BenchPair

Core i5-11600K bottleneck & gaming FPS

Ranked 130 of 201 desktop processors for gaming in our database (35th percentile). It can sustain roughly 107 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 clock4,900 MHz
L3 cache12 MB
TDP125 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 Radeon RX 7700 XT
Cyberpunk 2077 102 fps 72 fps
Fortnite 137 fps 135 fps
Counter-Strike 2 162 fps 159 fps
Baldur's Gate 3 93 fps 91 fps
Red Dead Redemption 2 121 fps 80 fps
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 61 fps 60 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
Radeon RX 7700 XT 104 1.2%
GeForce RTX 4070 GDDR6 105 3%
GeForce RTX 4070 105 3%
GeForce RTX 3080 105 3.1%
Radeon RX 6800 XT 105 3.4%
Radeon RX 7800 XT 105 4.6%

What a Core i5-11600K is good for

This chip is capable at 1080p with a mid-range card, but it will become the limit if you pair it with something substantially faster. If you are considering a large graphics upgrade, check the pairing first — you may find most of the new card sitting idle.

Moving to a higher resolution is the cheapest way to get more out of it, because it shifts work onto the card and away from the chip.

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 130 of 201 desktop processors for gaming. Nearest faster: Core i7-10700KF, Ryzen 7 3800X. Just below: Core i5-11600KF, Ryzen 5 5600F. Full method on the methodology page.