for money for a gaming system, which hasn't really happened for me with Ryzen for various reasons.
Although, looking at current prices it's harder to recommend the 11900F, it makes less sense at £300+.
I'm not that well educated on this but I'd read that a common issue with B560 is VRM performance and being able to supply sufficient power to boost effectively. The Bazooka was one of the coolest in hardware unboxed's B560 round up from a VRM temp perspective but is also known to deliver lacklustre performance at stock due to not sustaining high clock speeds. This was one reason I bought an aftermarket cooler, so I could crank up the power limits in the BIOS and take advantage of the relatively high boost clock of 5.2ghz. With it being a locked chip, I really needed to take advantage of the boosting.
I already have a decent system (5900X) so was curious to see how it handles gaming/single core workloads given Intel's traditional rep for strong single core performance against the modern backdrop of Zen3 supposedly having excellent IPC. What I found was that it performs very well, dispatching SuperPi 1M in about 6.5s compared to 7.5s for the 5900X. In my preferred eSports game it also delivers around 10-15% higher framerates in benchmarks. This was kind of what I was hoping for, but wasn't sure if it would actually materialise.
Of course this doesn't tell the full story and unsurprisingly the extra cores on the 5900X mean it runs away with heavily threaded benchmarks. The 11900F also uses a LOT of power. Overall the 5900X is the better chip but considering it cost £445 on its own (more than double I paid for the 11900F and more than the Intel cpu, mobo, ram and cooler combined) the 11900F certainly doesn't disgrace itself. I guess a 'fairer' comparison is with the 5800X coming in around £300.
In summation I think the 11900F is a bit of an overlooked chip due to rocket lake generally being viewed as a failure and it being a locked chip. I feel 'locked' doesn't really tell the whole story with cpus these days however due to all the various clock boosting that goes on - the stock speed of 2.5ghz is clearly terrible, but the reality is with the lid lifted on power limits, when loaded it runs at 4.7-5.2ghz dependent on load. Something like a 11900K may not stack up due to the cost - may as well buy Alderlake or Zen 3 - but putting this system together reminded me a bit of 10+ years ago where I felt I was getting something approaching value for money for a gaming system, which hasn't really happened for me with Ryzen for various reasons.
Although, looking at current prices it's harder to recommend the 11900F, it makes less sense at £300+.
