Intel Core i9-11900K Review, The Worst Flagship Intel CPU... Maybe Ever!

[Music] welcome back to harvard unboxed today we're checking out the new intel core i9 1100k this is their new flagship cpu and for those of you who missed it i did check out the more mid-range core i5 11 600k yesterday found it to be a decent offering though at the msrp it's not really competitive with the ryzen 5 5600x but with that cpu currently overpriced i felt the best six core option for those of you buying right now is actually the older 10th gen core i5 10 600k or even better the 200 uskf model the core i9 11 900k though at a list price of 540 us in thousand unit quantities and a current retail price of 600 and 15 u.s 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 actually i'll be honest i really can't be bothered reviewing this thing but i know there'll be some of you that want to see how it stacks up in games so here we are and even at 540 u.s i just don't know why this thing even exists other than to take advantage of 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 it is worth keeping in mind that the 12 core 24 thread ryzen 9 5900x also costs 550 us and all that availability hasn't been particularly great for that part the performance deficit is going to be pretty ugly in most tests if you missed tim's announcement video a few weeks ago discussing pricing and specifications of these new 11th gen core processors here's a quick refresher for the 11900k unlike the 10 core 20 thread 10900k the 11900k is actually an eight core 16 thread cpu packing a 16 megabyte l3 cache and a 125 watt tdp yet despite featuring less l3 cache and fewer cores the price has increased from 490 u.s to 540 that's a 10 price hike for 20 fewer cause that said it is a little more complicated than that as the 11th gen architecture is entirely different to that of the 10th gen series that came before it so rocket lake is a new architecture or rather a hybrid architecture that's back ported ice lakes 10 nanometer sunny cove cause hence why they changed the name of the cause to cyprus cove in the rocket lake architecture now this makeshift solution seems entirely unnecessary to me really all intel needed to do here was keep prices of their 10th gen lineup where they currently are so well under that of amd's ryzen 3 parts and they would have sold well enough so in my opinion intel just needed to make the price cuts official and we'd change our cpu recommendations for viewers instead they went through the difficult process of back porting newer designs and in the case of the 11900k they made a cpu that's more expensive to produce than the 109k and in many ways it's worse this is all the more confusing once you realize that their upcoming 12th generation is right around the corner and should be much better the 12th gen core series codenamed elder lake is expected later this year and with it we should see intel transition to its 10 meter process for desktop cpus while also adopting a new lj 1700 socket and other technologies like ddr5 memory that being the case why even release rocket lake and why release new zed 590 motherboards that won't support the upcoming 12th gen parts again why bother with any of this i've got to assume here that the motivation is to try and boost cpu revenue all indications point to pretty weak intel cpu sales over the past year so intel's probably banking on bold new performance claims and a shiny new look to boost sales and the fact that they're going to end up burning customers like what they did with the 7th gen series is unlikely to keep them up at night anyway you can probably tell that not that keen on this release and the core i9 1100k won't be getting my recommendation but rather than just end the review here let's at least check out the results though i will be skipping more than half of our productivity benchmarks for testing the intel cpus i used the gigabyte aorus z590 master using bass version f5a the board was configured with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3200 cl 14 dual rank dual channel memory and for the cooler the corsair iq h150i elite caplex white was used essentially this is a 360 millimeter io all this hardware was installed in the corsair 5000d airflow case and powered by the rm850x power supply the ryzen test system features the same cooler though the black version the same memory and power supply with the only key change of course being the motherboard and we're using the gigabyte x570 aorus master please note for this video we're going to look exclusively at results for intel cpus that aren't power limited so no tdp limited testing this is typically how we test intel cpus and this is because well this is how the majority of z490 and z590 motherboards operate out of the box so while we will be using the default clock multiplier tables none of the intel cpus are adhering to any power limits finally all configurations were tested with a geforce rtx 2080 ti for productivity benchmarks but all the gaming benchmarks were conducted with the newer geforce rtx 3090. okay let's get into the results as i said i'm going to skip over most of the productivity testing as the results are pretty boring as you'd probably expect the 1100k is indeed slower than the 10900k while costing more so a bit of a bus for productivity the cinebench r20 multi-core results sum it up pretty well when compared to the previous gen 8 core part so the 10700k the 1100k looks good as it boosts the performance by 20 but the new 8 core part isn't priced to replace the 10700k but rather the 10900k and in that match up it was 8 slower an impressive effort for a cpu with 20 fewer cause but also not impressive given the price the real issue for the 1100k though is amd's ryzen 9 5900x which just happens to be a whopping 42 percent faster in this test that's no small margin and you certainly wouldn't expect both cpus to occupy the same price point based on that result then when looking at single core performance we see the 1100k is 14 faster than the 100k but also 2 percent slower than the 5900x so even for single or lightly threaded workloads the 1100k is unlikely to beat the 12 core amd processor again intel has managed to go backwards with the new core i9 processor this time the 1100k was four percent slower than the 10900k in the 7-zip compression test and that meant it was 30 slower than the 5900x and things get even worse when measuring decompression performance here the 1100k was 16 slower than the 100k and 40 slower than the 5900x so a similar margin to what we saw in the cinebench r20 multi-threaded test the 11900k did manage to match the performance of the 10900k in the adobe premiere pro 2020 benchmark but it was also eight percent slower than the 5900x so a bit of a hollow victory there moving over to the blender open data benchmark and we see the 1100k is again slower than the old 100k this time trailing by an eight percent margin obviously though if you have around 500 to spend on a cpu and you'll be doing a lot of core heavy productivity tasks like rendering the 5900x is the way to go and here the ryzen 9 part offered 40 more performance and this is the icing on the cake for amd or the death blow for intel we just saw the ryzen 9 5900x was 40 faster in blender so a massive margin in favor of amd there but it also managed to produce that huge performance margin while also consuming 25 percent less power than the 11 900k so 40 more performance 25 less power probably don't need to say much more let's move on to the games and see if the 1100k can redeem itself there kicking off the gaming benchmarks we have a watchdogs legion and here the 1100k does manage to make its way to the top of our chart boosting performance from the 10900k by 3 not exactly an exciting margin but it is better than going backwards it also meant the 1100k was four percent faster than the 5900x again not exactly a noteworthy margin but at least managed to pull ahead unfortunately performance in f1 2020 did regress we're looking at a six percent drop in frame rate down to 261 fps which admittedly is more than enough but when comparing products directly it did mean that the 1100k was four percent slow in the 5900x which isn't going to help intel claim the gaming performance crayon testing with horizon zero dawn saw no performance improvement for the 11900k over the 100k and that meant we were looking at ryzen 9 5900x live performance the 1100k also only match the 10900k in borderlands 3 making it six percent faster than the 5900x which admittedly is a small margin but at least it is a clear win here for intel moving on to death stranding and here we see that the 1100k edged out the 100k by a five percent margin but unfortunately that meant it was still seven percent slower than the 5900 x so again results like this make it difficult for intel to claim the gaming crown once again we're looking at virtually identical performance between the 1100k and 100k and again that meant the new 11th gen processor was slower than the ryzen 9 1500x in this hitman 2 example it was six percent slower the star wars squadron's results are a bit brutal here the 1100k was nine percent slower than the old 100k but even worse was the 11 margin it trailed the 5900 x buy so not a good result for intel's new flagship core i9 processor sirius m4 is another example where the 1100k ends up being a step backwards for intel as it loses out to the older 10900k by nine percent margin though much worse than that was the huge 18 loss it suffered to the 5900 x the core i9 1090k was a bit of a beast in rainbow six siege and while you can certainly argue the relevance of 538 fps it was still the fastest cpu in this game unfortunately we're again seeing a situation where the 1100k ends up reducing performance dropping frame rates by a seven percent margin to come in just behind the 5900x last up we have shadow of the tomb raider and here the 11 900k was just two percent faster than the 10900k but hey at least it was faster and that also meant that it basically matched the 5900x coming in just two percent slower okay so here's a look at the 10 game average and as you can see intel's certainly not taking the gaming crown with their 11th gen core series at least not based on our sample of games in fact they've managed the rather unimpressive feat of reducing overall performance as the 11900k came in 2 behind the 100k and that made it four percent slower than the 5900x that's really an insignificant margin and it means both cpus will enable the same gaming experience when using more typical quality settings with a super high-end gpu like the rtx 3090 so 1440p or greater so at least for gaming it just doesn't matter but why spend roughly the same amount of money for a power hungry 8-core processor when you can get a much more efficient 12-core model from amd that's way faster for productivity tasks that's really the main issue with the core i9 11-900k the price just doesn't make sense like not even a little bit of sense and assuming good availability of both the 1100k 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 also you have to overlook the fact that the cheaper 10900k which was released a year ago is faster in most applications certainly faster for core heavier workloads and it's basically on par for gaming performance right now the 10900k can be had for 460 dollars over at newegg while the 11900k is 615 obviously it's not worth 34 more so again why did intel even bother now if you're wondering what an acceptable price for a part like the 11900k might be i'd say around 400 to 420 dollars would be reasonable that's based on the fact that the ryzen 7 5800x which is also an 8 core processor costs 450 and it delivers comparable gaming and application performance while using significantly less power in a way i've actually just reviewed the 11700k which as luck would have it comes in at 400 u.s though that's the 1 000 unit price so it costs more like 420 u.s at retail which is just acceptable based on my previous estimate the 11 700k is based on slightly worse silicon than the 11900k but overall performance will be very similar right now you can purchase the core i7 10700 kf for just 300 and that would be the 8 core cpu to buy at the moment i should note that the sale will end soon so if that part returns to 380 you might as well just buy amd at that point so for now intel's hanging on by their teeth and they desperately need adelaide to deliver the goods hopefully later this year before amd counterpunch with zen 4. so hopefully we have some exciting battles to come because right now intel's 11th gen it's just not it at least not at the high end and that's really all i have to say about the 1100k as expected it sucks in terms of value and absolutely nobody should buy it so if you liked this honest take well feel free to give it a like we appreciate that you can subscribe for more content i've actually just purchased the core i5 11400 f is that actually looks to be pretty good value i'll be testing it on some b560 motherboards so that content will be coming up on the channel soonish depends on when all that stuff arrives and how much time i have for testing but it is a priority and of course i will be looking at a heap of z 590 motherboard vrm thermal testing i'll be starting with the most affordable two motherboards from each brand so it should be like an eight board roundup to kick things off so that should be good also if you'd like to get more involved the channel support harbour and box so we can buy cpus that manufacturers won't send us and motherboards that board makers won't send us well you can join us over at floatplane or patreon so links for those in the video description you'll get access to some pretty cool perks exclusive discord chat monthly live streams to myself q a's behind the scenes video so yeah if you're interested check that stuff out if not perfectly fine and i would like to just thank you for watching this video i'm your host steve and i'll see you again next time [Music] you

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 230,101

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: _jVAfk4AG3A

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Draiko]

You know how companies market their products with quotes from reviews?

I want this to happen with the 11700K and 11900K...

"Pathetic"

"Waste of sand"

"Disappointing"

"Absolutely no one should buy this"

INTEL 11th gen core processors! Buy yours today!

[u/TorazChryx]

Worst intel flagship cpu ever?

the 1.13Ghz Coppermine Pentium 3 would like a word.

[u/xmostera]

I love all those burns, imagine how Intel's engineer feels when seeing Intel's subreddit lol.

Intel , get yourself up please.

[u/cadissimus]

It was huge coup to make scalpers buy them and make huge losses after they cant sell them for 1.1k

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Hellascrupman]

Intel is batshit insane to charge $600 for turbo settings that barely work in win 10. Two 8 core cpus separated by fluff. Not cores, nothing remotely useful: fluff.

[u/kryish]

not a bad product, just a bad price. i think this should have been 475 max for the K version and 420-450 for the F-KF respectively.

[u/FMinus1138]

It still has a place, as decor on store shelves.

[u/Apolojuice]

As someone who daily runs an FX-9590, you have my interest.