Unpopular opinion: Rocket Lake Is Fine

[Mister Woof]

Bad/good in a vacuum isn't really a meaningful metric because as long as AMD (or Apple, or whoever) exist, there is always something to compare it to.

 

An American prison lunch isn't technically "bad" in that it satisfies your basic nutrition needs. But it sure as hell is when you're comparing it to virtually anything else that is also available.

 

It's only okay for prisoners because that's all they can get.

[fonsui]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

?! This “AMD has not deployed CPUs with more than 8 cores” thing is emphatically not true.  More than 8 cores is basically their deal.

 

 

Zen processors use multiple dies to reach their total core count. You re-typed what you thought were my words, but did not select and quote them, like so:

 

2 hours ago, fonsui said:

AMD has not deployed a single CPU die, ever, that had more than 8

 

[Sarra]

I think Steve put it best when he said that the 11900k would be better off as sand on the beach, or sand in your swim suit scratching up your bits. Same with the 11700k. The 11600 looked... Interesting. But seriously. The 11900k benches worse than the 10900k, and that's really not a good thing.

 

I don't think Intel has a smart play that they can do right now. The "Best" they could have done is left the 11th gen on the same socket and chipset as the 10th gen, cut the prices, and tried to compete in a reasonable way. That, and just keep it to maybe 7 SKU's, the i3, i5, i7, and i9 with maaaaaaaybe a F version of each for the i6, i7, and i9.

 

As it is, I'm getting close to building a third PC for myself, and there's absolutely 0% chance I would even consider an Intel 11th or 10th gen for the core. I would consider a 9900k, but it would have to be really, really cheap.

[Bombastinator]

I would say it depends on what is available for what price.  Imho one shouldn’t pay much more for a 11900k that a 11700k, and a 11700k should be a bit less expansive than a 5800x.  If a 5xxxX chip can’t be gotten though it’s irrelevant.  The thing works to run things.  It’s not like it’s broken.  Just depends on what one pays for what.  Overpriced is not the same as worthless.

Edited April 3, 2021 by Bombastinator

[xg32]

11400 is the new budget king, might as well use it with the stock cooler, 116/117 is vs  106/107/109 depending on budget and  is ok for midrange gaming, 11900k is pointless.

 

There's still an intel tax since amd is still has a higher chance of problems, that's about it, certainly not as bad as some of the reviews make it sound but still bad. that said, my next build is a 5950x at msrp

 

Still need to see a super tune between the 11700k vs the 5800x in pure game and obviously 5900x and 5950x wins the flagship range.

 

If this is necessary for ADL it's understandable but i'm just seeing it from a consumer pov, like when amd launched zen 1, it was slower than sandy beach per core, but it forced intel's hands and gave us 8 core chips.

[yenic]

Doing some troubleshooting tonight on my 5900X, reflashed the latest BIOS, set optimized defaults (changing absolutely nothing).. fired up Prime95 and success! I achieved stability in that my system no longer crashes (I was doing no overclocking before, to be clear), but the show was entertaining nonetheless. I thought you'd enjoy this boys.

 

Reason I'm sharing this here, find me ONE Rocket Lake or Comet Lake rig doing something as goofy as this. Good old AMD! Never fails to surprise me. I'll dump a few more hours of my life into this and get it straight eventually, maybe.

 

[Mister Woof]

37 minutes ago, yenic said:

Doing some troubleshooting tonight on my 5900X, reflashed the latest BIOS, set optimized defaults (changing absolutely nothing).. fired up Prime95 and success! I achieved stability in that my system no longer crashes (I was doing no overclocking before, to be clear), but the show was entertaining nonetheless. I thought you'd enjoy this boys.

 

Reason I'm sharing this here, find me ONE Rocket Lake or Comet Lake rig doing something as goofy as this. Good old AMD! Never fails to surprise me. I'll dump a few more hours of my life into this and get it straight eventually, maybe.

 

That sound is pretty neat imo

[yenic]

I was able to resolve that by unplugging all my USB devices except my mouse, ran P95 and no more issue. I then plugged everything back in, ran P95 and no more continual redetection. Makes no sense but that's traditional quacky AMD. You know, the "Rocket Lake slayer"? So I went to my next typical-Ryzen troubleshooting step that's 2nd nature by now.. reset CMOS RAM. Will format, see if that smooths out my issues with PB not hitting the right voltages/frequencies or not.

 

I see you have a 10900KF, pretty much what I wish I had right now, but just a K SKU. I'm a rare one that actually thinks Intel's IGP is a huge value add. Very handy when you need it as a backup, troubleshooting, etc. Every CPU or preferably the chipset should have a terrible IGP that at least puts up a screen. Right now my favorite CPU is the 10850K. I wouldn't overclock it as you have there, just run it stock on my D15 that's currently on my 5900X.

[Bombastinator]

23 minutes ago, yenic said:

I was able to resolve that by unplugging all my USB devices except my mouse, ran P95 and no more issue. I then plugged everything back in, ran P95 and no more continual redetection. Makes no sense but that's traditional quacky AMD. You know, the "Rocket Lake slayer"? So I went to my next typical-Ryzen troubleshooting step that's 2nd nature by now.. reset CMOS RAM. Will format, see if that smooths out my issues with PB not hitting the right voltages/frequencies or not.

 

I see you have a 10900KF, pretty much what I wish I had right now, but just a K SKU. I'm a rare one that actually thinks Intel's IGP is a huge value add. Very handy when you need it as a backup, troubleshooting, etc. Every CPU or preferably the chipset should have a terrible IGP that at least puts up a screen. Right now my favorite CPU is the 10850K. I wouldn't overclock it as you have there, just run it stock on my D15 that's currently on my 5900X.

Heh.  Those are all “remove secondary code” things.  Remove any loaded on cruft.  People used to complain a lot about Apple Maps vs Google maps. Turned out Google was while not directly messing with apples stuff, they were messing with everyone else’s stuff by not quite adhering to standards they said they were adhering to.  A lot like microsoft did with C sharp.  Just enough to totally screw up Apple Maps in very specific ways.  It was a constant battle that apparently still goes on.  They do it to all the non chrome browsers too.  Offer “free” developer tools that are supposed to produce stuff other browsers can use except they only sort of can. It’s become a standard big dog move these days.

[heickelrrx]

The most negative coverage during Rocket Lake being horrible are centered around 11900K, 

Yes that SKU is bad, but that doesn't mean the rest of the Lineup is Bad

the i7 11700K, 11600K is well positioned in price, while we know the performance is just behind Ryzen counterpart with higher power draw, it doesn't really bad product considering Ryzen Counterpart offering

the Locked part also attractive too, and let's be real, only few people do actually overclock, and these RKL chip already boosting high at default, all we need to do is remove power limit, and do some memory tuning on Budget Chipset

OFC the discounted 10th gen is Very Great Value, the problem with 10th Gen is the IO is basically Skylake, so if u need more IO RKL is welcome upgrade

The status of RKL and Zen 3 actually Very simillar with Coffee Lake with Zen +, but this time Intel were in backseat in performance compared to Ryzen

Anyway, don't get the 11900K for the god sake, as always just buy the i5, the i5 is very good, for the price, don't let AMD get away for selling overpriced 5600x and raising 3600 back to over 200$
 

[Bombastinator]

28 minutes ago, heickelrrx said:

The most negative coverage during Rocket Lake being horrible are centered around 11900K, 

Yes that SKU is bad, but that doesn't mean the rest of the Lineup is Bad

the i7 11700K, 11600K is well positioned in price, while we know the performance is just behind Ryzen counterpart with higher power draw, it doesn't really bad product considering Ryzen Counterpart offering

the Locked part also attractive too, and let's be real, only few people do actually overclock, and these RKL chip already boosting high at default, all we need to do is remove power limit, and do some memory tuning on Budget Chipset

OFC the discounted 10th gen is Very Great Value, the problem with 10th Gen is the IO is basically Skylake, so if u need more IO RKL is welcome upgrade

The status of RKL and Zen 3 actually Very simillar with Coffee Lake with Zen +, but this time Intel were in backseat in performance compared to Ryzen

Anyway, don't get the 11900K for the god sake, as always just buy the i5, the i5 is very good, for the price, don't let AMD get away for selling overpriced 5600x and raising 3600 back to over 200$
 

The thing is the 11700k is also considered overpriced so the 11900k is likely much worse.  I suspect it’s intel’s equivalent of Mac Pro wheels.  They expect only idiots will buy one.  They may have gotten heavily ordered by resellers though.  They might become not so bad after they are deeply discounted.  They’re basically just an 11700k that has been breathed on a bit.

[heickelrrx]

10 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The thing is the 11700k is also considered overpriced so the 11900k is likely much worse.  I suspect it’s intel’s equivalent of Mac Pro wheels.  They expect only idiots will buy one.  They may have gotten heavily ordered by resellers though.  They might become not so bad after they are deeply discounted.  They’re basically just an 11700k that has been breathed on a bit.

isn't 11700K is 400$ chip? while competing 5800x is 450$

it has slightly worse performance, while consume more power, but cheaper? also has integrated video out, 

maybe if u want the no iGPU there is the F version for some price drop? not a bad deal I think

PS : Do not ever follow Microcenter price, they always try to jack up price on launch day, I saw 100$ price difference for Intel chip between microcenter and newegg

 

[jones177]

I found this video interesting.

  

[Alan G]

8 hours ago, yenic said:

. I'm a rare one that actually thinks Intel's IGP is a huge value add. Very handy when you need it as a backup, troubleshooting, etc. Every CPU or preferably the chipset should have a terrible IGP that at least puts up a screen.

+1 to this.  I built a new work station last year just before the pandemic hit.  My GTX 1660 lasted five months before it developed awful artifacts that made it unusable.  It was on a Friday and all I had to do was pull it and plug the monitor into the MoBo display port  and run just fine off of the Intel graphics until a replacement GPU arrived from Newegg. 

[Mark Kaine]

In short, you as everyone else has a right to have an opinion,   but objectively its not "fine" it's a huge disappointment,  people didn't expect yet another "refresh" and while technically it might be "fine" ,price and performance wise it isn't,  and especially not where it should be. 

 

I agree calling it "bad" isn't totally justified,  disappointing and bad "value" seems more adequate. 

 

 

[Mister Woof]

The i7-1700k is "fine" for the price, but I think they should have just given it all the features of the i9-11900k and just omitted the i9 for this generation. The i5 lineup is fine, and for i3, they could have just made them refreshed 10th gen parts with higher frequency.

 

That way they:

 

1. Could have still satisfied their OEM market with 11th gen parts for the year.

2. Could have avoided being compared with the Ryzen 9 5900x - since obviously they can't compete anyway. Better to not even be in the segment than to show up and fall flat on their faces.

3. Could have been a good choice for a $399 "i7-11700k (which would be our current i9-11900k) to compare against the $50 more expensive Ryzen 7 5800x.

[Orian Pax]

On 4/3/2021 at 6:57 AM, fonsui said:

I'll intro this with pointing out that I find the "Team Blue vs. Team Red" argument to be unproductive, if I consider myself on any "side" its "Team Consumer". I have a healthy respect and appreciation for the strengths and accomplishments of both Intel and AMD, and I am able to recognize their individual failings.

 

That established, I believe that the discussion surrounding Rocket Lake has been somewhat dishonest/misleading, absolutely not by intent, but in impact. I will explain:

 

Obviously, benchmarks are science and properly executed science has shown that Intel is absolutely behind the ball in per-core performance, and the product stack itself shows how behind Intel is in core count - AM4 Zen processors scale to 16c/32t while Intel is maxing out on mainstream desktop at 10c/20t last gen, and goes down to 8c/16t this generation. We are also within our rights to not love the Rocket Lake pricing, Intel went higher when we were not-so-secretly hoping they'd go lower.

 

That's the bad, now let's look at the "fine" - Intel has landed a product line that is:

 

- Running on a new chipset which allowed a feature refresh and includes some previously "premium" functionality filtered down from the Zx90 tier

- At least in the same ballpark as Ryzen 5000 overall performance at every tier, even if it doesn't trash it like customers have come to expect

- Not completely ridiculous pricewise, and downright competitive in some tiers/use cases (see 600K, all the -F models)

- Using a brand-new memory controller that provides comparable performance and functionality as Ryzen 5000

- Operating PCIe at 4.0, and has an additional x4 link for NVMe in addition to the standard 16 lanes that have previously been available

 

Does it trounce Ryzen, unqualified? Absolutely not. It does, however, put Intel parts in the market that are competitive choices that provide a lot more feature parity with Ryzen 5000 than Comet Lake or prior gens did. This was a parity move to keep them in the game, not a run at the crown. Intel's money in the desktop consumer market is on Alder Lake and Xe HPG, that's what they really want to push hard.

 

Now, if we look at the HEDT space Intel has slipped even further and Threadripper simply dominates, workstation Xeons haven't been keeping up for quite some time now, and the non-workstation Core X-Series CPU (latest being Cascade Lake AKA Yet Another Skylake) and chipset (X299) are so far behind they're barely worth talking about, and I've seen no plans to change that.

 

TL;DR: Rocket Lake seems to be suffering from an expectation management problem more than actually being a "Bad Product". It doesn't leave customers with poor performance or non-working systems or functions, it's not wildly overpriced, and if people can snag a working current-gen CPU in this climate that in and of itself is a win.

no they are not fine (availability issue of opponent team is gonna be plus point for them). but they did indeed helped to kick ecc memory out from consumer market at consumer price

tl;dr no!

[yenic]

23 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Heh.  Those are all “remove secondary code” things.  Remove any loaded on cruft. 

Yup. It's the only way I've been able to get my X370 and X470 rigs to work right over the years. Always start from scratch in every way possible. It works. I think AMD just does a lot less variable testing than Intel, and less software does less testing against them. An example from last night, I wanted to use Samsung Secure Erase on my SSD before doing my reinstall. The utility would load syslinux and then the kernel would turn off my keyboard. I did some research into this, as I have to do everything with AM4 rigs, and this has been an issue in the past with that software. Fixes included rolling back BIOS etc. Guess who maintains and wrote syslinux? An Intel engineer. So there you go, they're doing more work in the industry, and you're probably best off with their hardware if you're a tinkerer.

 

As far as my work on that issue, I tried everything in the UEFI to get it to work, looked into building a newer version of syslinux and running Samsung's utility myself.. not worth it.. my SS Magician benchmark doesn't indicate I have any performance issue, so I just did a normal format in the Windows installer.

 

Once I get an AMD rig working correctly, it's best to not touch anything for years. After the updates stop rolling in, then install the latest BIOS, etc to get all the fixes. Then do another format and CMOS clear. But trying to track every chipset driver, BIOS update etc, bad idea. In my humble experience. I expect that to a certain degree with everything, but I've found AM4 to be pretty extreme this way. Seems like I can't touch a damn thing, never know when it'll go haywire. Intel? Can't say that was ever a habit that I had to form, even once. Rocket Lake sounds awfully good to me!

 

edit to add-

Welp, I have my conclusions to my "why Rocket Lake is a resounding success" blog entry here. A format solved nothing for me, set my memory speed to 3200, still crashing on starting up P95 torture test. I then restored to a system image I took a day ago, reset optimized defaults (leaving 2133MHz RAM in place), no crash. So this all started with AGESA 1.2.0.0. Pretty much got the nail in the coffin on what the issue is. I ran P95 torture test and CBR20 nonstop on the older AGESAs at 3200MHz.

 

Likelihood someone updates their BIOS and can no longer hit their CPU spec for RAM on Rocket Lake (3200)? Not likely. This is why your 12 and 16 core CPUs are cheap from AMD. NOTHING is free. And I can't roll back the BIOS, no mobo vendor bios flashback feature on my board (wasn't available when I bought), and there's a read/write lock that they just put into place around AGESA 1.2.0.0 releases.. I can't even BACK UP my existing bios using Flash Rom any longer.

 

So in my book Rocket Lake- it may not be the best CPU on the market, but it does have the best platform, and that makes it the best choice.

Now to decide if I run 2133MHz RAM until AMD gets their platform fixed, or gamble on a similarly-unsupported new B550 board, or just order up a 10850K and Z490/Z590. Decisions... but probably time to kick this Ryzen to the curb.

[porina]

On 4/3/2021 at 2:27 AM, fonsui said:

TL;DR: Rocket Lake seems to be suffering from an expectation management problem more than actually being a "Bad Product". 

I think it is a bit worse than that, with the problem at the feet of the enthusiast community at large. Details are looked at and selectively picked to min/max advantage by whichever side the poster likes. In architecture terms Rocket Lake is less far behind Zen 3, than Zen was to Skylake, yet that didn't stop early Ryzen from being a seller.

 

On 4/3/2021 at 11:57 AM, yenic said:

I like Rocket Lake a lot, because my 5900X system isn't stable after recent AGESA updates. It doesn't matter how fast or cool something runs, if it's not reliable. Mine freezes immediately when starting up P95. And frankly, I moved on Ryzen with the 1800X, this is my 4th one, while I've been able to stabilize them, I've had to fight them all. Disabling DRAM power down, disabling C-States, it's a joke. I did not have to do so with any of my Intel rigs. I think I'm done. What do you think Fine Wine is? Hacked products that are stabilized a year or two after you buy them.

I went through similar. I've now eliminated Zen from home (had 5) but might look again with Zen 4. In my case, I don't believe the CPUs were the problem but the quality control of mobos were the root cause. Some were fine, some less so. I found adding a positive voltage offset to help but did not completely remove the stability problems I observed. Reducing power limit made it worse. Nothing else seemed to make a difference.

 

For balance, I have one Intel system currently which is occasionally unstable, and I found disabling turbo seems to eliminate it. Both this and the worst AMD systems had Asrock boards. Wonder if there is a pattern there, but I don't have enough sample size. I suspect mobo power delivery needs more attention universally especially if you're running sustained CPU loads.

[yenic]

9 hours ago, porina said:

I think it is a bit worse than that, with the problem at the feet of the enthusiast community at large. Details are looked at and selectively picked to min/max advantage by whichever side the poster likes. In architecture terms Rocket Lake is less far behind Zen 3, than Zen was to Skylake, yet that didn't stop early Ryzen from being a seller.

 

I went through similar. I've now eliminated Zen from home (had 5) but might look again with Zen 4. In my case, I don't believe the CPUs were the problem but the quality control of mobos were the root cause. Some were fine, some less so. I found adding a positive voltage offset to help but did not completely remove the stability problems I observed. Reducing power limit made it worse. Nothing else seemed to make a difference.

 

For balance, I have one Intel system currently which is occasionally unstable, and I found disabling turbo seems to eliminate it. Both this and the worst AMD systems had Asrock boards. Wonder if there is a pattern there, but I don't have enough sample size. I suspect mobo power delivery needs more attention universally especially if you're running sustained CPU loads.

Early Zen was a good seller just because of the 8 core novelty. That's why I bought an 1800X and 1700. The motherboard I had was terrible though, not that those CPUs don't have well-documented errata that you have to disable BIOS options around to stabilize (in most steppings). Going back in time, I would've bought a 7700K instead of my 1800X, and a 8700K instead of my 2700X. It's hard to calm me down though when there's something new and exciting on the market like Zen has been. I have to put my hand on the hot stove every damn time. I think I've had enough though. I'm Intel for life now.

 

I've never failed to stabilize my Ryzen rigs, but I'm always disabling something to do it. Now I can't even use Samsung Secure Erase due to a documented issues with keyboards with some UEFI BIOSes. It does affect Intel and AMD, but lo and behold, my AMD is affected. I guarantee I can secure erase that drive on the Asus Z490 board that I have my eye on. I'm just tired of these little quirks that are reduced on the industry standard that everyone tests against.

 

Unless I find a way to flash back to the BIOS that had the AGESA that worked for me (1.1.8.0), or a fix isn't pushed out soon (unlikely), I will probably order a new board and CPU. It looks like you have a lot of rigs, and I'm torn on an 10850K, 10900 (65W), or 11900K. I want the IGP. Results are all over the place, sometimes the 11900K matches the older 10-core SKUs, sometimes it doesn't. I consider everything on the market today equal in gaming (just need a bit of resolution), so I'm mostly looking for the best multicore performance that will be cooled with my D15. You can respond in a private message if you wish, I don't intend to try to derail this thread. But I would like advice from people that know Intel's 10th and 11th gen lineup better than I do on what to buy for my usecase. I will be running stock, I know cooling matters a lot more with 14nm Intel, so this is my rig that I don't want to change. It does a decent job cooling to be clear-

[Guest]

8700K still a fine, or OK processor to use? 

Yes?

Then why wouldn't a 11 gen Eye 7 not be fine?

 

Honestly.

 

The fastest AMD 5800X I saw in the repository was clocked 5950mhz to beat my time.... on an 8700K.

 

Repository 5800X PiMod 32m benchmarks list.

https://hwbot.org/benchmark/superpi_-_32m/rankings?hardwareTypeId=processor_6349&cores=8#start=0#interval=20

 

Mines like 54th place while Intel can bench up to the 7ghz range. 

So who's really faster? 

 

AMD vs Intel thread in disguise!

[porina]

47 minutes ago, yenic said:

It looks like you have a lot of rigs, and I'm torn on an 10850K, 10900 (65W), or 11900K. I want the IGP. Results are all over the place, sometimes the 11900K matches the older 10-core SKUs, sometimes it doesn't. I consider everything on the market today equal in gaming (just need a bit of resolution), so I'm mostly looking for the best multicore performance that will be cooled with my D15.

Decide which workloads you have where you care most about performance, then focus on benchmarks or other test data for that if possible. Keep in mind on Intel the power limit can be freely adjusted without voiding warranty (unlike AMD) which may complicate matters.

[yenic]

2 hours ago, porina said:

Decide which workloads you have where you care most about performance, then focus on benchmarks or other test data for that if possible. Keep in mind on Intel the power limit can be freely adjusted without voiding warranty (unlike AMD) which may complicate matters.

General multicore. Looking at benchmarks, they're all over the place. The 11900K can beat the 10950K, and vice versa. It's hard to tell which is the better buy because Sunny Cove has significant IPC uplift, and 10th gen only had 2 more cores. Not very clear cut.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, yenic said:

General multicore. Looking at benchmarks, they're all over the place. The 11900K can beat the 10950K, and vice versa. It's hard to tell which is the better buy because Sunny Cove has significant IPC uplift, and 10th gen only had 2 more cores. Not very clear cut.

The problem that I can see though is a 11700k and an 11900k aren’t that different. 

[yenic]

The 11900K is Intel validated for DDR4-3200 Gear 1 (i7 and i5 are just not official), and it has Adaptive Boost. At $540 USD it runs up against the 5900X though, and there's good reasons why many of us have 5900Xs today. It seems unlikely that at 14nm that Adaptive Boost will really get to stretch its legs. AB on the 11900K is probably basically a test run for it on 10nm where things will get interesting.

 

Staying in theme with this thread, I didn't find any of Intel's 9th-11th gen CPUs appealing at all. It's not just Rocket Lake. That said, as I've tried to show through my Zen3 woes, Intel has value it just isn't showing up on benchmark charts right now. If I'm in the market for an 8-core CPU though, it'd be foolish to outright dismiss the 11700K over the 5800X. If it's me building a 6-8 core rig, I'm going with Intel. It's hard to deny the 5600X and 5900X. 6-core for gaming, 12/16 core for work. That said, I wish didn't have my 5900X, I should've bought an 8700K when those were released and stuck with it till Alder Lake or later. My next build will be Intel, just be nice if they can get on top again before then. I fussed with AMD around 2000 on socket-A, and had multiple Athlon rigs.. had a Yorkville Q9450 that was amazing in comparison, then as dumb as could be, that great experience failed to mold me into a Intel fanboy. That's how it's supposed to work. If a company does right by you for your money, you should keep giving it to them. Fanboyism exists for good reason. I came back to warm my hands at AMD's dumpster fire again like a moron. I can't just build it and forget it, has to become a full-time job.