The Advancement of Intel's LGA 1200 Socket Systems

Launched in 2020, Intel's socket 1200 paves the way for enthusiasts to embark upon a new decade of advancing CPUs and newer architecture.

PC Gamer has one of the best reviews of Intel's 11th generation Core i5 chip. The CPU is explained to a tee in the popular website and magazine. This is the go-to gamer's chip of early 2021.

PC Gamer - 11th Generation Intel Core i5 Review

The website's writer is a little skeptical about how this generation of Intel processors provides a high enough performing PCIe 4 link for expansions, although I would personally be a lot more optimistic about this. It seems logical to assume that the higher performing chipset, Z590, would make so much of a difference in performance with a high end PCIe 4 GPU, offering much greater bus bandwidth. The Rocket Lake i5 needs your faith.

Only the CPU provides PCIe version 4 expansion lanes and not the chipset. What really matters though, is that you are happy with what you have there in the overall system. To have a least one high bandwidth GPU connection and a single ultra fast generation 4 SSD is totally satisfactory to many system builders who may be partial to continued use of additional PCIe 3 SSDs. Great gaming performance is possible.

More to the point, the K-Series Rocket Lake i5 really is a serious upgrade from the K-Series Comet Lake release. PC Gamer explains that the K-Series i7 or i9 processors are not a great deal faster or more powerful than the i5, making the Core i5 a perfect choice and especially attractive at the current price for the unit.

A recommendation at PC Gamer is the purchase of recent Intel chips such the latest two generations of Core i5 to be used for a budget system. I have being aiming to do just so myself. Still, I believe the system you can build and higher chipsets such as H570 and Z590 are underestimated and should be seen as the go to chipsets as well as the CPUs. This is new stuff and these products make exciting choices for the serious builder.

Content Creation

The wider internet community is lacking reviews and analysis of recent Intel systems for content creation. The systems should be shockingly impressive when using Z590 and Rocket lake. In these instances such as when performing many common types of graphics or video production, and especially music production, yes, the new architecture (and it's clearly a new and revamped architecture) should impress. There is greater bandwidth to utilise and surprisingly in comparison to older Xeon builds. This is exactly why Rocket Lake Xeon chips have been released.

PC Gamer calls the Rocket Lake K-Series chips power hungry, but think about the Xeon and how the architecture can provide a less power hungry Xeon workstation chip, with better throughput plus better compatibility and with very high system memory clock speeds, with the 14 nanometre process stretched to a high potential.

Rocket Lake Xeon is presented for usage with W480 chipset from the 400 series range, although this existing chipset has a four lane DMI 3 uplink. This is why Intel have released the W580 chipset that provides an eight lane uplink like what you would get with Z590, as Rocket Lake Xeon finds it's best home within a 500 series family of chipsets of it's generation.