Intel claims gaming leadership with their 11th Gen i9-11900K
Intel claims gaming leadership with their 11th Gen i9-11900K
Intel’s Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake-S, Coffee Lake-R and Comet Lake processors all utilised refined iterations of its Skylake core design. While it would be oversimplifying things to say that the past five years of Intel’s desktop lineup has been “the same as before except more cores”, we would also be overselling it to say that Intel offered much more than that. Aside from security fixes, support for faster DRAM speeds and small clock speed bumps with each generation, Intel’s desktop lineup has seen very little innovation. That’s why Intel’s 11th generation processors and Cypress Cove architecture is so important. It’s the first real change in Intel’s desktop CPU architecture in half a decade.Â
With their i9-11900K, Intel promises eight cores and sixteen threads with a single core boost of 5.3GHz and an all-core boost of 4.8GHz. Intel has also added support for DDR4 3200MHz memory (without overclocking) and delivered PCIe 4.0 support, a first for Intel. Alongside Intel’s iGPU upgrades and platform innovations, Intel’s 11th generation processors is the shake-up that the company needs, but is it enough to regain performance leadership? Â
The Gaming Crown
Gaming is a huge part of the PC market, and the core reason many PC users upgrade their processors. You don’t need a fast CPU for web browsing, watching Netflix or browsing emails, making gaming a critical reason for many consumers to upgrade. As a vocal part of the PC community, gamers also define the PC community’s opinion on products on websites like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, giving the brand behind the “best gaming processor” a useful PR boost.Â
With AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series of processors surpassing Intel’s gaming performance in many titles, it became clear that Intel needed a response to the Ryzen 5000 series. That answer is their i9-11900K, a processor which claims to deliver superior gaming performance despite having fewer cores.Â
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With their 11th gen Core i9-11900K, Intel has claimed performance leadership, surpassing the performance of AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900X across a variety of PC titles. Note that AMD’s processor has 12 cores and 24 threads, 50% more than Intel’s processor. With the chart below, Intel has claimed the gaming crown. When we review Intel’s 11th generation i9-11900K, we will put this claim to the test.Â
Intel has not revealed the pricing of the i9-11900K, and neither have they revealed any power consumption date for their processor. Intel may claim that their processor is better at gaming, but they haven’t claimed that their CPU is more efficient or that it offers better value for money. As always, gamers should wait for reviews before coming to any firm conclusions. Â
While Intel claims to offer more gaming performance than AMD, it worth remembering that there is a lot more to the PC market than gaming alone. With 50% more cores, AMD’s Ryzen 5900X will likely smash Intel’s i9-11900K is many multi-threaded workloads, making Intel’s gaming “win” seem rather hollow.Â
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