I’ve been looking at reviews for the 11th generation Intel CPUs all week. The reviews are not good. I’ve transcribed these where applicable but you really should go watch the videos.
Jay over at Jayz Two Cents comparing the Intel Core i9 11900k to the Ryzen 7 5800x. Some highlights:
When it comes to just straight up raw processing the 5800x is faster in pretty much every where it matters. However when you go to the IPC (instructions per clock) where we lock them at 4GHz, it’s kind of a sad story for Intel. Where although we saw an improvement in IPC where we locked them at the same frequency, the same memory speed …. Intel’s IPC improvement was not enough to make up for Ryzen’s latest IPC which is just absolutely phenomenal. And then the only thing that makes Intel even compete with the 5800x is the fact that it has a dominant core clock. We need to see a true improvement process from Intel before these … harping on Intel videos end.
Tough but fair. He’s also the nicest of the bunch where by nice I mean “chose his words carefully”.
Steve Burke at Gamer’s Nexus talking about a handful of chips in various videos. If you like numbers and charts like I do, this is your guy:
The 11700K at its current pricing… I’ts not particularly exciting. We think microcode might help in some places. The boosting behaviour is not strong enough. It doesn’t boost to a high enough frequency in some of these games to surpass the 10700K, which is sort of embarrassing. The CPU is not really in an advantageous position vs the 5800x if they’re close in price. At all. If they’re distant in price maybe there’s a conversation there. Overall the 11700K kind of seems like a wasted effort. But we said the same thing about the 10700K where its in this no man’s land. We said the same thing about the 5800x. You should just buy a 5600x instead for most scenarios. Or if you’re really going to be production heavy a 5900x.
In our 11600 K CPU review that’s already live we said we wanted Intel to put up a good fight. An entertaining one versus AMD. What we ended up with with he 11900K is a boxing match between Intel’s left glove and it’s right glove leaving us with one extremely confused parasite occupying the carcass of what was once a great and competitive host. And so we’re here to review the Intel i9 11900K. If the 11700K was a waste of sand that could have been on the beach, the 11900K might be a waste of sand that could’ve been in swimwear. It’s that bad.
Ouch.
On the Core i5 11600K vs the R5 5600x:
Rocket Lake looks to be sort of a stop gap solution. And it was certainly supposed to come out a lot longer ago than it actually did come out. And Alder Lake isn’t that far ahead at this point which makes buying Rocket lake, even if it’s in a competitive position, feel a little bit not great. Sort of like buying Kaby Lake when you got Coffee lake later that year.
I can somewhat agree with this. I don’t regret my 7700K as I’m not sure I would’ve gotten that much more out of an 8700K had I waited.
But let’s continue:
So looking at the power chart you have a part that does 60 something watts, that’s the 5600x, vs the 11600K which, following Intel guidance is about 125 watts for sustained load. So 120 vs 60 and yet the 5600x is in some cases murdering the 11600K in production or in best cases tied. The efficiency is just favoring the 5600x. Now that doesn’t necessarily matter for a gaming targeted product and a lot of people who are building more cost effective gaming rigs really dont care that much about an extra 60 watts here or there. So in gaming Intel now with the 11600K is in a significantly better position than it was maybe a month ago. … So now the 1600K is extremely competitive with the 5600x if you are planning to either specific or a lot of production workloads but don’t have the budget to step up to an R7 or R9 then the 5600x still makes more sense because in some applications like compression / decompression you’re anywhere form 13 to 22 percent better on a 5600x which is obscene. Or in something like Blender you’re roughly equal to an 11600K but more power efficient. Now if you’re primarily gaming … the 11600K … out of the box, it’s extremely competitive gaming, it’s cheaper, it ticks all the right boxes to be a value focused CPU.
This was essentially the case made when I bought my i7 7700K in… 2017. If you’re really just gaming, Intel is still great. Anything more and you should go AMD. Like I’ve mentioned before, in gaming rig land power efficiency is a feature not a requirement. It’s great the the Ryzen chip is 60 watts more efficient at load but what concerns me more are the thermals.
On the Core i5 11400 : vs the R5 3600, 5600x:
So this is where Intel now has it’s best chance. It’s at the lower end. The non-flagship territory. Where the i9 11900K goes forth to decimate itself, the 11600K and 11400 have a chance to price compete where AMD is missing right now. If you’re wiling to give up that flexibility of overclocking or you’re the type of person who doesn’t care about a couple percentage points or you don’t want to bother with overclocking anyway then the 11400 is a good consideration to save some money and get a relatively well positioned gaming processor where it’s not facing a lot of immediate competition. Overall the positioning is strong for gaming. It lacks some confidence in the production benchmarks so its a few places where the 11600K becomes more relevant than it might otherwise be vs the 11-4 as compared to games. An example might be photoshop where the higher boosting frequency, since its multiplied across all threads, or all cores at least, becomes tangibly noticeable in terms of the performance increase you get in certain applications like photoshop. If you’re planning to do any amount of pseudo professional or professional work that involves non-gaming applications that’s where those $300ish CPUs start to become more meaningful as an upgrade. In gaming for a lot of people looking at these price classes $100 up from the 11400 is a very large jump and that amount of money could be put into something else. Either you save it or you put it into the GPU. At which point now you can maybe play games at a higher resolution or whatever.
Between the 11600K and the 11400 I’m really starting to see a pattern here. Gaming is still good so long as price is competitive. Any other situation… not so good.
Hardware Unboxed comparing the 11600K and 11900K CPUs:
Core i5 11600K vs Ryzen 5 5600x and Core i5 10600K:
The new Core i5 11600 K when compared to the 10600K. It’s typically between 10% to 20% faster for productivity tasks, which is right in line with Intel’s own claims of a 20% IPC increase. It also meant for the most part it was able to keep up, even match the Ryzen 5 5600x. So Intel has made up some good ground ont he productivity front. Though as we saw int he Blender benchmark they’re nowhere near AMD in terms of efficiency and that’s down to the fact that they’re stuck on the 14 nanometer process node When it comes to gaming AMD is still on top. The Ryzen 5 5600x was 7% faster than the 11600K based on our ten game sample. Intel also only made a small 5% step here from the 10600K.
Each site is definitely using their own set of games for benchmarks and it shows in the numbers. Hardware Unboxed got somewhat different numbers than Gamer’s Nexus. The good thing is there is consistency where a middle of the pack chip is always somewhere in the middle of the pack. It only really varies depending on how old the game is and possibly what technologies that particular game is using. The variation in games between sites is good though. I tend to play more games that Hardware Unboxed tested with vs Gamer’s Nexus whereas someone else might lean the other way.
The Hardware Unboxed Core i9 11900K review :
At a list price of $540 US in thousand unit quantities and a current retail price of $615 US at places like Newegg, and no that’s not a third party listing, the new mainstream desktop Core i9 part… It’s a complete joke. So much so that I almost couldn’t be bothered reviewing it. Even at $540 US I just don’t even know why this thing even exists. Other than to take advantage od helpless Intel fanboys. I know that sounds harsh but you’ll understand where I’m coming from once we have a look at the benchmark graphs. Also worth keeping in ming is that the 12 core 24 thread Ryzen 9 5900x also costs $550 US … the performance deficit is going to get pretty ugly in most tests. That’s really the main issue with the Core i9 11900K. The price just doesn’t make sense. Like not even a little bit of sense and assuming good availability of both the 11900K and 5900x with both available at the MSRP there is quite literally no reason to buy the Intel offering. It’s objectively worse at everything and often much worse.
Brutal.
I think the big take away from all of this is simply that if you’re only looking to do gaming and little to nothing else, Intel is still a viable option so long as you keep it in the “value” price range. At around $200 for a CPU. Anything more than say $250 and it’s off to AMD land.
In terms of raw numbers the Core i9 11900K isn’t terrible, but it’s not the flagship product Intel wants it to be. It has decent performance but at it’s price point to say it’s just not a good chip is putting it kindly. It’s a jumbled mess of a product. It has less cores then its predecessor and competitor, barely keeps up with its predecessor, gets blown out most of the time by it’s competitor, and seemingly manages to use more power while doing so. Even as I sit here on a 7th gen Core i7 7700K, not a single one of these Intel chips justify an upgrade.
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