Intel Core i9-11900K sample goes through benchmark battery including Cinebench R20 and CPU-Z but PCIe issues force it behind an i9-10900KF in gaming tests

A sample of the Intel Core i9-11900K, which was most likely at an engineering stage, has been thoroughly tested by Chinese YouTuber ChaoWanKe. The Rocket Lake-S processor produced some excellent results but was hamstrung when it came to gaming tests in conjunction with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti card. The 8-core i9-11900K was compared with the 10-core Comet Lake Intel Core i9-10900KF (no iGPU present) and 12-core Zen 3 AMD Ryzen 9 5900X APU.

Unsurprisingly, the upcoming i9-11990K, which should be announced soon and may be made available for purchase by March, performed extremely well in single-thread or single-core benchmarks. The Rocket Lake chip was the fastest out of the three in both Cinebench R20 and CPU-Z, scoring over 700 points in the latter test. The Intel Core i9-11900K CPU was also measured reaching an impressive clock speed of 5.3 GHz. Equally unsurprising was the fact that the Ryzen 9 5900X came out top in the multithread benchmarks, with its additional processor cores offering a distinct advantage.

While the i9-11900K showed decent generational single-thread results over the Comet Lake chip (R20: +18.8%; CPU-Z: +25.98%), the performance increase over the Vermeer desktop processor from AMD was less impressive: R20: +1.11%; CPU-Z: +5.67%. Factor in the power usage difference (more needed for the Intel part) and the huge multithread advantage (Ryzen 9 5900X R20: +46.71%; CPU-Z: +50.71%), and it becomes more important for the i9-11900K to shine in gaming tests, where single-core power apparently matters the most, depending on the game.

Unfortunately, GPU-Z revealed that the Intel Core i9-11900K was limited to PCIe x16 1.1 interactions with the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, which usually connects to a system with a PCIe 3.0 interface (thus hinting at the Intel chip being an engineering sample). This left the Rocket Lake part falling behind both the Ryzen 9 5900X and the i9-10900KF in gaming tests in regard to FPS, with one benchmark showing 225 FPS for the i9-11900K compared to 270 FPS for the Comet Lake CPU and 420 FPS for the Zen 3 chip. That leaves differences of -16.67% and -46.43%, respectively, which is not ideal for a chip that will be sold on its gaming prowess. But once the PCIe issues are ironed out, the Intel Core i9-11900K should be able to challenge for the mantle of gamers’ choice for high-end desktop PC builds.

Buy the Intel Core i9-10900KF on Amazon