Leo Says 57 – Anandtech’s early review of Intel Core i7-11700K

Anandtech has posted a review of Intel Core i7-11700K some weeks before the NDA lifts, however they have avoided trouble with Intel by finding a German store that started selling these 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs early. You have to wonder whether the retailer, Mindfactory, will be in trouble with Intel, but that looks like a problem of their own making. The upshot is that we are able to discuss the performance of Intel's new 8-core CPU and the results look ominous for Team Blue.

Timestamps:

00:00​ Start
00:15​ Anandtech goes live early – and results
01:23​ Review takeaway and tech details
02:46​ Questions and answers
03:36​ Whose fault is it? Leo’s thoughts
05:14​ Leo isn’t too impressed, at this point anyway
05:57​ ‘Why don’t they just smear our balls with honey’ – what do Intel need to do?
07:04​ Are you really bothered if it's 8 cores or 10 cores?
07:49​ 11th Gen Rocket Lake, the mobos and closing thoughts

We won't cherry pick from Anandtech's review as you should really have a proper read of the material HERE but instead will sum it up by saying Intel has been forced, yet again, to use a 14nm process and the result is that it cannot crank up clock speeds and has been forced to cut the maximum core count from ten to eight. While the Core i7-11700K has new Cypress Cove cores, a new DDR4 memory controller, new Xe integrated graphics and new support for PCIe Gen 4 it runs head-to-head with Core i9-10900K and consumes a huge amount of power.

This weird situation where a respected tech site can legitimately review a CPU some weeks before the NDA lifts is, in our opinion, entirely down to Intel. At CES 2021 we saw the launch of piles of Z590 chipset motherboards even though we knew full well the matching 11th Gen CPUs would not arrive for two or three months. We are unclear why Intel is holding back the launch of 11th Gen Rocket Lake until the end of March as leaks about the performance of Rocket Lake parts have been circulating for many months. The unusual part of the story is that Mindfactory decided to sell these Core i7 CPUs and that gave Anandtech an avenue to post its review early.

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KitGuru says: It looks like Intel 11th Gen Rocket Lake is going to be a damp squib and we have little hope that Core i9 will be impressive. Let's hope the Core i5 delivers joy to gamers who are on a budget.

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