Intel Core i9-11900K Review: Not a Great Flagship CPU

[Arbie]

What a load of tosh. There is no “collective sentiment” within this industry. If there were then no one would buy this 11900K part and we both know it will sell by the thousands.

Right now the Ryzen 3 3300X costs more than the Intel i5 10400F. Anyone who chooses the 3300X over the Intel part because of “Sentiment” deserves to be ridiculed as a stupid fanboy.

Both companies are multi billion dollar American corporations. Believe me neither of them care about you at all, they sit down and have meetings to form strategies of taking as much of your money as possible! And both are just as bad as each other. In fact I believe it was AMD that suffered the most recent class action against them.

Users should buy what’s best for them today. Right now for enthusiasts that’s AMD Ryzen &. Threadripper series and for budget users it’s Intel core i3 - i5.

The oh-so familiar (for the past 4 years) tripe.

AMD revolutionized the industry in 2017, offering 8 multi-threaded cores for the price of Intel's 4. Along with very good performance per core. AMD brought a halt to 10 years of Intel milking us dry. Without AMD we'd still be getting quad-cores at $300. And if AMD is driven out of the market - as Intel tried so very hard to do - we'll be back to the milking. How hard is that to understand?

In 2017, Intel fanboys had to switch from gloating over uncontested leadership to damage control: moving the goalposts, comparing apples to oranges, cherry-picking results, focusing on single-core / FPS, magnifying every AMD mistake etc. All the the while claiming that both "multi-billion dollar" companies were somehow equivalent so don't favor one over the other etc etc.

And then... Intel blew 10 nm !!! For years and years!! While AMD executed to their plan and beyond. At that, most of the Intel fanboys just gave up. But a few persist, lamely chiming in on CPU news to badmouth AMD.

I say: Thank god for AMD and their miraculous recovery. I (finally) realized what was happening in 2017 and bought an 1800X at launch. I haven't given Intel a cent since then and don't plan to. Not because I hate Intel (though I despise their CPU marketers) but because AMD needs, has earned, and deserves my business. For those reasons I will even pay more for their chips.

 

[nnguy2]

The oh-so familiar (for the past 4 years) tripe.

AMD revolutionized the industry in 2017, offering 8 multi-threaded cores for the price of Intel's 4. Along with very good performance per core. AMD brought a halt to 10 years of Intel milking us dry. Without AMD we'd still be getting quad-cores at $300. And if AMD is driven out of the market - as Intel tried so very hard to do - we'll be back to the milking. How hard is that to understand?

In 2017, Intel fanboys had to switch from gloating over uncontested leadership to damage control: moving the goalposts, comparing apples to oranges, cherry-picking results, focusing on single-core / FPS, magnifying every AMD mistake etc. All the the while claiming that both "multi-billion dollar" companies were somehow equivalent so don't favor one over the other etc etc.

And then... Intel blew 10 nm !!! For years and years!! While AMD executed to their plan and beyond. At that, most of the Intel fanboys just gave up. But a few persist, lamely chiming in on CPU news to badmouth AMD.

I say: Thank god for AMD and their miraculous recovery. I (finally) realized what was happening in 2017 and bought an 1800X at launch. I haven't given Intel a cent since then and don't plan to. Not because I hate Intel (though I despise their CPU marketers) but because AMD needs, has earned, and deserves my business. For those reasons I will even pay more for their chips.

And if you got B450 or X470 you can upgrade across 4 iterations without need a board upgrade. Try that going from i6700K-i9700K.

 

[Top S]

However this 11900K part for $540 is a hell of a lot better value today than the 1800X part was from AMD at $500 in 2017.

What are you talking about... Maybe 1800x isn't particularly great for gaming but was amazing for productivity and nowhere as hot as this Intel space heater. Talking about value, similarly performing 6900k was going for $1089.

 

[DonquixoteIII]

I am not going to speak to the relative merits of any of the CPUs here, but to the amazing skullduggery of the reportage. IFF you are at least attempting to be unbiased (which I doubt), then at least mention in your graphs the number of cores / threads of each CPU. Possibly also whether the benchmark in question utilizes how many cores.Try to give raw stats, not percentages. (Is 50% of two greater or less than 80% of 1? More? but we like 1 better, or 1 is a sponsor.. THAT'S what I mean by skullduggery.)

Refer to Samuel Clemens on statistics, then try to do better. OR just admit that you are not really journalists...

 

[hahahanoobs]

The new series was designed in 2019. Keller led chip designs won't be out until 2023. Chip design and fab production takes years.

It's a backported design meaning changes were made after the initial design stage, avoiding a decision to go back to the drawing board. Enter Jim Keller...

 

[DonquixoteIII]

It's a backported design meaning changes were made after the initial design stage, avoiding a decision to go back to the drawing board. Enter Jim Keller...

Don't have a dog in this race, but back-porting doesn't mean what I think you think it means.. To de-mystify that, back-porting means taking an older fab model and scaling it to a newer process node. Basically what Intel has done for the past five iterations.

 

[Makste]

What a load of tosh. There is no “collective sentiment” within this industry. If there were then no one would buy this 11900K part and we both know it will sell by the thousands.

Right now the Ryzen 3 3300X costs more than the Intel i5 10400F. Anyone who chooses the 3300X over the Intel part because of “Sentiment” deserves to be ridiculed as a stupid fanboy.

Both companies are multi billion dollar American corporations. Believe me neither of them care about you at all, they sit down and have meetings to form strategies of taking as much of your money as possible! And both are just as bad as each other. In fact I believe it was AMD that suffered the most recent class action against them.

Users should buy what’s best for them today. Right now for enthusiasts that’s AMD Ryzen &. Threadripper series and for budget users it’s Intel core i3 - i5.

Key word, subconscious.
For example;
You got yourself a ryzen part, but do not fail to come here and trash it at every available opportunity.
There are people here with ryzen parts with probably a few kinks in them, but deal with these kinks in silence and never show up here to trash them at every opportunity.
See how user benchmark ignores facts and goes with 'whatever they want' to express.
There are, many enthusiasts, who bought bulldozer regardless of its performance, just for support. And got the then performant Intel parts, and kept trashing these parts at every opportunity.
There are enthusiasts who have been waiting to buy Rocket Lake and are going to do so regardless of the reviews, and will always prefer Intel no matter what.
I could go on and on, but sentiment is a powerful tool in any business.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Don't have a dog in this race, but back-porting doesn't mean what I think you think it means.. To de-mystify that, back-porting means taking an older fab model and scaling it to a newer process node. Basically what Intel has done for the past five iterations.

It's a 10mn design backported to 14nm....

 

[DonquixoteIII]

"It's a 10mn design backported to 14nm...."

Kinda convoluted, but correct

 

[amghwk]

Amusing to see how much certain fans of Intel will go the length to defend their brand with bucket-loads of more craps.

Is it too hard to accept that Intel is in the losing end now? It may reclaim it's top spot someday. No one argues that. Just that Intel now is the loser. Sorry if that hurts ya'.

For those who think I'm an AMD fanboy, I'm still using an Intel i7 8700K. I'm eyeing to get the Ryzen 5900X, but it's still way overboard from the MSRP. Otherwise I would have long upgraded and sold the 8700K system. And I'm no sucker to pay the scalpers.

8700K is not bad either. I can still play all latest games at 1080p and 1440p maxed out @ 60fps with my 5700XT.

For me, I just get the best value I can get out of my money. Intel or AMD and AMD or Nvidia. I'm a consumer. And I get whatever is the best value for my enjoyment.

 

[Makste]

What a load of tosh. There is no “collective sentiment” within this industry. If there were then no one would buy this 11900K part and we both know it will sell by the thousands.

Apart from the niche users of AVX512, why would someone considerably informed and with the means, buy the 11900K over the 5900X if it isn't sentiment at work?

Your conclusion in your quoted statement, is not sufficiently supported by your premise.

 

[HardReset]

It's a backported design meaning changes were made after the initial design stage, avoiding a decision to go back to the drawing board. Enter Jim Keller...

11900K is using Cypress cove architecture that is exactly same as Sunny Cove architecture that was ready around 2015. There were no architectural changes made for Sunny Cove. Sunny Cove's physical implementation was supposed to be for 10nm tech, but since that was delayed, Intel decided to make it for 14nm. Since Keller handles only architecture and not physical implementations (so far he has always left company after architecture is ready, much before chip physical layout is ready) there is no way Keller had anything to do with this chip.

 

[Shadowboxer]

Apart from the niche users of AVX512, why would someone considerably informed and with the means, buy the 11900K over the 5900X if it isn't sentiment at work?

Your conclusion in your quoted statement, is not sufficiently supported by your premise.

My conclusion is just fine. You have failed to comprehend my point. Intel don’t have the right to sell a single 11900K. But they will. Not difficult mate, try harder next time..

 

[nodfor]

Nice to see techspot upholding some standards
The original video review was of really bad taste, having a turd in the thumbnail, and continued the AMD fanboy appeasement in the video, where they made direct comparisons between this (a cpu u can actually buy) with the 5900X (that is almost impossible to be found in stock) based on msrp.
Comparing hardware with vaporware, is not the proper way to conduct reviews

On the 11th series, it is clear that the fine tuning of the turbo of the skus, the power limits and the unlocked memory OC on b560 and h570 boards, make the non-K variants the best VFM products. 11400(f), 11500 (with the new igpu), 11700, are the cpus that seem to be interesting in terms of value

 

[Shadowboxer]

Nice to see techspot upholding some standards
The original video review was of really bad taste, having a turd in the thumbnail, and continued the AMD fanboy appeasement in the video, where they made direct comparisons between this (a cpu u can actually buy) with the 5900X (that is almost impossible to be found in stock) based on msrp.
Comparing hardware with vaporware, is not the proper way to conduct reviews

On the 11th series, it is clear that the fine tuning of the turbo of the skus, the power limits and the unlocked memory OC on b560 and h570 boards, make the non-K variants the best VFM products. 11400(f), 11500 (with the new igpu), 11700, are the cpus that seem to be interesting in terms of value

I agree, I thought turd was far too much. It says more about AMD fans than it does about Intel. Apparently this sort of deeply childish, literal sh1t slinging appeals to them.

 

[Adi6293]

I agree that userbenchmarks reviews are poor and I’m not defending them or the 11900Ks value here.

However this 11900K part for $540 is a hell of a lot better value today than the 1800X part was from AMD at $500 in 2017. Yet the reviews from much of the tech press of the 1800X were favourable of it. Certainly absolutely no where near as negative as they have been for this part.

I do believe there is some bias in the tech press towards AMD. Maybe this was because for the longest time they were the underdogs and charged less for their parts than Intel. It still exists, examples include how the 1800X was received. Or the 3600XT, or even the abysmal FX 9590. None of these products had the sh1t thrown at them by reviewers as much as this one has. There have been many many releases of poor products from AMD that haven't received a YouTube video from Steve on HUB with a thumbnail saying “it’s sh1t”. Which by the way I thought was rather unprofessional and baffling, do HUB want to make enemies of these companies? Anyway I digress.


Rocket lake is a success, well at least so according to Dr Ian Cutress of Anandtech. As in its a success for Intel’s backporting capabilities, not a success for the consumers wallets, in that case yes it’s clearly quite the fail! But if Intel slashed $150 off the price then I think most reviewers would be praising it.

You such an Intel fanboy I wonder if you actually notice it? Bringing up 1800X while forgetting the 1700? You do know that the actual MSRP of this 8 core thermal heater is higher than 12 Core Ryzen 9 5900X? we are talking about $549 vs $612 so even in 2017 Ryzen 7 1800X at $499 was a better value CPU vs this disaster 11900K is at $540 - $612 because Ryzen was unmatched in multicore tasks and quite good at gaming at its price, this i9 gets its *** whooped by R9 and in games it struggles with cheaper R7 5800X

Edit: I would appreciate if the Stasi moderator chilled out a little, this removing of comments for nothing is getting really boring!!

 

[Makste]

My conclusion is just fine. You have failed to comprehend my point. Intel don’t have the right to sell a single 11900K. But they will. Not difficult mate, try harder next time..

I rest my case. But I have realized that you are very much gifted with denial. I'd also like to point out that, being more permissive on one side than on the other is understandable. Therefore it should be okay for you to agree that you an Intel fanboy.

 

[EdmondRC]

Well, its not as bad as an Intel Pentium D all things considered, but yeah, Intel needs to get off 14nm process.

 

[nnguy2]

Intel fan boys trying to polish turds

 

[decksmeck]

I went to the Intel site and did a comparison between the I9, I7, and I5. Many characteristics of the chips are identical. There are different boost technologies installed. I5 has tech 2. I7 has techs 2 and 3. I9 has techs 2, 3, and thermal velocity boost. All of this amounts to the closest thing we have to automatic overclocking. I have never manually overclocked so these techs are the closest I will get to being able to install a better cooling solution and get a performance boost. I really hope they get to a point with thermal velocity and adaptive boosting where all I have to do is make sure it has the power and temperature headroom and it will overclock as well an expert can and from the reviews I have read, intel seems to be moving in that direction.

The I5 has a faster base frequency. If it didn't lack the boost technologies it would probably be a better gaming CPU. (Maybe it is. I am not sure) Less cores, or less power in the chip, seems to mean less heat so it follows that you can keep the I5 cooler. The I7 and I9 can boost higher.

The other main difference is the cache. I9 and I7 has 16mb while the I5 has 12 mb. It follows that the I5 has to talk to system memory more often which impacts performance. That might have more of an affect when there are many programs running so it might not be as impactful when the computer is being used for one program like a game. Not sure though.

 

[amghwk]

You just can't argue with Intel and Nvidia fanboys. They're full of craps, as much as Intel and Nvidia are loaded with their shares and money. Reasoning won't work with them. Common sense and logic died with them too. Intel lost the few recent rounds. 'Nuff said.

 

[wiyosaya]

This CPU gets lower performance for a higher price than last year's model? Sounds about right for Intel.

This reminds me of the time that I called up Spectrum to complain about their crap service and they tried to sell me more.

 

[godrilla]

Seems like Intel is stagnating 8 cores/16 threads just like it stagnated 4 cores/16 threads once. Also wouldn't the 3090 be a bottleneck at 1080p than lets say the better scaling at lower resolution 6900 xt?

 

[Arbie]

You just can't argue with Intel and Nvidia fanboys. They're full of craps, as much as Intel and Nvidia are loaded with their shares and money. Reasoning won't work with them. Common sense and logic died with them too. Intel lost the few recent rounds.

Some Intel and NVidia fanboys internalized being unquestionably on top and able to gleefully despise the competition. Like being Joe Louis in a land where everyone else is 4 ft tall. They enjoyed this for years, never imagining Intel CPUs being knocked to the mat by (horrors!) AMD. And ignoring what Intel was doing to us commercially. I remember feeling that way myself.

Their mental baggage makes seeing Intel on the ropes humiliating, so they grasp at straws to maintain balance or even fictional supremacy. Incessant recollection of Bulldozer; cherry-picked benchmarks of corner cases, ignoring the true thermals and their cost etc. are the symptoms of this.

I'm an AMD booster solely because their technical prowess has given them the ability to compete. In 2017 their need for recognition and support in that was dire. Today - partly due to Intel's total process failure - they're technically on top across the board.

But Intel, with its resources, will eventually be back with genuinely good stuff. By then we desperately need AMD reestablished as a permanent competitor. Think about what will happen if they aren't! For that, they need our business - which they've certainly earned.

So unless you need a specific Intel processor for some professional use, buy AMD. Pay a little more if you have to. Lose a few FPS if necessary. That extra is insurance for the future - a future that we very nearly lost.

 

[quadibloc]

So unless you need a specific Intel processor for some professional use, buy AMD. Pay a little more if you have to. Lose a few FPS if necessary. That extra is insurance for the future - a future that we very nearly lost.

Well, since I put together a new system over a year ago, with a 12-core 3900X, I can't justify running out and buying an i7-11700K now (rather than the i9-11900K, since it seems to be almost as good with a significant savings).
But locally, my computer store has plenty of those in stock, whereas the 5000 processors from AMD are just not available. So if someone needed to build a new system now, they might not have a choice.
Given how this chip does when benchmarked with Ycombinator, though, it may not be the flop that everyone is painting it as. Games do use a lot of floating-point, and they're going to be re-written to take advantage of AVX-512, given the prevalence of Intel chips... and then this chip is going to look like it has almost twice the performance that it looks like it has now.
So I think the time of Intel building "genuinely good stuff" has already arrived, despite the fact that this is yet another 14nm+++... chip!
I still think that people should buy AMD, but AMD has to do its part. Everyone was expecting that the Ryzen 3000 chips would be up against 10nm chips with AVX-512 from Intel, and against that kind of competition, AMD's 3000 series would have been in a similar position to the 1000 and 2000 series - good enough to be interesting, but still arguably well behind Intel.
It's only because of Intel's 10nm debacle - and thus because of sheer luck - that instead the 3000 was close enough to Intel for there to be no significant difference, and the 5000 was clearly ahead of Intel.
Given the competition AMD was anticipating from Intel, if it intended to be competitive, it should have included AVX-512 with the 3000 series (if that was feasible; maybe the cost of that in terms of die size and thermals would have been ruinous, and if so, of course they made the right decision to exclude it). Remember, both the 1000 and 2000 series, despite big improvements from the Bulldozer years, were still behind Intel in vector width.
So this fall, or next year, or whenever the Ryzen 6000 chips come out, they had better have AVX-512 in them as well. You can't expect people to buy AMD just for the sake of preserving competition if AMD doesn't have a competitive product.
I think that AVX-512 is a make-or-break feature. I could be wrong, since not many people agree with this. And the Ryzen 6000 chips may be too late in their design cycle anyways, although I really don't think AMD should have needed the i9-11900K to tell them to do what they knew (or should have known) they needed to do back when the Ryzen 3000 came out.
It's going to take time to update software to use AVX-512 anyways.
But if the Ryzen 7000 chips in late 2022 or early 2023 don't have AVX-512, that will be, in my opinion, inexcusable.