Intel Core i9-11900K and Core i5-11600K Review: Rocket Lake Blasts Off

[harlan4096]

14nm flies again

Our Verdict

The Core i9-11900K is impressive in gaming and lightly-threaded work, but it trails the Ryzen 9 5900X tremendously in threaded work and doesn't cement itself well enough in gaming to justify the premium price tag.

For

• + Snappy single-threaded performance
  
• + Gaming performance
  
• + Overclocking enhancements
  
• + PCIe 4.0
  
• + Faster iGPU
  

Against

• - High pricing
  
• - High power consumption
  
• - Needs CPU cooler
  
• - Eight cores
  
• - Lackluster threaded performance
  
• - Gear 2 Memory Mode
  
• - Limited PCIe 4.0 Support
  

Intel's 11th-Gen Rocket Lake processors have finally been cleared for liftoff, with the eight-core $539 Core i9-11900K taking on AMD's potent Ryzen 9 5900X that leads our CPU Benchmark hierarchy, while the six-core $262 Core i5-11600K slots in with more palatable pricing as the mainstream gaming chip to challenge AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X, our current Best CPU for gaming.

The 14nm Rocket Lake family arrives during dark times for Intel in the desktop PC market. AMD's Zen-fueled assault on the desktop has culminated in its powerful Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 chips taking the uncontested lead in nearly every metric that matters, including in Intel's long-held gaming stronghold.

Intel says Rocket Lake will retake the gaming crown, but the devastating fallout of the company's failure to transition to 10nm desktop PC chips now ripples through a fifth generation of its processors. As a result, Rocket Lake comes fabbed on the seventh and presumably final iteration of Intel's 14nm process for desktop processors. This after having soldiered on since 2015 as Intel's longest-lived leading-edge node.

However, Rocket Lake comes with a powerful new addition — Cypress Cove, Intel's first new architecture for desktop PC chips in six years, which Intel says grants a 19% increase in IPC. But Cypress Cove comes with a big tradeoff: Rocket Lake tops out at eight cores and sixteen threads, a step back from the previous-gen 10-core Comet Lake i9 models that pales in comparison to AMD's beastly 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X flagship. 

Intel Rocket Lake Flagships
Suggested Price Cores / Threads Base (GHz) Peak Boost (Dual/All Core) TDP iGPU

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RKL-S Core i9-11900K (KF) $539 (K) - $513 (KF) 8 / 16 3.5 5.3 / 4.8 125W UHD Graphics 750 Xe 32EU
RKL-S Core i7-11700K (KF) $399 (K) - $374 (KF) 8 / 16 3.6 5.0 / 4.6 125W UHD Graphics 750 Xe 32EU
RKL-S Core i5-11600K (KF) $262 (K) - $237(KF) 6 / 12 3.9 4.9 (TB2) / 4.6 125W UHD Graphics 750 Xe 32EU

The lowered core count is an unavoidable side effect of Intel basing its new architecture on a design that originally debuted with its 10nm Ice Lake processors, but the decision to etch it onto the 14nm process left its chip designers with a leaner transistor density budget that ultimately resulted in fewer cores.

Intel says this tactic, which is called backporting, was necessary because 10nm couldn't support the higher frequencies needed for desktop PCs. Intel claims the increased IPC and faster frequencies should offset the reduced core count in most work. However, as you'll see in our testing, the reduced core count can lead to lower gen-on-gen performance in some heavily-threaded applications. That certainly hasn't stopped Intel from charging a premium for its new 11900K flagship, though, which comes with a $51 upcharge over the prior-gen model.

Rocket Lake has plenty of notable advances, though: Intel stepped forward to faster DRAM speeds (though that comes with a big caveat), finally adopted the PCIe 4.0 interface, added AVX-512 support and AI-boosting DL Boost technology, and also moved to the integrated UHD Graphics 750 engine that hails from the company's 10nm Tiger Lake chips. Rocket Lake also has other gaming optimizations with added support for Resizable Bar, which boosts gaming performance with supported discrete GPUs. The chips also cater to the enthusiast crowd with a host of overclocking features to wring more performance from the silicon, including unlocked memory overclocking with cheaper B- and H-series motherboards.

However, while much of AMD's successful formula has consisted of more cores, a newer architecture, and a denser 7nm node, Intel has launched its new flagship on an older, less-efficient 14nm node with fewer cores. As a result, Intel has attempted to offset the reduced core count by dialing power consumption to the extreme to maximize performance. The Core i9-11900K is impressive in gaming and lightly-threaded work, but it trails the similarly-priced Ryzen 9 5900X by large margins in threaded applications and doesn't cement itself well enough as a gaming leader to justify its premium price tag. 

Meanwhile, the six-core twelve thread Core i5-11600K lands with a much friendlier $262 price point that's much more competitive with AMD's comparable chips. In light of its price point, it has a very competitive price-to-performance ratio with the $300 Ryzen 5 5600X in a broad swath of games and applications. While the Core i5-11600K might not claim absolute supremacy, its mixture of price and performance makes it a solid buy. Provided, of course, that you can find any of these chips at close to sane pricing. 
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