First Reviews: Rocket Lake-S - With Good Performance Comes Great Power Consumption

"It truly is impressive from Intel to retrieve this level of performance at a proc fabbed at 14nm, but that positive also is negative, as the same 14nm fabrication brings challenges in heat and energy efficiency, sometimes at controversial levels depending on your motherboard configuration. (...) Clock-for-clock [at similar clock rates - editorial note] AMD with ZEN3 has better IPC, though, but Intel has faster and longer-lasting high clock frequencies en energy usage levels, and that's the tradeoff between the two brands. Each of the architectures will show advantages and disadvantages."

Rocket Lake overall is Intel's best-performing consumer CPU. Still, the competition tries to overshadow every move that Intel makes, and for you as a consumer, that is fantastic news as you get something to choose from. In the end, we feel the Core i9 11900K is a seriously fast and competitive processor; make no mistake about that. Whether it's enough to make a substantial difference, we can't say with certainty, as pricing is also something you need to weigh in. AMD's counterpart 5800X processor has an MSRP of 449 USD. Currently, we feel that RKL has been priced a notch too high, at 539 USD (MSRP) for the flagship 8-core part that is," reads the review of the i7-11900K.

"Last year, I called the Core i9-10900K the fastest processor for gaming but that has since been displaced by the Ryzen 9 5900X and the Ryzen 7 5800X, both of which offer absolutely fantastic performance in games, even when using the fastest graphics card from NVIDIA, the GeForce RTX 3090. The Intel Core i9-11900K tries to gain some ground in the gaming segment, offering a few wins for the blue team in select titles but that comes at the cost of a much higher power draw and higher temperatures. It is surprising to see that the 8 core Core i9-11900K breaks the 400W power limit with Adaptive boost technology while the 10 core Core i9-10900K was sitting just slightly under 400W.

(...) Overall, Intel's Rocket Lake Core i9-11900K could've been better if it was priced right but at over $500 US, it makes zero sense to get the chip over the Ryzen 5000 CPUs (if available) or the i9-10850K. The blue team would've been better if they'd just skipped the Rocket Lake lineup as a whole and put more effort in its Alder Lake lineup which is also confirmed for launch in Q3 2021. By the time Alder Lake starts showing up in news, the Rocket Lake lineup would hardly be missed," reads the review of the i9-11900K.