Intel's Rocket Lake Core i5-11600K Spotted

Intel CPU
(Image credit: Intel)

With Rocket Lake's release date approaching, testers are getting their hands on more and more SKUs from Intel's future Rocket Lake lineup; this time, we have benchmark results of Intel's future Core i5-11600K (thanks to @Leakbench). The 11600K was found running the Geekbench 5 benchmark with mediocre performance at best, though, as usual, pricing will determine if it lands on our list of Best CPUs

According to the spec sheet found on Geekbench 5's browser, the Core i5-11600K packs 6 cores and 12 threads with a 3.9GHz base frequency along with a max turbo frequency of 4.9GHz. Nothing is unusual here; this is where we would expect a 11600K to land. Excluding the rare unlocked Core i3 and Pentium, the unlocked Core i5s have traditionally been the lowest clocked chips out of all the "K" SKUs.

That's not all that will be slowing down Intel's 11600K, unfortunately. The system configuration for the 11600K shows it being paired with super-slow DDR4-2133 memory. This will noticeably hamper performance, so take the upcoming benchmark results with another dose of salt — they certainly won't represent what we'll see in our CPU benchmark hierarchy when these chips come to market. 

In the Geekbench 5 results, the Core i5-11600K scores 1565 points in the single-threaded test and 6220 points in the multi-threaded benchmark. These results are quite underwhelming, especially in the multi-core department where even AMD's older Ryzen 5 3600 beat the 10600K by 7.6% (or roughly 400 points).

When it comes to single-core performance, the 11600K fares better, but it's still the slowest CPU out of all known Rocket Lake SKUs and AMD Zen 3 CPUs to date. Luckily, the 11600K does take a major win against Comet Lake-S parts like the 10900K, beating that chip by 11%.

Again though, take these results with a huge grain of salt. Geekbench 5 already has a poor reputation for translating well to real-world results, and adding in slow memory complicates the findings. 

The Rocket Lake release is coming soon next month, so hopefully, by that time we'll have a review sample of the 11600K to test for ourselves and give you an in-depth look into how this chip really performs against our best gaming CPUs.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • TerryLaze
    In the Geekbench 5 results, the Core i5-11600K scores 1565 points in the single-threaded test and 6220 points in the multi-threaded benchmark. These results are quite underwhelming, especially in the multi-core department where even AMD's older Ryzen 5 3600 beat the 10600K by 7.6% (or roughly 400 points).
    What has the 10600k to do with anything, unless it was supposed to be 11600k?

    Also if that was just a validation run with base clocks then the final score will be much higher.
    Reply
  • Blackhawk69
    It's DOA, few months later alder lake release with ddr5 & pcie5 and new socket.
    Reply