Intel Core i9-11980HK Review

As you know, Intel released its 11th generation processor family this year and brought a breath of fresh air to the competition with AMD between both desktop and laptop platforms. If you remember, we reviewed the Intel Core i9-11900K and Core i5-11600K, which were designed for the desktop computer platform before. This time, we will take a closer look at Core i9-11980HK, one of Intel’s top processors for mobile platforms.

The Core i9-11980HK is one of Intel’s best processors on mobile platforms. The Core i9-11980HK, which was released in the 2nd quarter of this year, is important with a 10nm SuperFin fabrication process processor and 8 physical cores, 16 threads. Working at a base frequency of 2.6 GHz, this processor provides a maximum turbo frequency reach up to 5 GHz, provided that the CPU cooling is also sufficient. This means a 10 percent clock speed advantage, especially over the Core i9-11800H. Of course, since it needs a powerful cooling system to reach its peak, it is included in powerful laptops such as the MSI GE76 Raider 11UH model.

In the meantime, let’s talk about the HK tag at the end of the processor. While the “H” of the letters here describes the high performance of the processor, the letter “K” means that this processor is unlocked. In other words, you can easily overclock the processor and carry the performance values ​​to higher lines. Of course, for this, the laptop with this processor must also be in a suitable structure.

Inside this laptop, there is a GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card equipped with 16 GB GDDR6 memory. It also includes 32 GB dual-channel DDR4-3200 MHz memory. In this laptop with 1 TB SSD, the screen also has a 17.3 size screen at IPS level with 360Hz refresh rate, which is specially prepared for high-end gamers.

Yes, the laptop also hosts very powerful features, but here we will talk more about the processor, not the laptop. So let’s continue with the tests to make sense. Our first stop, as always, will be Cinebench R23.

As we encountered in the previous Intel Core i9-11900K review, the Core i9-11980HK performs particularly well in single-core performance. Core i9-11980HK, which has a top performance in its class, manages to sit at the top by collecting 1596 points in the Cinebench R23 single core test.

However, as a result of the multi-core, it produces the same result as in the 11900K review, and here, we see that it falls slightly behind its rival Ryzen 9 5900HX with 10854 points.

When we come to the CPU coding test, Handbrake, we see that 11980HK is ahead of 11800H here. But here it is possible to see that the Ryzen platform has achieved a shorter time.

So, how does the processor draw the line on the gaming side? When we look at the game side, here we also evaluated Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and F1 2021. Of course, we set all the graphics settings to ultra, so we had a chance to evaluate the overall system performance of the laptop. When we look here, it is not difficult to see that really high performance is produced. So much so that the laptop, which sees 80 fps in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, easily exceeds 100 fps in F1 2021.

You can see the tests and comparison charts with the Intel Core i9-11980HK in our video above.