Intel Core i5 11600K

It’s a chip that tickles Dave James’ price/performance sensibilities.

- Dave James

This is one of the only new CPUs that should interest gamers from Intel’s 11th Gen desktop CPUs and is probably the go-to chip for anyone looking to build a mainstream desktop PC today. Y’know, if you can find a graphics card to go with it…

The Core i5 10600K’s all-core clock of 4.6GHz and the 4.9GHz single-core clock speed are both one step higher than the Comet Lake i5. It’s also got that PCIe 4.0 support baked into the CPU itself, though sadly not throughout the new Z590 chipset. We’ve not had the greatest experience with PCIe 4.0 performance from the Rocket Lake chips so far, either from the top-end Core i9 or this i5 11600K.

That doesn’t change the fact that Intel’s 500-series motherboards don’t themselves support it from the chipset, and that reduces the effectiveness of the platform as a whole. With the dropping prices of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, it’s going to be the connection of choice going forward and could be a deal-breaker. Bad Intel!

A brand new build

Rocket Lake is more than a higher-clocked version of the Comet Lake i5 – it’s a whole new architecture. You’re getting a hefty IPC increase of some 19 per cent over the previous desktop Intel CPUs, as well as some smarter silicon to go along with the vagaries of Intel’s PCIe 4.0 support. That extra performance is the upside. The downside is that you lose the areal and efficiency benefits the smaller 10nm node offers, resulting in a bigger, hotter, and more power-hungry chip.