Core i9-11900K Engineering Sample Spotted in Unlocked B560 Motherboard

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Intel appears to be testing more and more of its future Rocket Lake processors, as more engineering samples have been spotted by @harukaze5719 on Twitter; including the flagship Core i9-11900K, a higher clocked i9-11900, and a new i7-11700. But perhaps the best news of all is that Intel has seemingly unlocked B560 to allow full overclocking support.

In the past, Intel's lower-priced B series of motherboard chipsets were always locked to prevent users from overclocking their CPUs and memory. Instead, you had to hike up and grab a more-expensive Z series board to unlock those features. Fortunately, though, this looks to be changing with Rocket Lake and its associated 500 series chipset boards. Harukaze5719 was able to run a 4133MHz XMP profile on a B560 motherboard on a Core i9 11900K and Core i9-11900, both of which are engineering samples.

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This is the first time we've seen the top-end Core i9-11900K engineering sample in the wild. According to Harukaze579, this chip has a base frequency of 4.3ghz and a turbo clock of 4.8ghz. This is promising because if the core frequencies are this high on an engineering sample, we could be seeing some crazy high turbo clocks on the official SKUs.

There also appears to be a new i9-11900 engineering sample floating around with a much higher frequency than the QVJ1 model we've been seeing. This model features a significantly higher base clock of 4 GHz (compared to 1.8Ghz) and a boost frequency of 4.5 GHz (before it was 3.8Ghz).

Harukaze5719 also shared a Cinebench R20 score for another Rocket Lake SKU, the Core i7-11700, which has a 3.8Ghz base clock along with a 4.3Ghz boost. It scored a multi-threaded score of 4672 points and 529 points in the single-threaded benchmark. For comparison, the multi-threaded score managed to just beat the Ryzen 5 5600X barely by a few hundred points. However, the single-core score is much more favorable and the i7-11700 managed to beat Intel's flagship i9-10900K Comet Lake-S SKU.

Next year will be very interesting for Intel. It looks like AMD's relentless competition is finally forcing Intel's hand in allowing its B series boards to overclock, which AMD has done on its B series boards since 1st Gen Ryzen. But, will backporting a new architecture to 14nm really pay off? We'll have to wait and see.