Intel’s unreleased i7-11700K is being sold and shipped in Germany

WTF?! German retailer Mindfactory listed the unreleased and unannounced Intel Core i7-11700K for over a day, until they were sold out. Now, enthusiasts on German forums are posting photos and screenshots of the next-gen processors.

Intel’s eleventh-generation desktop processors, codenamed Rocket Lake, were announced in general terms at CES 2021, but only the flagship i9-11900K was formally named.

The Core i7-11700K is no stranger to us though: it was the victim of an illicit benchmarking attempt, and its naughty photos have been plastered all over the internet. And now it’s been listed for sale. Or it was listed, rather, because Mindfactory has ended sales with over 120 units sold.

The listing was previously for €469 ($565) including a 19% VAT. It’s unclear if they ran out, which their website would seem to suggest, or if Intel put a stop to it. Either way, it’s too late now.

Enthusiasts turned into hardware beta testers have been documenting their experiences with the new processors on popular German forums Hardwareluxx, ComputerBase, and Extreme PC Games & Hardware (via VideoCardz). It looks like several dozen received an 11700K. Some of them have struggled to get the processors running on their Z490 boards, which are a few updates away from full support, and there have even been problems with Z590 boards. (Good luck calling Intel’s support team about that!) But after a little perseverance, the processors booted up.

The codes on the boxes and processors seem to indicate that these are release samples allocated to Europe, but not all the codes are properly understood yet.

What was found was what was expected. The 11700K is an octa-core part with a 3.6 GHz base clock, and a boost clock of 5 GHz. A few beta testers overclocked it to 5 GHz on all cores without much hassle, and one pushed it to 5.2 GHz.

At those speeds, it performed very well in some rudimentary benchmark runs — but at the margins we’re talking about now, it’s pointless to discuss numbers until reviewers can do an apples-to-apples comparison.

Speaking of, it’s rumored that Intel could announce Rocket Lake on March 16. We’ll be putting them to the test and putting the speculation to rest as soon as we can get the chips in our labs.