14 nanometers. Looks good. faster, stronger than ever before. Just like our sponsor. Honey is the free to use browser extension that helps you find some of the best promo codes on over 30,000 sites. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. Yeah, yeah, nanometers aren't an accurate measure of anything, I know. But this process is old and this has huge performance implications, which we'll test on the Core i9-11900K and Core i5-11600K that we have here today. To do that, we've grabbed the equivalent 10th gen core processors along with the Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 9 5900X for comparison with Team Red. Special note, we're running both benches at one to one memory, more on that later. And we're running these tests under completely stock turbo limits. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the Core i9's first L at a roughly 8% lower average FPS than Ryzen 9, while the Core i5 sees significantly better minimum frame rates than Ryzen 5. GTA 5 has the Core i9 pulling ahead of the 5900X by 5% or more in minimum frames, while the Core i5 again pulls off a 13% or so lead over Ryzen 5's minimums. F1 2020's absurd frame rates reveal the generational improvements Intel's managed here for the Core i5. The Core i9 appears roughly in line with 10th gen thanks to fewer threads and lower base clocks. Forza Ryzen 4 has Intel trading blows with AMD with better minimums and worse averages on both new CPUs, while turn times in Civilization 6 are about half a second or so faster on 11th gen. Flight Sim 2020 has both CPUs ahead of last gen, but falling short of AMD in all but the minimum frame rates. CSGO is another bloodbath where AMD's Zen 3 architecture firmly curbs Stomps Rocket Lake, perhaps thanks to the gigantic amount of shared cash Ryzen enjoys. Although it's worth pointing out that every CPU here is already in overkill territory. Moving on to productivity, Intel's single threaded Cinebench scores are much better than last gen and higher than AMD's, but not by a huge amount. While PugetBench for Creative Cloud shows that even lightly threaded workloads like Photoshop can still favor AMD, again, likely thanks to the extra cash. It's not a big L though, that comes from Blender. The Core i5 falls behind by 10% in Gooseberry, while the Core i9, because of stock turbo, is a staggering 40% slower than Ryzen in the same test. CoronaBenchmark, being much shorter, puts the Core i5 much closer to Ryzen 5, and the same goes for V-Ray, a test that only lasts about a minute. POV-Ray has Intel very close to AMD in single threaded performance, while the Core i9 continues to struggle. Specs Workstation is mostly another pain point for Intel, with some tests again favoring the 10th gen Core i9, thanks to its additional cores and threads. Even the Core i5 struggles, with 10 to 14% lower aggregate scores than AMD across the life sciences, financial services, and energy segments of the test. Not looking great so far, at least not for the Core i9, but now we need to talk about power and thermals. And we're gonna talk a lot, because if you recall, Comet Lake was better than Coffee Lake for thermals, but only because Intel busted out all the tricks of the trade to make it happen. And now, despite having two fewer cores, all early reports had Rocket Lake pegged at basically being a flame thrower in addition to the performance concerns relative to AMD. At stock, both our Core i9 and Core i5 manage thermals that are reasonable, thanks in large part to strictly conforming to Intel's rated 125 watt TDP once turbo expires. They do draw much higher power than last gen to hit their peak all-core turbo speeds, but in the Core i9's case, Intel's new adaptive boost technology impressively allows the cores to run 300 megahertz higher all-core than it's rated for. This new behavior is similar to AMD's precision boost too, opportunistically increasing all core clocks within thermal and power limits, but Intel's is still constrained by their finite turbo period of 56 seconds by default. Upon disabling this turbo limit using our motherboard's multi-core enhancement feature, the Core i9 draws a staggering 275 watts peak with 260 watts sustained from the socket. That is nearly double the Ryzen 9's power draw and around 40% more than 10th gen's. We did get about a 19% faster render time than stock, but even with our Noctua NHD 15S, the i9 instantly hits 80 degrees and creeps up to the mid 90s throughout the run. Bizarrely though, the Core i5 manages better thermals and power draw with multi-core enhancement compared to its own stock turbo, thanks to a lower core voltage provided by the motherboard. These results, however, were for AVX too. Intel added the AVX 512 instruction set and machine learning extensions to Rocket Lake, and they're leaning heavily on them in marketing. We don't have any benchmarks for that right now, but we can do a quick stress test with Prime95, where at stock we've got okay thermals again for our Core i9, but our Core i5 hits the 100 degree mark thanks to a higher turbo speed before settling into the mid 60s to 70s. Power consumption roughly matches the non-AVX 512 testing and unsurprisingly, both CPUs dropped straight to base clock after the turbo window expired. It's when we removed the limits again that, oh no, Intel, are you okay? The Core i9 can draw over 290 watts at peak. The Core i5, once again, draws less power thanks to the motherboard SVID control, but both CPUs still run toasty enough that our dual tower cooler can just barely handle it. We're really at the limits of what Intel's reheated 14 nanometer process can do here. Thankfully, you won't have to reheat your drink for up to eight hours with a water bottle from LTDstore.com. But even without AVX 512, you have to ask, why is 11th gen so hot with fewer cores than last gen? Aside from AVX 512 taking up a huge amount of die space, it was originally built for 10 nanometers. That's right, Intel had to backport this thing. And that's why we got this really strange looking product stack. No fewer than 10 eight core CPUs across Core i7 and Core i9, nine six core CPUs in the Core i5 line, and everything else is just a comet lake refresh. No rocket lake Core i3s or Pentiums this time around. Without being able to rely on core counts to cleanly distinguish between skews, the differences are so minor in practice that they're going to make most people think twice about spending an extra $140 for a Core i9 when a Core i7 is almost as good, or when AMD is a better performer for the money. Granted, Core i9s get thermal velocity boost and adaptive boost technology, but you can mimic that by enabling multi-core enhancement if your motherboard has it, or by maxing out the power limits manually in Intel XTU if it doesn't. All 11th gen Core desktop CPUs that we know about have the same cache per core and the same improved graphics core with expanded video decode capabilities on skews that include them. What's more, they all have an extra four PCI express Gen 4 lanes on the CPU now for NVMe storage like AMD does. Get subscribed by the way, because even within the same model, not all NVMe SSDs are created equal, and we're calling out the worst offender. Now there is the issue of gear one mode support. TLDR, it's just like running infinity fabric in one-to-one mode with memory speed on Ryzen for better performance. The Core i9-11900K and KF are supposed to be the only ones that handle DDR4-3200 memory this way, but from our testing, the Core i5-11600K can too. It's just not the default, and it'll go even higher than that. It looks like the Core i9's main draw will be in pre-built PCs that don't expose these options. If the Core i7-11700K is, as Gamers Nexus put it, a waste of sand, the whole Core i9 lineup on paper is even worse, especially the K-SKU that's just priced $10 less than Ryzen 9. Thankfully, you don't need to buy a high-end motherboard to use faster memory now, so that's one savings that's no longer exclusive to Team Red, but that doesn't save the Core i9. In games, matching Ryzen's performance is a best-case scenario where even the Ryzen 5 at times comes close. Granted, it may not make or break your gameplay, but the value's just not there. For work, unless you can use AVX512, the extra oomph from Ryzen 9's 12 cores means Intel is not going to be your first choice this generation in that domain either. The real star of the show is the Core i5. It's only about two to 6% slower than the Ryzen 5 at stock across our testing, but it costs $30 less at retail. Even better for Intel, availability troubles means the 11600K is $100 cheaper than Ryzen 5's street price, making it a no-brainer as long as Intel has the chips to sell. Bonus, if you don't overclock, you'll lose very little by getting a cheaper non-case queue and turning on multi-core enhancement to offset the difference in base clock. Just make sure you get a cooler that can handle it. If you're worried about upgradability, DDR5's impending arrival means both teams' sockets have an expiration date at this point, so you lose nothing either way if you need a new CPU today, or you lose everything, depending on how you think about it, class half empty, half full. It might be rough going for Intel for a while longer, but it looks like things are improving. A week ago, their CEO, Pat Gelsinger, announced a renewed focus on fabrication and process technology, including a seven nanometer tile process that will, hopefully, power Meteor Lake two generations from now. We've heard this kind of promise from Intel before, so time will tell. For now, just buy a Core i5 or AMD when the scalpers have finished scalping. But if Linus won't scalp you for sponsor segues, I won't either. Get the best prices and best selection on computer hardware and everything else technology at any of Micro Center's 25 locations across the United States. 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