With their 11th generation processors, Intel is finally introducing a new architecture to replace the Skylake arch that has been dragged along since forever. At the same time, they're adding support for PCI-Express 4.0 and new instructions like DLBoost for Deep Learning and AVX-512 for SIMD calculations. The Core i5-11600K is the company's midrange offering for Rocket Lake even though it punches quite a bit above its weight.

With our Rocket Lake reviews, we're introducing our new CPU Test Suite comprised of 38 (!) benchmarks that cover the whole spectrum of workloads, from consumer to scientific, content creation, and enterprise. The applications tested are a healthy mix of single-threaded, lightly-threaded, and fully multi-threaded workloads—just like you would encounter in real life. Averaged over all these tests, the six-core Core i5-11600K pretty much matches last generation's eight-core Core i7-10700K—this is Cypress Cove working its magic. It very much depends on the workload, though. If you take a closer look at our individual tests, you'll realize that there are scenarios where the i5-11600K has a huge lead over the i5-10600K, beating even i9-10900K, and in others, the gains are smaller, but they are always there, confirming that Intel's new architecture is a step in the right direction. When compared to AMD's recent Zen 3 releases, the Core i5-11600K is under serious pressure. The Ryzen 5 5600X is still faster than the i5-11600K—both are six cores and Intel even has a 300 MHz clock advantage, which shows how impressive AMD's Zen 3 improvements are. Due to the good pricing of the i5-11600K, there really aren't that many competitors besides the Ryzen 5 5600X. The Ryzen 7 5800X costs $450, for 20% faster performance, which definitely is not worth it. Unlike many other Intel CPUs, raising the power limit above the 125 W stock setting didn't make a huge difference; it seems this 6-core design isn't as power constrained as other chips.

What could bring big wins for Intel is the newfound love for AVX512 and DLBoost—extensions that have been available for years, but never made it to the desktop. At this time, software support for either of those instruction sets is extremely limited, and they are not useful. I am convinced that they can offer tangible benefits once adoption rates go up, though. Remember AVX—everybody said it's a useless tech that's not needed as we already have SSE; today, a lot of apps and games use AVX, also owing to excellent compiler support. Using these new instructions is often as simple as checking a box that tells the compiler that it may optimize with AVX instructions—that's it. The hard work will be done by the compiler; you don't have to mess with hand-coded assembly instructions. Today, all this doesn't matter as consumers won't need AVX-512 for a couple of years at least. That said, Rocket Lake can be a cost-effective option for researchers and industry professionals who want to use these new instructions to speed up their calculations, but don't want to pay up for the expensive Xeons.

Gaming performance is surprisingly low with Rocket Lake. Everybody expected it to beat Comet Lake, especially in gaming. My numbers can't confirm that. The Core i5-11600K basically matches the Core i5-10600K in gaming, which is very decent, of course, but I expected more. This also means AMD's Zen 3 processors are clearly better at gaming than the Core i5-11600K, but the differences are so small nobody would be able to tell the difference in a side-by-side test. Once you go to higher resolutions, the differences between processors become tiny, a percent here or there really makes no difference. Spend wisely—if you save money on the CPU, you might have enough left over to afford one of the new GPUs.

Just like their other recent desktop processors, Rocket Lake is fabricated on Intel's 14 nanometer process. The company does have a working 10 nm process, which is in production for Ice Lake, and everybody is wondering why they didn't use it for Rocket Lake. Silicon manufacturing has extremely long lead times, so I suspect they decided to continue using 14 nm well before AMD's Zen 3 came out to make sure their older fabs continue to see full use. The excellent yields on the mature 14 nm processes certainly played a role in this business decision, too. The drawback of this aging technology is that power consumption is much higher than what AMD offers.

Energy efficiency has definitely suffered with Rocket Lake even compared to Comet Lake, which wasn't impressive either. Looking at our power consumption results, we have a total energy of 18.9 kiloJoules to complete one Cinebench run for the i5-11600K, against 9.6 kJ for the Ryzen 5 5600X—almost half! AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X is only a third of that, with 6.4 kJ. This "total energy consumed for Cinebench" metric is important because it takes the processor's speed into account, not only momentary power usage in watts.

While the Core i9-11900K has received Intel's full arsenal of boosting algorithms to increase the processor's clock frequencies, the Core i5-11600K only gets Turbo Boost 2.0. Don't get me wrong, even just that works really well as we reached 4.9 GHz for up to four active threads, beyond which the CPU ticks at 4.6 GHz—far from the base clock of 3.9 GHz that seems to be more of a guaranteed minimum, possibly also for legal reasons, than a frequency you'll ever encounter in real life. I still wish Intel would have included their more advanced boost technologies on lesser SKUs—it could be enough to make a difference, on top of the psychological value of "Intel is giving us all they've got."

Rocket Lake finally brings with it PCI-Express 4.0 support, which is an essential capability gamers demand these days even though it doesn't make that much of a difference, neither for graphics nor storage. With the much more modern platform, AMD is obviously capitalizing on Intel's shortcomings, even if it's just for marketing. While many pieces of the Rocket Lake puzzle are now running at PCI-Express 4.0, the chipset still puts out Gen 3 lanes, which means you're limited to one PCIe Gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSD; the other slots support Gen 3 only. What I do like is that integrated graphics are included on many Rocket Lake processors—with plenty of scenarios that don't need a discrete graphics card, there are possible cost savings here, too. We will take a look at the new Gen 12 Xe graphics and its capabilities in conjunction with Rocket Lake in a future review. Praise also goes out to Intel for letting us use faster memory not only on Z590, but also on lesser chipsets, which are often good enough and have motherboards that are priced much more reasonably.

What really displeases me is how tacked-together and unfinished the whole Rocket Lake platform feels. The BIOSes have numerous bugs that are completely obvious to anyone using them for more than 10 minutes. Maybe this is not Intel's fault, but since AMD introduced AGESA, a common-base software stack, things have gotten much better for the red team. POST times have always been good with Intel, but I'm now sometimes sitting at A2 (VGA) for 20 seconds, with an occasional double boot when changing a BIOS setting, which we criticized AMD for in the past. This whole experience reminds me of the first generation of Ryzen. With Rocket Lake, Intel is introducing a new memory controller, which offers a setting called Gear 1 and Gear 2. In Gear 1, the memory controller will run at the same clock as the memory, and in Gear 2, it runs at half the clock. Gear 2 is designed for ultra-high memory overclocks, or so I thought. My sample doesn't even run DDR4-3800 in Gear 1; it seems only up to DDR4-3200 MHz is guaranteed for the i9-11900K(F), with other SKUs are guaranteed only 2933 Gear 1. My Core i9-11900K review contains data for Gear 1 vs. Gear 2 at DDR4-3200, and the difference is around 1% on average, with much bigger swings depending on the application. Surprisingly, 3200 CL14 Gear 1 is actually faster than 3800 CL16 Gear 2. The whole BIOS situation is quite fluid at this time, so I hope Intel figures out some additional memory optimizations because I really don't want to go back to the days of raising the BCLK just to achieve the desired memory speed.

Priced at $275, the Core i5-11600K is sitting at an excellent price point. AMD is currently enjoying their leadership status and has jacked up prices across the board, and they're also suffering from TSMC's limited 7 nanometer production capacity. That's why the Ryzen 5 5600X is so expensive these days—$350 for a six core. The Ryzen 5 5600X is great for gaming and most applications, no doubt. At almost $100 cheaper, the Core i5-11600K is the better alternative, though. It offers very similar performance at a much more reasonable price point. Scroll back up, the list of cons for the Core i5-11600K is longer than the list of pros, yet I'm giving our Editors Choice award to the 11600K—given current pricing, I would buy one instead of the Ryzen 5 5600X. If you are willing to skip the integrated graphics, the Core i5-11600KF could be an option, too. We tested multiplier-based overclocking in this review and found that the gains aren't substantially better than just raising the power limit, which works on non-K SKUs, and even cheaper motherboards. I'd be tempted to save more money here by opting for the Core i5-11600 provided I can unlock the power limits in the BIOS. Let's hope the Core i5-11600K triggers AMD to where they move forward their Ryzen 5 5600 non-X plans and possibly bring down pricing for the Ryzen 5 5600X.