11400F vs 11600K with an RTX 3060 – Worth Paying More?
|If you are considering building a new system, or even just upgrading your current rig, with one of the new Intel 11th gen CPUs, is it worth splashing out more for the unlocked i5-11600K, or is the 11400F all you need? You’ve probably seen reviews and comparisons on this already, but the majority of those (including my own!) use 3080s or similarly high end cards. That’s great for finding the absolute difference in performance, but it leaves a bit of a gap for what you, the actual user, would get. So, Gigabyte sent over this RTX 3060, and a B560 motherboard, and I’m going to test these two chips out and see!
For most folks who are watching this video and buying these chips, gaming performance is your top priority when comparing these two options, so let’s start with that. In Watchdogs Legion, the gap between the two is pretty large. The 11600K is almost 30% faster here, hitting just shy of 60 FPS average at 1080p ultra, whereas the 11400F only hits 46 FPS average. That’s a very noticeable difference, enough that I’d turn the settings down on the 11400 a notch or two, whereas I might not need to on the unlocked chip.
In Cyberpunk it’s much closer. Just 1.4 FPS between them, on average, and even the 1% lows are only 2 FPS better on the 11600. It’s quite the start contrast to Watchdogs, and shows that it really depends on the game how dependent on the CPU versus GPU, or even GPU memory, it is.
In CS:GO it’s back to the massive performance gap. Well over 300 FPS average on the K, and well under 300 on the 11400. The unlocked chip is nearly 20% faster here, although this is on high settings and we are talking about hundreds of FPS total so the gap is less likely to be noticeable.
In Fortnite again it’s back to being just 2 FPS apart. 148 FPS average for the 11600K, and 146 FPS average for the 11400F. The 1% lows are only split by 6 FPS, so it’s safe to say you’d get the same playing experience on both of these chips.
Finally in Microsoft Flight, it’s back to having a decent gap. The 11600K gets 44 FPS average here on ultra settings, whereas the 11400F only manages 36.5 making the K chip a hair over 20% faster.
So for gaming it depends quite a lot on what game you’re playing as to whether or not buying the faster chip really matters. The peak difference was in Watchdogs with almost 30% more performance, but if you average it out, the 11600K is about 14% faster than the 11400F.
Of course, FPS in games isn’t the only thing these CPUs are good for, nor what you might want to do with them. What about if you want to edit videos or 3D model? Somewhat obviously, the more powerful chip does a better job here – but not quite as mind-blowingly well as you might think.
In single threaded workloads like Cinebench R20 Single Thread, thanks to it’s higher boost clocks, up to 4.9GHz on the 11600K versus just 4.4GHz on the 11400F, the 11600 is 13% faster running just shy of 600 points rather than the 524 the locked chip gets. Interestingly, thanks to a combination of thermals and the all core turbo frequencies being closer than the single core boost numbers, in the multi-threaded test, the 11600K is only around 8% faster. It’s still a healthy lead, but not as big as single threaded.
In a more ‘real world’ app like Blender, rendering the BMW scene, the unlocked chip runs 9% faster, rendering in a little over 3 and a half minutes rather than the 4 minutes the 11400 takes. In Gooseberry the gap widens to a full 14% advantage for the 11600. So, if you need to render out longer, more complicated scenes you will see a much more sizable benefit in getting the unlocked chip instead.
And in the Puget Bench Suite for the Adobe CC apps, like Premiere, there actually isn’t all that much of a boost going with the 11600K. It’s 3% better here, although I should note the score you are seeing is a combined score that encompases not only rendering out clips, but the general user experience while editing, playing back footage and using effects so while the faster chip will definitely do your final render a touch faster, the overall user experience isn’t greatly improved with the higher end chip. In After Effects the 11600K holds a bigger lead at around 7%, although Photoshop drops that back down to a 3% improvement.
So, if you are considering between these two, which should you buy? If all you care about is gaming, and especially if you are playing less CPU bound games, or at higher resolutions like 1440p, the 11400F is perfectly fine. In some titles you will see a moderate, to sizable improvement so if you can spare the extra £50 or so for the 11600K it may be worth it to eke out the most performance possible, but if you settle for the 11400F you can rest easy knowing it’s a good buy.
If you stream as well, edit videos, 3D model or do stuff like game development, you will see a decent improvement going for the unlocked i5 instead. The extra headroom you get from the faster single and all core boost clocks will pay for itself in time saved while rendering, or by losing less performance while streaming games. But again, if the 11400F is all you can afford, it’s still a great option, the gap in performance isn’t night and day so I wouldn’t be too worried if that’s all you can get.