A rather comprehensive review of an upcoming Intel Rocket Lake processor has been shared by a Romanian tech site called Lab 501. The processor put through a wide range of benchmarks, productivity, and gaming tests by the outlet is an 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11700K 'Rocket Lake-S'. However, the site manages to squeeze out this early review as it tested an engineering sample of an ES processor that isn't meant for or tuned for final release. In other words this is one of a series of test chips Intel and partners will work with ahead of launch and will likely be at least a little different to a retail sample.
Sometimes ES chips are quite a bit slower than the ones that are generally released and entered into the Intel Ark. In this particular case though, it is thought that the chip under test is running at the same clocks as the retail version. That might be good, but there are a few other things that could hamper this ES chip performance compared to the eventual retail release – most significantly a further expected microcode update from Intel for motherboard BIOSes ahead of release. The source site, Lab 501, admits this, and suggests that its test results could easily vary by +/- 5 per cent and power/thermal performance could change too.
OK, now we have got that out of the way, how does the Core i7-11700K perform? First, as should be expected it edges ahead of the previous gen Core i7-10700F in all the tests. Comparing it to its contemporary foe, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, it typically lags in the benchmarks, utility, and productivity app tests – but it is extremely close and sometimes a little better in gaming tests.
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I've downloaded and added some of the performance charts in this article, but the source has many more if you are interested in checking further – take your translator with you for the between charts copy.
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Another thing of note here: the engineering sample appeared to run rather cool. In Prime 95, for example, the i7-11700K maxed out at 71 degrees, compared to 75 for its predecessor, and 89 for the 5800X. (All test systems used the Noctua NH-D15 cooler.) However, during these Prime 95 tests the i7-11700K system ate up 286W compared to the 224W of the 5800X system.
Remember, this is a leaked test of an engineering sample on non-final firmware. HEXUS will have reviews of the final release Rocket Lake-S hardware as soon as it becomes available.
