Intel’s New i7-11700K Sold and Shipped in Germany

WTF ?! German retailer Mindfactory has listed unreleased and unannounced Intel Core i7-11700Ks for more than a day, until they are pay off. Now enthusiasts of the German forums are posting photos and screenshots of the new generation processors.

Intel’s eleventh-generation desktop processors, named Rocket Lake, were announced in general terms at CES 2021, but only the flagship i9-11900K was officially named.

The Core i7-11700K is no stranger to us though: it has been the victim of an illicit benchmarking attempt, and its naughty photos have been plastered all over the internet. And now it is on sale. Or it was listed, rather, because Mindfactory ended its sales with over 120 units sold.

The listing was previously € 469 ($ 565), including 19% VAT. It’s unclear if they’re sold out, what their website seems to suggest, or if Intel is shutting it down. Either way, it’s too late now.

Enthusiasts turned into hardware beta testers documented their experiences with the new processors on the popular German forums Hardwareluxx, ComputerBase and Extreme PC Games & Hardware (via VideoCardz). It seems that several dozen have received a 11700K. Some of them have struggled to get the processors working on their Z490 cards, which are a few updates away from full support, and there have even been issues with the Z590 cards. (Good luck calling the Intel support team on this!) But after a little persistence, the processors started up.

The codes on the boxes and processors seem to indicate that these are output samples allocated to Europe, but not all codes are fully understood yet.

What was found corresponds to what was expected. The 11700K is an octa-core part with a base clock of 3.6 GHz and a boost clock of 5 GHz. A few beta testers overclocked it to 5 GHz on all cores without much hassle, and we pushed it to 5.2 GHz.

At those speeds, it performed very well in some rudimentary benchmark analyzes – but at the margins we’re talking about now, there’s no point discussing the numbers until reviewers can make an apples-to-apples comparison.

Speaking of which, it is rumored that Intel may announce Rocket Lake on March 16. We will put them to the test and end the speculation as soon as we can get the chips in our labs.