Intel Core i7-11700KF, 8C/16T, 3.60-5.00GHz, boxed ohne Kühler

Intel Core i7-11700 und 11700K fordern AMD Ryzen 7 5800X heraus. Den Preisvorteil auf ihrer Seite, beißen sie sich dennoch die Zähne aus, denn sie bieten eben nicht nur die Stärken von Rocket Lake-S und acht Kernen, sondern auch die Schwächen.

It seems that the more cores the RKL generation has available, the more complicated things get. Ergo perhaps that's the reason why Intel dropped from 10 cores towards 8. The energy levels and accompanying heat to deal with swiftly become challenging once the processors have longer PL2 states. However, and I've stated this in the 11900K review also, Intel does manage to get the most utmost out of 14nm fabrication. I think we can all agree though backporting the CPU cores from 10nm towards 14nm might work, but is not well suited for 14nm overall. It would have been very interesting to see what this generation would have been capable of on 10nm or 7nm, as really the power draw is the root of all issues. Performance overall isn't bad, however, when compared to a Ryzen 7 5800X (the main competing processor) the 11700K(F) loses its appeal quickly. Multi-threaded performance and applications run quite a bit slower than that of Ryzen. Gaming wise Intel does manage to do adequately with the fastest graphics your money cannot buy you.

Overall gaming performance is excellent on the Core i7-11700KF. Differences are very small, a few percent, really nothing worth worrying about. What is surprising is that the last-generation Comet Lake CPUs are clearly faster at gaming than the new Cypress Cove design. While the differences are tiny, I'm yet again surprised: didn't anybody at Intel test gaming performance? AMD, on the other hand, has made huge architectural improvements with Zen 3, improving both application performance and gaming. Do take a hard look at our gaming benchmarks and go down the performance rankings a bit. You don't need a high-powered, high-core-count CPU to play games—the graphics card is almost always the bottleneck. That's why I strongly suggest you consider options like the 10400F/11400F/5600X; these are fast enough for gaming, and every dollar saved on the CPU brings you a bit closer to maybe being able to afford one of the new graphics cards.

If you’re buying a new PC, price would still be a factor here and that plays into the purchasing decision as some distributors may push CPU+Motherboard just to buy a GPU, so given the insane prices of graphics cards today, that could be a possibility which would improve overall price. Is it bad for gaming? Not really, but the cost-benefit ratio is hard to justify with the current landscape while Comet Lake is still available.