Intel Core i7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake

[HACO]

He seems to use the same Thermalright cooler for his recent Intel reviews. It wasn't the 'best cooler on the market' in 2008 when it came out and is definitely nowhere near the best air cooler in 2021. I'd hazard a guess that his temperature readings are going on for ~10c off from if he did use a current air cooler like the D15 etc.

I agree that Rocketlake is a bit of a dud but his testing methodology leaves a lot to be desired.

Or maybe it's that 300w power draw that keeps the temperature high.

well the point is amd people jumped in double footed because one biased review gone up.

But I heard, for years, that Anandtech were Intel and Nvidia fans who hated AMD? And that changed after the Apple M1 review, they turned into Apple fans who hated Intel and AMD?

Never mind, they're AMD fans who hated Intel all along.

 

[RavenXXX2]

That's the issue right there.

 

[uscool]

lol 5800x is instock and around £390 and on much better platform shouldnt even consider this, I guess the i9 will be priced around 5900x even if the intel is instock I wouldnt buy it

 

[RavenXXX2]

Intel defenders right now.

 

[Grim5]

Agreed, in fact, 19% and it can't seem to beat Intel last gen in any situation.
Little bit odd that.

It does beat the 10700k and 10900k in some synthetics that are not latency sensitive - but anything that uses memory, it bends over and gets analed

 

[Grim5]

Intel defenders right now.

Dave2150 looks quite good with that paint and hair

 

[KompuKare]

That's the issue right there.

Thanks for digging to find the 5800x results.
Don't know why Ian didn't include them in the main review.
Guess this shows where Intel have to concentrate if this isn't due to the backport to 14nm (and hence won't be an issue for the eventual 10nm successors).
All they have to do is copy AMD progression from Zen1 to Zen3.
However, it seems that most of Intel's engineering talent had been busy trying to bring BIG.little to x86 which could be, 'ahem', interesting at least for kernel and driver developers.

 

[Orcvader]

Yikes. I wasn't expecting it to do this bad, for gaming there's hardly any difference from Intel's previous gens. I suppose it's great if you do have AVX-512 workloads but for everything else this seems pretty pointless.

 

[Grim5]

What I really want is to hear from Dave2150 is his throughts on the fact that this is Intel's first new mainstream architecture in 6 years and yet its slower than a 2015 Skylake architecture

 

[RavenXXX2]

 

[Minstadave]

What I really want is to hear from Dave2150 is his throughts on the fact that this is Intel's first new mainstream architecture in 6 years and yet its slower than a 2015 Skylake architecture

He'll tell you it will all be fixed by the microcode update. Then when it isn't he will start foaming at the mouth and saying AVX-512 over and over.

 

[Alex h]

He'll tell you it will all be fixed by the microcode update. Then when it isn't he will start foaming at the mouth and saying AVX-512 over and over.

Your wrong he will start foaming at the mouth saying avx-512 and at least its not a paper launch over and over

 

[Emlyn_Dewar]

Houston. We have a problem.
Unless Intel are willing to become the budget alternative, then are enthusiasts really buying this?

 

[muon]

How has this turned out to be so bad. Sunny Cove was looking competitive.

edit: Wait what, still 14nm lol. What have Intel been doing with all the money they've been raking in.

 

[Minstadave]

How has this turned out to be so bad. Sunny Cove was looking competitive.

edit: Wait what, still 14nm lol. What have Intel been doing with all the money they've been raking in.

They've ported their 10mm design back to 14mm and it doesn't seem to have worked well. They've broken the core to core latency.

 

[MartinPrince]

It's an odd choice of cooler but it's not terrible by any means (it's a ginormous copper beast with plenty of airflow) a 10 degree difference seems optimistc.

As to my guess at up to ~10c difference between a current, top line air cooler, I'll come back to that.

My biggest gripe with Dr Ian Cutress is his distinctly amateurish approach. Just simply use exactly the same model cooler with the same model fans on both systems. There is absolutely no reason not to. In the same way he used the same GPU and SSD.

If he did that then there might even be a bigger disparity with Intel being shown to run even hotter but then any parallels or equivalence would be much more accurate and he would not leave himself open to claims of bias.

He did a similar thing when testing the 10850K last month. For the AMD system he used an excellent £700 motherboard with an up to date (Dec '20) bios but on the Intel system he used a poor £250 motherboard with an old (June '20) which was still plagued by over heating CPU's which was fixed by many board vendours in bios' from September.

See here for the bios fix that Asus brought out in Sep which dropped load temps by 25c
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1246523-i9-10850k-is-mega-hot/

Dr Ian Cutress is the Senior CPU Editor at Anandtech and for him not to be aware of these issues/fixes just strikes me as incompetent.

The other fact that he does not seem to be aware of is that even heat pipe based heatsinks can deteriorate over a good length of time and 13 years is a long time, irrespective of how much air you blow through it. The warranty on a Noctua D14 is 6 years for good reason. The fact that he is using such an old cooler could mean that it long stopped performing anywhere near it's original optimum condition or it could also be performing exactly the same. Though we are left having to assume it is still working fine when he could have simply chosen to use a new D15 on both systems. This is just poor technical judgement.

I fully expect subsequent reviews to come to similar conclusion though when I now see Dr Ian Cutress at the top of reviews I generally go looking for better setup ones, which is a shame as Anandtech for years has been thoroughly reliable to me.

 

[GreatAuk]

Saving grace for Intel is probably that even if most enthusiasts go with AMD from now on, big oem suppliers will probably carry on offering Intel options. Apart from anything else AMD will simply not be able to make enough CPUs to meet demand if there is a large scale shift to them, given the pressures that TSMC and other manufacturers are under. Intel definitely has the production and brand recognition advantage.

 

[SKILL]

As to my guess at up ~10c difference between a current, top line air cooler, I'll come back to that.

My biggest gripe with Dr Ian Cutress is his distinctly amateurish approach. Just simply use exactly the same model cooler with the same model fans on both systems. There is absolutely no reason not to. In the same way he used the same PSU and SSD.

If he did that then there might even be a bigger disparity with Intel being shown to run even hotter but then any parallels or equivalence would be much more accurate and he would not leave himself open to claims of bias.

He did a similar thing when testing the 10850K last month. For the AMD system he used an excellent £700 motherboard with an up to date (Dec '20) bios but on the Intel system he used a poor £250 motherboard with an old (June '20) which was still plagued by over heating CPU's which was fixed by many board vendours in bios' from September.

See here for the bios fix that Asus brought out in Sep which dropped load temps by 25c
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1246523-i9-10850k-is-mega-hot/

Dr Ian Cutress is the Senior CPU Editor at Anandtech and for him not to be aware of these issues/fixes just strikes me as incompetent.

The other fact that he does not seem to be aware of is that even heat pipe based heatsinks can deteriorate over a good length of time and 13 years is a long time, irrespective of how much air you blow through it. The warranty on a Noctua D14 is 6 years for good reason. The fact that he is using such an old cooler could mean that it long stopped performing anywhere near it's original optimum condition or it could also be performing exactly the same. Though we are left having to assume it is still working fine when he could have simply chosen to use a new D15 on both systems. This is just poor technical judgement.

I fully expect subsequent reviews to come to similar conclusion though when I now see Dr Ian Cutress at the top of reviews I generally go looking for better setup ones, which is a shame as Anandtech for years has been thoroughly reliable to me.

I did notice the cooler difference, and I suspect he may have been trying to go 'easy' on Intel at points, like not showing the 5800X (or even Comet Lake) core-to-core latency diagrams, or thermals.

I have a lot of time for Anandtech, or used to, and I think the review overall wasn't terrible, or inherently biased, but the quality, and quantity, has dropped hugely since Anand left... Not sure if that is personnel or just the inevitability of the 'techtuber' world we're in. Not all but lots of the techtubers do clearly very brief 'reviews' and almost certainly make a whole lot more from advertising, and in some cases being shills. The good Anandtech days of old, and even this review, put in so much more effort, depth and understanding, but almost certainly get little reward in terms of ad revenue.

I think that also contributes to the setups/coolers, they seem to be using largely whatever they can scrounge for free from the manufacturers, who aren't as interested in a text based review site vs techtubers, and it shows frankly...

Your wrong he will start foaming at the mouth saying avx-512 and at least its not a paper launch over and over

To be fair he's probably right about there being plenty of supply, all Intel need to do is make say 100 more chips than they send out to reviewers cause nobody is gonna buy one surely

 

[humbug]

Humbug and his charts, getting kind of long in the tooth (in every thread).

Again I will wait on AlderLake if they can do this on old process then it should be far better and efficient on newer one.

They are not my charts, they are Anands charts.

Wait some more...... i got mine.

 

[Hotwired]

So if some monkey was selling cpus almost a month early any chance of anyone else doing a review.

Technically anand could pass around the one(s) they bought since its not covered by any NDA.