For testing, I used the Intel Core i9-11900K CPU. The Intel 11th Gen Rocket Lake family comes with brand new core architecture but features a maximum of 8 cores vs 10 cores of the previous 10th Gen flagship and also retailing at a similar price point. We were also sent three Z590 motherboards from MSI, ASRock, and Gigabyte which will be featured in this review.
| Processors | Intel Core i9-11900K (Retail Chip) Intel Core i9-10900K (Retail Chip) Intel Core i7-10700K (ES Chip) Intel Core i5-10600K (Retail Chip) Intel Core i9-10980XE Intel Core i9-9900KS Intel Core i9-9900K Intel Core i7-8700K Intel Core i5-8600K AMD Ryzen 9 5900X AMD Ryzen 7 5800X AMD Ryzen 9 3950X AMD Ryzen 9 3900X AMD Ryzen 7 3700X AMD Ryzen 5 3600X AMD Ryzen 7 2700X |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | MSI MEG Z590 ACE (Intel 11th Gen) AORUS Z590 PRO AX (11th Gen) ASRock Z590 Steel Legend WiFi 6E (Intel 11th Gen) ASUS ROG Maximus XII HERO WIFI (Intel 10th Gen) MSI X299 Creator (Intel 10th Gen X Series) Z390 AORUS Master (Intel 8th/9th Gen) MSI MEG X570 Unify (AMD Ryzen 3000/Ryzen 5000) ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate (AMD Ryzen 2000) |
| Power Supply | ASUS ROG THOR 1200W |
| Solid State Drive | Samsung SSD 960 EVO M.2 (512 GB) |
| Memory | G.SKILL Trident Z Royal Series 16 GB (2 x 8GB) CL17 4000 MHz |
| Video Cards | MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio |
| Cooling Solutions | ASUS ROG Ryujin 240 |
| OS | Windows 10 64-bit |
Our test rig includes the Samsung 960 EVO 512 GB SSD that boots up our main OS while a 2 TB Seagate HDD is used for demonstration purposes for the Intel Optane memory. In addition to these, we are running an MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio graphics card, an ASUS ROG Thor 1200W power supply and 16 GB of G.Skill provided Trident Z Royal series memory which runs with a clock speed of DDR4-4000 MHz. For cooling, we used the ASUS Ryujin 240 AIO cooler.
For overclocking, I made the following tweaks to the CPU on the respective boards:
Intel Core i9-11900K 8 Core CPU:
- MSI MEG Z590 ACE: 52 x 100 at 1.325V
- AORUS Z590 PRO AX: 52 x 100 at 1.3285V
- ASRock Z590 Steel Legend: 52 x 100 at 1.33V
