Intel Core i5-11600K CPU Review & Benchmarks: Gaming, Overclocking, Video Editing, & More

intel's 11600k i5 cpu is probably one of the most interesting out of the three major cpu launches today and that's because it's about 270 dollars at least on newegg at the time we checked and that makes it extremely price competitive with amd's r5 5600x even if the 5600x were always available at msrp which is it's still sort of repopulating the stock so we're reviewing the 11600k in this video we have an 11 900k review going up later today as well and this is well this is how we got it from intel but the cpus are solid state so they should be fine before that this video is brought to you by evga's new keyboards evga's new z20 and z15 rgb optical mechanical gaming keyboards have abundant rgb leds and programmable macro keys on the left side of the keyboard they also have a sensor to detect and turn on the leds when you're in front of the keyboard and turn them off when distant offering a unique feature for keywords the keyboard claims a 0.5 millisecond response time and 100 million keystroke lifespan learn more at the link in the description below as we ramped into this review of the 11 600k we had a brief call with intel and pr just to talk about some of the overclocking and expectations and things like that one of the things that i told intel pr ramping into the review was that i want to see a good fight between the amd and intel it's good for everyone it's healthy for the industry it keeps everyone interested and engaged and it keeps the job interesting so i told them you know i i want to i don't want to see a fight between logan paul and floyd mayweather i want to see a good fight that's so we're hoping today that intel can deliver just that which is a good match up against amd uh 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 positioning feel a little bit well not great sort of like buying kaby lake when you got the 8700k later that year that certainly didn't feel great something just fell over that certainly didn't feel great to the 7700k buyers at the time the basics we already have a video from the news announcements of all the specs pricing things like that we're not going to go back over here if you want to learn that stuff it'll be linked in the description below but just brochure knowledge at this point what we're interested in is benchmarks today it's a couple of important points first of all we've already covered z590 versus z490 and all the chipset differences that are relevant in that previous video linked below if you're curious uh 270 is about the listing price for the 11 600k when we checked the 11700k we already reviewed but we have a revised benchmark with it and many of the applications today because of a microcode update that came out in the final hours of the launch cycle here so there has been a slight update to the 1100k now unfortunately just to kind of tldr this for you the 11700k with the microcode update and as compared to the 11 600k looks even more pointless than before so our opinion remains basically the same that it's a waste of sand the sand would be better on a beach or in as we say later an 11 600k and that's because the 11600k competes so directly with the 11 7 in gaming workloads that even with a micro code update it's hard to care about the 11 but that review is already up it's been a few changes to the numbers because of the you code update we'll go over that today now for comparisons the 5600x is the most apt comparison from amd it is currently 350 on amazon us when we checked that cpu has been as low as 300 ish but uh that's pending how available it is obviously so if it comes down to 300 when this video launches great that changes a few things but the price gap is still 30 favoring intel here so intel is now positioned as more of the value brand rather than what it used to be which was amd being the value brand enough of all that let's get right into it we have frequency validation overclocking games production benchmarks power benchmarks and more and we'll be doing overclocking live streams probably later this week alongside the 11900k review later today so check back for all that let's get into the benchmarking we'll start with validating the frequency behavior in both blender and cinebench beginning with blender the 11700k from last time plots as the first line and shows the expected behavior there's a drop after about 56 seconds following tao expiry on the asus board and then the cpu drops to around four thousand to forty one hundred megahertz the eleven six hundred k meanwhile plots at about forty four hundred megahertz all core sustained after tao expiry except its default behavior was to expire tau after around 86 seconds instead of 56. we checked with intel and the official guidance is still 56 seconds for this part as we've said in the past that's not technically the specification from intel but it's how the cps are marketed and how they're expected to perform when factoring in all of those marketed metrics including tdp as such we adjust this appropriately for any performance testing to follow the official guidance provided to the motherboard manufacturers otherwise everything looks correct aside from this towel number in the out of box configuration for the 11600k quickly checking cinebench we found the maximum sustained single core frequency at a given interval was about 4900 megahertz on the 11600k when tested out of box that aligns with the advertised 4.9 gigahertz peak boost which is listed in the intel official spec sheet and allows for a range of 4 600 megahertz all core to 4 900 megahertz single core the 11700k is plotted on this chart as well under the asus single clock listing in case you wanted to see a comparison to one step up you'll see in a moment that the latest beta bios and microcode update helps the intel i7 111 to 100k that we reviewed previously but not in a way that changes our opinion of it or of its relative hierarchical positioning which is to say those things aren't good the cpu was and still is a waste of sand you'd be better off with it on a beach or in an 11 600k instead we did however want to test the 11700 k's frequency again to see how much uplift was from frequency changes with the microcode versus lower level changes in this chart you can see the f1 2020 results rank the 11 700k 0605 update at about the same frequency with very occasional spikes a few megahertz higher at the start of the workload frequency doesn't seem to be much influenced by the microcode update nor was tau which was already correct on the asus board anyway leaving improvements lower down on the code but still present f1 2020 shows the microcode advantage in the 11700k moving up to 304 fps average from a previous of 287 that's not as high as when the turbo limits are ignored but it's higher than the previous microcode it's not our focus for today it's just worth pointing out since the 11700k has moved around a little bit in the final hours of launch the intel i5 11600 that we're focusing on ran at 298 fps average demonstrating holy what a waste of the 11700k is at 400 bucks if you're playing games the 11 600k is even closer to the 11700k than the 10600k was to the 10700k previously an 11 percent gap and we recommended the 10-600k wholesale over the 10-700k when those two came out that remains true here bumped up one generation the 11-7k only has a 2.2 percent lead over the 11th 600k compared to amd the 5600x maintains a 7.9 lead over the 11 600k but the 11 600k is listed at the time of writing for 270 on neweck that's a lot better than the 350 dollars we're seeing right now for the 5600x and it's an easy choice over the amd cpu given this specific positioning if we were at 300 for the 5600x it'd be a much tougher selection between the two highlighting the overclocking result it was worthwhile we gained about six percent with an oc and it is stable and that put the 11 600k on par with the 10 900k and not distant from a stock 5600x although then it becomes an arms race obviously because you could always see the 5600x also and we've done that heavily in the past if you'd like to watch our old content at 1440p the 11600k ended up at 267 fps average spacing it apart from the 5600x by only 3 fps for averages the cpus all start to blend together here thanks to other limitations namely the gpu intel technically leads with the higher end skew and we'll see how the 11900k does in our next review but amd's r5 and r7 alongside intel's i5 and i7 are all about the same as each other from a functional standpoint you're not really going to notice a difference at this point especially in a game like this if you're a rainbow six siege junkie the small fps differences might really matter to you or more likely you might think they matter to you in which case we'll get to that soon red dead redemption 2 is up now this one has the 11700k mostly corrected from where it was before the beta microcode update now at 175 fps average and ahead of the 11 600 koc by 1 fps stocks to stock the 1100k leads the 11.6 by 2.8 percent that's not quite error but it's real close to it and this reinforces our original opinion that the 11 700k is wasted money for gaming you would be far better off spending the difference on a better gpu or something else that's not even in the computer compared to the 5600x the 11600k outpaces it in this game and by four and a half percent intel is finally slowly climbing ahead it's about the same as the 5800x as well in total war three kingdoms and the battle benchmark the 11600k ran at 205 fps average at 1080p the 11600k ends up equivalent to the 11 700k even with the 0605 microcode update on asus this game just doesn't recognize the difference in cpus because we're becoming clearly bound in the case of intel we're actually more bound by the cache clock than we are by the gpu you can see that in roc with an alcor oc only which we've tested in the past and have shown for this game we would still be stuck at 205 fps average adding the cache oc that you see here gave us room to boost to 208 fps average andy could also push here with memory and f clock tuning but then you'd have to tune the memory on intel and again we're back at arms race territory for what is approximately the same ceiling to performance at the end of the day the uplift over the 10-600 k stock to stock was about 10 before hitting the cash ratio wall the 11 700 k's only potential benefit here is higher one percent lows but these aren't particularly meaningful at this level of difference hitman 3 is our newest game added to the bench in this one the 11 600k performed at 131 fps average about 11 percent better than the 10600k and just behind the 10700k and 5600x the 11600k is good value here especially at the 270 price we spotted and establishes a stronghold for intel back in the i5 range the overclock pushed the 11600k up to 10 900k levels or about the same as the 11700k with that microcode update rainbow six sieges up now the 11 600k stock cpu posted a result of 444 fps average we need to rerun the 11700k with a microcode update for this one still so it's missing from this charge but the previous test plus some common sense put it as around a plus or minus single digit percentage difference from the 11 600k cpu anyway the 5600x outdid the 11 600k by about 2.2 percent here marking the intel 11 600k as in an advantageous position from its price to performance which far outweighs the 2 change in performance for the 5600x favorite it's a role reversal and he has positioned itself as the perceived high quality brand now while intel is coming in as a value option although one that's maybe regarded as a bit more stable than some of the past value options we've had in the market it's not a bad thing to switch like this and it should be good for the market overall and create a healthier set of options between the two companies the overclocked 11 600k climbs to 457 fps average which is a gain of three percent in this workload not particularly exciting but other cpus show that there's plenty of room for scaling on the cpu side with the right set of hardware at 1440p we saw what we pointed out in our 11700k review intel due to a combination of nvidia gpu and driver behavior now sweeps the charts when gpu bound amd ends up falling behind with the 3080 one gpu bound in rainbow six specifically allowing the 11 600k a position just behind the eight core 16 thread cpus from intel and leading the 5600x by about the same as the 5600x led in the previous chart roughly 2 cyberpunk testing is up now this one doesn't have a patch from the march 29th update but it has all the patches prior to that the data ultimately is important for its relative scaling anyway so that's fine the 11600k stock cpu and 11700k stock cpu are identical and within run to run variance and error when testing the 10700k is also aligned with these and the 11600 koc shows that there's some room for uplift but not a ton in this particular game we receive a sobering insight and it's that like 1440p in some of our other tests a gpu bottleneck eventually will limit the advantage from certain cpus there's nothing more to gain here because we're bound elsewhere in the system and so they all look the same it's not useful from the standpoint of producing a cpu review because we're hitting the limit so we don't actually know how much better one cpu is from the next because it's bound but something will bottleneck in any computer and most of the time for gaming that's the gpu not always sometimes it's memory like in total war or cash like in total war or it could be the cpu like in rainbow six but the gpu is often a limit and this is what that looks like in other words get the 11 6 or 5600 x doesn't really matter and then spend the difference on the gpu gta 5 hobbled out of its corner for another round of fighting this one is interesting because intel cpus show more scaling against their predecessors here than in some of the other newer games that's thanks to the nature of these older titles the 11600k ran at 134 fps ranking ahead of the 10 900k and the 9900k on this testing the overclock pushed in an impressive 7 on this title right behind amd's flagship and ahead of intel's own 11700k the stock result is adjacent to the 5600x and functionally the same in that sense either one would be good here but the cheaper one should win and that's the 11600k for today's review gta 5 as we see here is still useful for determining the behavior in certain types of games and it's still one of the most popular games on steam but this isn't representative necessarily of how all games perform especially the modern ones you can check our other benchmarks in this video for those at 1440p things don't change too much except for the very top end of results very marginally moving around so we'll move on quickly to production benchmarking here's a quick look at our overclock stepping chart for the 11 600k patrick stone walks through this process for his first review oc endeavor after which i went through and cleaned up some of the final numbers optimizing the voltage and the frequency settings from what you see here with an llc level of 5 vcore was close to 1.39 volts get when set to 1.44 to 1.45 in bios so we end up with a v get of around 1.4 to 1.41 at the end of the whole process that's around where the last several generations of intel have been for a decent overclock not necessarily one we recommend copying just what we were able to use to get some level of stability to get us through the review process and we'll do live streams for more in-depth overclocking with this where we'll have more time to play around with it with about two hours of additional testing not shown on this chart we're still unable to get a 5.1 gigahertz hold on all core in all applications we got it told sometimes sort of in games but not always and that meant it wasn't suitable for the review we settled on a 5.0 gigahertz all core with an avx offset of one unfortunately and a cash ratio of 44. we're fairly certain that we can make 5.1 to 5.2 gigahertz work in some applications but it'll require a lot more trial and error and would require an avx offset still the cash ratio is our weakest point on this particular piece of silicon we tried up to 48x but even at 46 and 45 it just wasn't stable we need to spend more time tuning vccio and vccsa to get it to stick but we ran out of time leading into the review process and we called it here this still gives you a great idea of where it'll fall for someone who's not a heavily experienced overclocker and then as always you can check out our streams for additional work on these cpus as we get more time with them blender is the first of our production benchmarks this is where amd has managed to carve out an extremely strong position over the last two years especially although it did struggle back when the 8700k and r7 2700 were the top contenders in the cycle's tile based renderer the 11600k required 22.9 minutes to complete the render roughly tied with the 5600 5600x the amd cpu no longer holds a meaningful advantage here and happens to be more expensive right now but it does have a significant efficiency etch the amd cpu needed about 66 watts during this workload while intel was around 125 and we'll talk about that more in a moment clearly if you're serious about using a cpu for regular tile based rendering in addition to any cuda rendering you might do an r7 or r9 would make the most sense but the 5600x and the 11600k do about the same here for a cheaper option at least when ignoring power chromium code compile is next like we've said in the past we can't represent all of programming with a single benchmark but this gives you an initial idea the r55600x required 131 minutes to complete this code compile while the 11600k needed about 124 minutes this is actually a big swing for the 11600k and we're not surprised that it happened and code compiled specifically the difference is nearly a six percent reduction in time required and overclocking the eleven six hundred k improves it to 114 minutes or a reduction of about seven point eight percent for top performers the amd r9 5900x remains among the best value for someone working in this type of environment professionally while the 5600x and 11600k alike offer decent performance for someone on a tighter budget or with a gaming first focus in 7-zip compression testing measured in millions of instructions per second the intel i5 11600k stock cpu completed 61 000 mips and ranks between the r5 3600 and r5600x the 5600x benefits from a 13 advantage here which is not just measurable but if you do a lot of this actually noticeable in time required to complete frequent compression tasks intel is doing better keeping up and has taken some production tasks away from amd or encroached on them this cycle but it is not the leader in all scenarios the r7 5800x and r95900x prove even between each other that cores have a heavy influence on this particular test but obviously there are other benefits to amd's architecture too like perhaps cash are quicker options for people who have professional budgets and have to do this work as always and you should be looking towards the r9 cpus if you're one of those people for someone in the middle who's doing this sometimes or can't afford one of the higher end cpus the 5600x remains a top choice overclocked the 11600k gained seven percent not bad but still behind in decompression the 11600k completed 72 000 mips as compared to the 5600x's 88 000 mips that allowed the 5600x a massive lead of 22 percent here the 5600x even though the 11600k is encroaching on its gaming performance is starting to stack significant leads where the best intel can do in production tasks is grab single digit percentage delete one stand out being again code compile in adobe premiere pro we're using the puget bench now and creating an aggregate score to show rendering and encoding time live playback speed filters warps and other effects all combined into one higher is better score the 11600k scored 723 points stock just ahead of the 3700x the 5600x held a 2.1 percent lead so not nearly as meaningful as in decompression or compression they're a lot closer here and if you're just doing gaming and maybe occasional video editing the 11600k is shaping up to be an actual value option photoshop once a stronghold for intel returns a technical strength for intel with a 1078 score as compared to the 5600 x's 984 points that's a 9.6 percent lead one of intel's better positions in these charts with the overclock pushing the 11 600k up to 1156 points or a 7 gain power consumption is last starting with blender and measured at the five-minute mark to ensure a post-tow expiry number the 11 600k pulled about 125 watts before vrm efficiency losses here that's about dead-on with the marketed tdp number although technically tdp isn't a power representation for comparison the r5 5600x pulled about 67 watts in the same test it's actually completely absurd how much more power efficient the r55600x is we're getting roughly the same performance plus or minus a few percentage points in favor of either one and yet it's pulling 58 watts less power the overclocked 11 600k pulled 230 watts although our cooler was still well within its capabilities and had some additional thermal headroom for more of an oc for power consumption prior to tau expiry the cinebench multi-threaded numbers have the 11600k stock cpu at about 143 watts this number is the one you'd pay attention to if allowing some motherboards to run how they're auto configured whereas the previous number would be more relatable if you're under a sustained load and using a motherboard that follows intel's guidance or if you manually configure it to follow the guidance the 11 600k looks a lot worse with these numbers but if set up following guidance that's only for 56 seconds and is much more tenable than allowing it to just run like this at an infinite for single threaded power consumption the 11600k stock cpu is about 41 watts with the 10600k previously around 31 watts intel's power consumption for an individual core has increased generationally here so that's it for our 11 600k benchmarks couple things here that are important the 5600x is completely ridiculous it's it's ludicrous insofar as its power efficiency so looking at the power chart so this doesn't matter to a lot of people but just as a technology point to make looking at the power charts you have a part that does 60 something watts 65 68 watts the 5600 x versus say an 11 600 k which following intel official guidance is doing about 125 watts for sustained load ignoring tao because 56 seconds whatever if you're doing a sustained load it doesn't matter it's just invisible at that point so 120 something watts versus 60 something and yet the 5600x is in some cases murdering the 11 600k in production or in best cases roughly tied with uh at least one easily memorable instance of intel pulling ahead that would be compile benchmarks the efficiency is just favoring the 5600 xl 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 don't 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 where there was really almost nothing well the 10700k came down in price due to severe price cuts because of competition but at the original msrps intel wasn't a rough spot and it was really only the lower end skews that started to compete hard with amd so now the 11600k is extremely competitive with the 5600x the 5600x if you are planning to do either specific or a lot of production workloads but you don't have the budget to step up to an r7r9 whatever then the 5600x still makes more sense because in some applications like compression decompression you're anywhere from 13 to 22 percent better on a 5600 x which is obscene or in something like blender you're roughly equal to 11 600k but more power efficient now if you're only gaming you're trying or you're primarily game you're trying to build a gaming focused rig the 11600k remains highly tunable it's not the easiest to overclock it's a bit harder to overclock for us on our chip anyway than our 10600k was but out of the box it's extremely competitive gaming it's cheaper takes all the right boxes to be a value focused cpu so we can actually recommend the 11600k for a gaming focused or gaming first build and it still has some production capabilities but as soon as you're tipping into i'm gonna do more production workloads territory you should buy 5600x instead maybe with the exception of code compile but we can't test every scenario for code compile either so for this one where the 11700k like the 3800xt should be snapped out of existence the 11600k actually comes out looking very competitive in gaming specifically factoring in the price that's its major advantage now the same position that amd was in approximately three to four years ago so hopefully that roughly sums it up for you the 11600k has places where we would definitely recommend it as a an option for a budget gaming build the 5600x remains an extremely strong competitor as well and if the price falls a bit back towards the 300 mark it'll be a harder choice but uh it is the one we would go with for most production tasks barring a couple like compile otherwise they're both good for gaming the 11600k is just more cost effective at this point and the 5600x walks away with a badge of honor for its power efficiency so some actually really good competition here depending on what benchmarks you look at uh again alder lake is probably the the thing that makes this the weirdest because that's supposed to come out later this year so something to consider if you're looking at building a pc but you could always wait uh in this industry and at some point you got to build something so that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more go to store.gamersaccess.net or patreon.com gamers nexus to help us out directly and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 79,523

Rating: 4.9494047 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, intel i5 11600k cpu review, intel 11600k worth it, intel i5 11600k vs 10600k, intel i5 11600k vs 11900k, intel 11600k vs amd r5 5600x, intel 11600k vs amd r7 5800x, amd r9 5900x vs intel 11600k, intel i5-11600k cpu review, intel i5-11600k cpu benchmarks, intel i5-11600k overclocking, best gaming cpus 2021

Id: lbch8LW-Bz0

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/IAmTriscuit]

Feels like this review shows a bigger gap between the 10600k and the 11600k compared to a couple others like hardware unboxed. I know you're not supposed to compare across reviews but I'm just wondering if I should return the $200 10600kf I just received today and get the 11600k for $270 instead.

[u/terp02andrew]

It's a very strange situation where the $329 10-core 10900KF is available...and then you have a $269 6-core 11600K. Yes, I know it was just released, but oof.

$60 dollars for 4c/8t bump. I have to think the 10900KF - for as long as that's available at Microcenter, and for those that can shop there, it's hard to be compelled by even the best-value Rocketlake offering right now.

The microcode updates still being a factor in the review/launch window also gives me pause. Say revisit this in a 2-3 months and see if the "Microcenter discount" is properly applied to Intel parts by then as well. Maybe then the 11-series CPUs are more compelling.

[u/IC2Flier]

So if you're a power thrift, get the 5600X. If you want raw power, literally just get 10th gen 6-core or the lower SKUs this gen. Even hotrodders are probably better off with the 10900K anyway.

[u/CaptainPlummet]

These releases are bizarre to me, especially the 119/11700k. Placeholders for Alder Lake?