Today we will be looking at something very special. It is a Dell Vostro SFF PC, but it comes with the 11th generation 14nm++++++++++++++++++++++ Rocket lake-S Processor!
This is a Engineering Sample system and the actual system is scheduled to release in March 2021. It has a blue motherboard, which is what Dell uses for ES motherboards. The production units will have green motherboards. This is a pretty simple board, or to say a cost optimized boards. According to my experience with ES Dell motherboard, it will usually contain more stuff than the production units, so I would assume it would be even more cost optimized when they make the production motherboards This particular board has a PCI-E x1 slot and a missing PCI-E x8 slot. The production unit will most likely be equipped with the PCI-E x8 slot. However I have confirmed with my source that this board will be using PCI-E3.0 although the CPU supports PCI-E 4.0. That means the M.2 slot and the PCI-E slots will be running in PCI-E3.0.
It has a M.2 2240 slot, which means you won’t be able to install an M.2 2280 SSD into it. For the power supply, it is using the new Intel 12V standard. 12V is the only voltage being fed to the motherboard. It has a 4pin CPU power connector and a 6 pin motherboard connector.
It has LGA1200 socket with B560 chipset. A simple aluminum heatsink covers the chipset. The power delivery for the CPU is pretty simple, it has only 4 phases for CPU core power delivery. It supports 65W maximum TDP, which means it won’t support the K SKU. The heatsink looks pretty slim.
Coming with it is a ES processor. It is supposed to be an ES for 11700. Here we have the processor on the left, and a 10700 on the right. As you can see, the IHS on the 11700 is taller than the 10700, and it’s more of a rectangular shape. This makes it looks a little bit like the Alder lake 12th gen processor. Sorry I can’t show you what it looks like right now...but it’s basically a taller version of 11700. On the back, the capacitor is totally different.
Here is a CPU-Z screenshot. It is 8 cores and 16 threads, it is a stepping 0 processor, which is 1 stepping before the production units. The production units will be stepping 1. The biggest change for this generation is the added support of AVX512F instruction set. But please note that it’s not the full AVX512 instruction set, it is missing a few instructions. Another big difference is the cache algorithm. It has 12 ways 48KB of L1 DATA cache, compares to 8 way of 32KB on the 10700. It has 512KB 8 way L2 cache, compares to 4 way 256MB of cache on 10700. The L3 cache remains the same. It has a single core boost of 4.4GHz and all core boost of 3.8GHz.
The current drivers listed on Intel website does not support the B560 chipset or the new iGPU. But luckily I have the driver package for this ES PC. However they are not the latest. I used the drivers that came with the Asus Z590 instead. Yes the Maximus XIII Hero Z590 motherboard has just arrived. I will be publishing a review of the board this weekend. GPU-Z still cannot recognize the iGPU.
Firstly the CPU performance. The score is very disappointing in CPU-Z Benchmark. It is slower than i7 10700 in both single and multi core testings. It only got 511 points in single single bench and 5120 in multi core bench.
As for Cinebench R15 and R20, things remains the same. It is considerably slower than the 10700. Yeah I know it’s an Engineering Sample with only 1.8GHz clock speed, but Intel processor runs on Turbo boost frequencies anyways, so this shouldn’t be an excuse.
Next let’s try some Prim95 pressure test. Here we are doing small FFTs, which is the most stressful test. The CPU frequency drops to 2.2GHz all core, and that raised my attention. At first I thought it’s thermal throttling, however after close inspection that is not the reason. The real problem is the TDP limit. With higher IPC and different cache designs, 11th rocket lake CPUs are consuming more powers per core at the same frequency, the voltage is also considerably higher than the 10th gen processor. With that said, the 65W power budget is becoming a problem. Unlike Asus boards that comes with Multi core Enhancement that removes the power limit, the Dell system is strictly following the Intel specs. 65W is nothing for an 8 core chip especially considering it has iGPU as well. Our CPU is being handicapped by the power limit.
With that discovered, let’s fire up Intel XTU and increase the power limit. Here let’s increase the PL1 to 125W and the Tau to 128 seconds. Let’s run the benchmarks again and see how it goes. The results are pretty self-explanatory. We are seeing a great improvement of 15%-20% in all the benchmarks. With the TDP set to 125W, and upgrading to the new graphics driver that came with the Asus motherboard, the 3D Mark score increased by another 500 points. That makes it about 40% faster than the 10th gen UHD630 iGPU. This is very impressive and that makes me looking forward to the Intel XE graphics card.
However gaming is not the only improvement. In Geekbench 5 compute tests, the new iGPU is able to achieve 15% increase in both OpenCL and Vulkan.
It is hard to recommend the actual Vostro system to most of the viewers here on the forum. It is cost optimized, and is not able to use a discrete graphics card. It is built for business users not for gamers. But as for the CPU and the platform, it is actually worth upgrading to. Yes I know the performance figures doesn’t look that impressive here in this review, but spoiler alert, it performs much better on the Asus M13H board. I was able to get anywhere from 10-20% better scores with the Asus board. And again remember, this is just an ES processor with 1.8GHz frequency, 10700 is a processor with 2.9GHz frequency and much higher boost clock. So even a tie here would mean higher IPC and better multi core efficiency for the 11700.
Please stay tuned for the Asus Maximus XIII Hero Z590 review. I will be comparing it heads to heads with the Asus Maximus XII Hero Z490 motherboards and tell you why you should or shouldn’t buy the new Z590 motherboard. Those are expected to ship in early March so you still got time to sell your current platform if you decide to upgrade. We will be comparing PCI-E performance with 4 Samsung PM9A1 PCI-E 4.0 SSDs in RAID0 mode. You won’t believe the number you are seeing. I will also be doing a lot of gaming benchmarks as well as more 3D rendering tests with an RTX3080. I have a 11900K and a 11900T on the way and I will be testing that as well if it can make it here on time.
For more details, you can check out the video version on my Youtube channel:
Thanks for reading!
This is a Engineering Sample system and the actual system is scheduled to release in March 2021. It has a blue motherboard, which is what Dell uses for ES motherboards. The production units will have green motherboards. This is a pretty simple board, or to say a cost optimized boards. According to my experience with ES Dell motherboard, it will usually contain more stuff than the production units, so I would assume it would be even more cost optimized when they make the production motherboards This particular board has a PCI-E x1 slot and a missing PCI-E x8 slot. The production unit will most likely be equipped with the PCI-E x8 slot. However I have confirmed with my source that this board will be using PCI-E3.0 although the CPU supports PCI-E 4.0. That means the M.2 slot and the PCI-E slots will be running in PCI-E3.0.
It has a M.2 2240 slot, which means you won’t be able to install an M.2 2280 SSD into it. For the power supply, it is using the new Intel 12V standard. 12V is the only voltage being fed to the motherboard. It has a 4pin CPU power connector and a 6 pin motherboard connector.
It has LGA1200 socket with B560 chipset. A simple aluminum heatsink covers the chipset. The power delivery for the CPU is pretty simple, it has only 4 phases for CPU core power delivery. It supports 65W maximum TDP, which means it won’t support the K SKU. The heatsink looks pretty slim.
Coming with it is a ES processor. It is supposed to be an ES for 11700. Here we have the processor on the left, and a 10700 on the right. As you can see, the IHS on the 11700 is taller than the 10700, and it’s more of a rectangular shape. This makes it looks a little bit like the Alder lake 12th gen processor. Sorry I can’t show you what it looks like right now...but it’s basically a taller version of 11700. On the back, the capacitor is totally different.
Here is a CPU-Z screenshot. It is 8 cores and 16 threads, it is a stepping 0 processor, which is 1 stepping before the production units. The production units will be stepping 1. The biggest change for this generation is the added support of AVX512F instruction set. But please note that it’s not the full AVX512 instruction set, it is missing a few instructions. Another big difference is the cache algorithm. It has 12 ways 48KB of L1 DATA cache, compares to 8 way of 32KB on the 10700. It has 512KB 8 way L2 cache, compares to 4 way 256MB of cache on 10700. The L3 cache remains the same. It has a single core boost of 4.4GHz and all core boost of 3.8GHz.
The current drivers listed on Intel website does not support the B560 chipset or the new iGPU. But luckily I have the driver package for this ES PC. However they are not the latest. I used the drivers that came with the Asus Z590 instead. Yes the Maximus XIII Hero Z590 motherboard has just arrived. I will be publishing a review of the board this weekend. GPU-Z still cannot recognize the iGPU.
Firstly the CPU performance. The score is very disappointing in CPU-Z Benchmark. It is slower than i7 10700 in both single and multi core testings. It only got 511 points in single single bench and 5120 in multi core bench.
As for Cinebench R15 and R20, things remains the same. It is considerably slower than the 10700. Yeah I know it’s an Engineering Sample with only 1.8GHz clock speed, but Intel processor runs on Turbo boost frequencies anyways, so this shouldn’t be an excuse.
Next let’s try some Prim95 pressure test. Here we are doing small FFTs, which is the most stressful test. The CPU frequency drops to 2.2GHz all core, and that raised my attention. At first I thought it’s thermal throttling, however after close inspection that is not the reason. The real problem is the TDP limit. With higher IPC and different cache designs, 11th rocket lake CPUs are consuming more powers per core at the same frequency, the voltage is also considerably higher than the 10th gen processor. With that said, the 65W power budget is becoming a problem. Unlike Asus boards that comes with Multi core Enhancement that removes the power limit, the Dell system is strictly following the Intel specs. 65W is nothing for an 8 core chip especially considering it has iGPU as well. Our CPU is being handicapped by the power limit.
With that discovered, let’s fire up Intel XTU and increase the power limit. Here let’s increase the PL1 to 125W and the Tau to 128 seconds. Let’s run the benchmarks again and see how it goes. The results are pretty self-explanatory. We are seeing a great improvement of 15%-20% in all the benchmarks. With the TDP set to 125W, and upgrading to the new graphics driver that came with the Asus motherboard, the 3D Mark score increased by another 500 points. That makes it about 40% faster than the 10th gen UHD630 iGPU. This is very impressive and that makes me looking forward to the Intel XE graphics card.
However gaming is not the only improvement. In Geekbench 5 compute tests, the new iGPU is able to achieve 15% increase in both OpenCL and Vulkan.
It is hard to recommend the actual Vostro system to most of the viewers here on the forum. It is cost optimized, and is not able to use a discrete graphics card. It is built for business users not for gamers. But as for the CPU and the platform, it is actually worth upgrading to. Yes I know the performance figures doesn’t look that impressive here in this review, but spoiler alert, it performs much better on the Asus M13H board. I was able to get anywhere from 10-20% better scores with the Asus board. And again remember, this is just an ES processor with 1.8GHz frequency, 10700 is a processor with 2.9GHz frequency and much higher boost clock. So even a tie here would mean higher IPC and better multi core efficiency for the 11700.
Please stay tuned for the Asus Maximus XIII Hero Z590 review. I will be comparing it heads to heads with the Asus Maximus XII Hero Z490 motherboards and tell you why you should or shouldn’t buy the new Z590 motherboard. Those are expected to ship in early March so you still got time to sell your current platform if you decide to upgrade. We will be comparing PCI-E performance with 4 Samsung PM9A1 PCI-E 4.0 SSDs in RAID0 mode. You won’t believe the number you are seeing. I will also be doing a lot of gaming benchmarks as well as more 3D rendering tests with an RTX3080. I have a 11900K and a 11900T on the way and I will be testing that as well if it can make it here on time.
For more details, you can check out the video version on my Youtube channel:
Thanks for reading!
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