[Hardware] Be careful if you plan to buy one of the new Intel CPUs for gaming!

[WilkerCSBD]

This morning we have made a small introduction about what we are going to see in this article and it is nothing more than a small plot that Intel has included in its last filtered slide and that can change the performance of your CPUs a lot. We are talking about the famous new dividers that the company has copied as AMD's FCLK in its Ryzen, now called Gear 1 and Gear 2 in the blue ones, which are going to skew the range of processors and their performance.

Small details can make all the difference, and the truth is that in this last week we have seen two benchmarks of the i7-11700K where the disparity in performance set off our alarms. To such an extent that we do not publish anything about it because there had to be a trapped cat or an error in the measurements. Well, now we know what could have almost certainly happened, and the result will make more than one person rethink the purchase of an Intel Rocket Lake-S CPU ...

Intel Segments Its CPUs By Their BMI: Will They Make A Difference In Performance?
Intel-Rocket-Lake-S-specs-CPUs-8-cores
It is necessary to differentiate two important sections in this article: the speculative one for obvious reasons and the one that uses the certainty of the leaked tests. We are going to start with the latter, since as we have seen this morning, in the filtered slide of the 8-core models and that we can see just above, in the small print we can see three key points, where the one that interests us the most is that third and last.

Saving the notice of the part number for the RAM and the 2 DPCs that is common in Intel, the section that matters to us is the last one:

i9-11900K (F) SKUs are DDR4-3200 Gear 1. All other SKUs are DDR4-3200 Gear 2. DDR4-2933 is Gear 1

That is, we start from the fact that last week we saw that the new motherboards are going to bring that Gear 1 and Gear 2 as an option, apart from the so-called Auto setting, and hence the controversy with AMD's FCLK.

Well, these Gears are obviously going to be performance limiters for CPUs, since they are nothing more than dividers of the BMI frequency, which apparently (and here we enter for a second in the speculative branch) is going to have repercussions. in lower performance. What we do know from the slide is that only the i9-11900K and i9-11900KF will be Gear 1 safe, which should guarantee better performance in games that depend on the speed of the RAM and its synchronization with the BMI.

The benchmarks of the i7-11700K would have been taken under Gear 2
Intel-Rocket-Lake-S-i9-11900K-vs-i9-10900K
What can we extract from this? Well, Intel now makes a deliberate artificial segmentation by an internal component such as the BMI. This can be criticized, but if within any CPU and already in BIOS this Gear 2 value can be manually changed to Gear 1 without consequences, it is still a small inconvenience for those who are not up to date with these details (the great most unfortunately).

11700K-Gears-Tactics
We could approach it another way: are they different BMIs? Is Intel having trouble with your BMI frequency in Willow Cove? Although we cannot answer this at the moment, what is certain is that the Anandtech data is from stock, which would imply this Gear 2 in the i7-11700K and it may be that from there they have the bad results seen.

We do not know if this parameter will be active in Gear 1 mode on some motherboards, which on the other hand could explain a certain increase in performance in some games / tests.