AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Review

Overclocking

Speed binning can be a funny old process. In the past it's lead to both poor and incredible overclocking performance as those that lucked out on cheaper parts had enough headroom to match more expensive parts in performance. The flip side is that some parts are binned low for a reason. With our sample of the Ryzen 7 1700 at least, the former is true.

We're not looking at significantly more overclocking headroom than the Ryzen 7 1800X, but two really great things happened. Firstly, we could overclock a teeny bit higher at 4.05GHz, which lead to some tangible boosts in performance, but also, the lower TDP also saw a lower power draws, while the lower voltage required to get to this frequency than the flagship model needed to get to 4GHz - 1.4125V, resulted in lower power consumption under load too. We didn't fiddle around with anything else in the EFI, just the multiplier and vcore.

Again, it was Terragen 4 that resulted in crashes below this voltage, or if we tried to raise the frequency, and boosting the vcore all the way to 1.45V didn't solve that issue either. It's clear, though, that if our sample is anything to go by, the Ryzen 7 1700 may lose little in overclocking prowess, despite supposedly being a lower-binned chip.

Performance Analysis

With such a low stock frequency, the Ryzen 7 1700 was always going to be weak out of the box and anywhere that doesn't dish out work to the majority or all of its 16 threads does see it languish at or near the bottom of the graphs, even when compared to Intel's four and six-core CPUs. The PCMark 8 Video Editing test only uses two threads while the Cinebench R15 single-threaded test is just that - single-threaded and in both the tests the CPU came a distant last. This had an impact on games too, with even Deus Ex: Mankind Divided showing a dip in frame rates, despite the fact it's normally immune to CPU horsepower at this end of the spectrum, especially as we benchmark at 1,920 x 1,080.

Push the cores up to 4.05GHz, though, and the tables are turned and graphs flip on their head. In the same game, the Ryzen 7 1700 is now top of the graph and a mid-table result in Cinebench R15's multi-threaded test leaps up to the top spot, bettering the overclocked Core i7-6900K and Ryzen 7 1800X. A lackluster performance in HandBrake jumps to second spot, with only the 200MHz faster overclocked Core i7-6900K managing to shave another second off the transcoding time. The Ryzen 7 1700's 1GHz overclock from its base frequency saw nearly 30 seconds shaved off here, with the encode taking just 75 seconds compared to 101 seconds at stock speed. Every hour you spend doing similar tasks, you'll be saving 20 minutes compared to the stock speed performance.

Thanks to the 65W TDP and lower voltage needed for the overclock, the power consumption figures are impressive too. Only Intel's quad-cores were more power frugal at stock speed, and even when overclocked, the Ryzen 7 1700 drew noticeably less power than the Ryzen 7 1800X and Intel Core i7-6900K.

The negative results are mostly at stock speed, but Intel still has a lead in VRMark and Ashes of the Singularity, plus the Core i5-7600K and Core i7-7700K are much quicker in most places all those cores and threads aren't fully utilised, especially so once you've overclocked them.

Conclusion

What we have here is somewhat of an overclocker's dream. While anything much over 4GHz is going to be tricky, at least until we see improvements AMD's end, the Ryzen 7 1700 is still able to dish out a 1GHz overclock over its base frequency of 3GHz and this has big ramifications for two reasons. Firstly, it massively improves performance in single and multi-threaded workloads, matching or bettering Intel's more expensive six and eight-core CPUs in most tests. Secondly, it shines a spotlight on its siblings, which suddenly seem like very poor value.

For example, the Ryzen 7 1800X costs a lot more and does boast a much higher base frequency for better stock speed performance, but oddly enough, it's not the CPU to buy if you're willing to play around in the EFI or AMD's Rzyen Master software and do a little overclocking. That CPU is only the best option if you intend to stay at stock speed, and the extra price premium is solely there for that purpose, and of course for anyone that wants the kudos of owning the flagship Ryzen CPU. Unfortunately for those that did the latter, the whole enthusiast community is likely to be laughing at you over the coming weeks for spending an extra £170 on a CPU that performs worse once overclocked than the Ryzen 7 1700 - at least that's our findings anyway.

The winner is clearly the Ryzen 7 1700. Our sample overclocked further and with a lower voltage, has lower power consumption across the board and as apart from clock speed and XFR the specifications are otherwise identical , you'd literally be mad to get the 1800X over the 1700 if you are game for some tweaking. It's all a lottery of course, but the difference in price between the two CPUs is most certainly not. It's £170/$170 cold hard cash.

So what about the Intel vs AMD arguement here? Well, as we said in our original Ryzen coverage, this will come down to a single price point decision - to say AMD or Intel is the winner is to completely misunderstand the new CPU landscape. At £330, the Intel Core i7-7700K is a worthy foe as the 4.7-5GHz you'll likely land at from an overclock can have a huge impact anywhere that 1-4 cores are more utilised than additional ones. We're still adding results to our graphs in some of the updated or new tests we've included, so the Core i7-7700K doesn't feature in all of them yet, but it's likely to come down to your specific needs. If you regularly do rendering, content creation or transcode videos, and rely on the CPU rather than GPU acceleration, then the Ryzen 7 1700 is an awesome choice that will wipe the floor with the Core i7-7700K anywhere its eight cores and 16 threads are fully utilised.

Sadly, this won't be everywhere and vast swathes of games still only utilise fewer than four cores and as a result you also have the Core i5-7600K to consider as well, which costs around £100 less. This will also perform better in any tasks not utilising most of the AMD CPUs cores at stock speed and when overclocked. Ultimately, we do buy into AMD's argument that Ryzen is about more than just games. Its value in multi-threaded tasks is fantastic and nowhere more so thus far than with the Ryzen 7 1700, if you overclock it that is. However, you still need a compelling reason to spend more and own anything with more multi-threaded grunt than the Core i5-7600K and that will come down to your own specific needs.