BenchPair

Core i5-11500 bottleneck & gaming FPS

Ranked 143 of 201 desktop processors for gaming in our database (29th percentile). It can sustain roughly 100 fps in a typical AAA title regardless of resolution — that ceiling is what decides whether a graphics card is worth pairing with it.

SpecificationsRocket Lake · 2021
ArchitectureRocket Lake
Cores6
Threads12
Boost clock4,600 MHz
L3 cache12 MB
TDP65 W
Released2021
Processor ceiling by game1080p, high

The frame rate this chip could sustain with an infinitely fast graphics card. It is almost the same at every resolution, because rendering more pixels gives the processor no extra work.

GameCPU ceilingWith GeForce RTX 5060 Ti
Cyberpunk 2077 95 fps 60 fps
Fortnite 128 fps 127 fps
Counter-Strike 2 152 fps 149 fps
Baldur's Gate 3 87 fps 86 fps
Red Dead Redemption 2 114 fps 72 fps
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 57 fps 56 fps
Best matched graphics cards1080p, high

Ranked by how little performance the pairing wastes. Anything much faster than the top entry will sit partly idle at this resolution — though it may still be worth it if you plan to move to 1440p or 4K.

Graphics cardEst. FPSUnused
GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 94 4.6%
GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB 94 4.6%
Radeon RX 7700 XT 99 4.9%
GeForce RTX 4070 GDDR6 99 8.9%
GeForce RTX 4070 99 8.9%
GeForce RTX 3080 99 9%

Living with a Core i5-11500

This processor sits in the lower part of the range and will be the limiting component in most modern pairings. Frame rates will be capped by the chip well before the graphics card runs out of capacity, and no graphics upgrade will change that.

If frame rates are the problem, this is where the money goes. Raising the resolution will not help here in the way it does for a graphics-limited system.

A small cache holds this chip back

12 MB of L3 is modest by current standards, and it costs this chip more in games than its clock speed suggests. Game engines walk large, scattered data structures, so a small cache means more trips to main memory and more stalls on the render thread. Memory speed and timings matter unusually much on a part like this.

Where it sits

Ranked 143 of 201 desktop processors for gaming. Nearest faster: Ryzen 5 5500, Ryzen 5 3600X. Just below: Core i3-14100, Core i3-14100F. Full method on the methodology page.