Intel Core i5-11600K

Where Rocket Lake shines

- DAVE JAMES

WE RECKON the Intel Core i5-11600K is Pat Gelsinger’s favorite CPU in this new 11th Gen Rocket Lake lineup, it’s certainly ours so far. Intel’s new CEO has been speaking at length recently about his desire for the company to return to its heyday—a return to the tick-tock CPU production cadence of yesteryear, and to putting engineering at the forefront of everything the company does.

And the i5-11600K has a little of the nostalgia chip about it to us; a return to the days when our recommendation around a new CPU architecture would inevitably fall to the Core i5 CPUs rather than the top-end i7s. In this case, it’s a really strong recommendation over the lackluster Intel Core i9-11900K.

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

It’s Intel’s top-end six-core CPU from the Rocket Lake range, offering solid clock speeds, HyperThreading, unlocked multipliers for making with the overclocking, and a $270 price tag that makes the $350 Ryzen 5 5600X look positively pricey.