Intel
Intel Core i7-11700K
Rocket Lake's eight-core i7 and the practical top of LGA1200 — a big IPC gain over the 10700K, but Intel cut the generation from ten cores to eight to fit Cypress Cove on 14 nm, so multi-thread barely moved. Its lasting appeal is PCIe 4.0 and AVX-512 on a cheap used platform.
Pros
- 8 cores / 16 threads of Cypress Cove — roughly 18% higher IPC than Comet Lake
- PCIe 4.0 with 20 CPU lanes, including a direct Gen4 NVMe link
- Unlocked multiplier with DDR4-3200 official support and Gear 1 tuning on Z590
- AVX-512 support, genuinely useful in a handful of encode and compute workloads
- UHD Graphics 750 for display output and QuickSync
Cons
- 251 W PL2, hot and inefficient; needs a 280–360 mm AIO to hold all-core clocks
- Only marginally faster than the 10700K in multi-thread despite the architecture change
- Loses on both performance and power to a Ryzen 7 5800X in threaded work
- No boxed cooler, and a good Z590 board adds meaningfully to the cost
Below average
Computed from specs & benchmarks via our public methodology.
Full specifications
Everything we track for the Intel Core i7-11700K
General
- Announced
- 2021
- Socket
- LGA1200
- Process
- 14 nm
- Base TDP
- 125 W
- Max turbo power
- 251 W
- Unlocked multiplier
- Yes
- Cooler included
- No
Cores & Clocks
- Cores
- 8
- Performance cores
- 8
- Efficiency cores
- 0
- Threads
- 16
- Base clock
- 3.6 GHz
- Boost clock
- 5 GHz
- L2 cache
- 4 MB
- L3 cache
- 16 MB
Integrated GPU
- iGPU
- Intel UHD Graphics 750
- iGPU clock
- 1,300 MHz
Memory
- Memory support
- DDR4-3200
- Max memory
- 128 GB
- Memory channels
- 2
Platform
- PCIe version
- 4
- CPU PCIe lanes
- 20
Benchmarks
- Geekbench 6 (single)
- 1,800
- Geekbench 6 (multi)
- 9,600
- Cinebench R23 (single)
- 1,550
- Cinebench R23 (multi)
- 15,000
- PassMark
- 24,700
Quick answers
Is the Intel Core i7-11700K good in 2026?
The Intel Core i7-11700K earns an Inno Score of 47.3/100 (“Below average”) based on its specs and benchmark results. Rocket Lake's eight-core i7 and the practical top of LGA1200 — a big IPC gain over the 10700K, but Intel cut the generation from ten cores to eight to fit Cypress Cove on 14 nm, so multi-thread barely moved. Its lasting appeal is PCIe 4.0 and AVX-512 on a cheap used platform.
What are the key specs of the Intel Core i7-11700K?
Cores: 8 · Threads: 16 · Boost clock: 5 GHz · Socket: LGA1200
What are the closest alternatives to the Intel Core i7-11700K?
Its closest rivals on InnoReviews are Intel Core i5-12400, Intel Core i5-12400F, Intel Core i9-10850K — open the comparison pages for a spec-by-spec breakdown.