AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU Review

AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Review

Introduction

One of the biggest changes in recent PC hardware history has been the move away from the option of buying a cheap CPU and overclocking the chuff out of it to get a very similar level of performance to the higher models for a lot less money. This has been for two reasons largely. On the one hand Intel have dissuaded us from doing so by producing their cheaper CPUs without hyperthreading, something that almost no amount of clock speed can overcome. AMD on the other hand have largely been limited by their actual CPUs not being either thermally efficient enough to cope with a beefy overclock, or just generally not being too rewarding.

Fortunately as we saw from the Ryzen 7 1800X overclocking is very much back on the AMD agenda and their aggressive pricing has also returned to idea behind this very website, namely getting ‘free’ performance by overclocking a more affordably priced processor to the level of the next model up. The Ryzen 7 1700 that we have up for review today is £170 cheaper than the 1800X we began our look at the Ryzen CPUs with, and £170 is the difference between a single RX480 in your system and Crossfire RX480s. Given our law of system building that any spare money in the budget brings the largest performance reward by funnelling it into the GPU, this should prick up the ears of anyone interested in a new AMD based rig.

Of course all this is dependant upon the Ryzen 7 1700 getting a significant performance boost from any overclock we can extract, so let’s see what the specifications are at stock before we see what some tinkering can achieve.

Technical Specifications

The main difference with the 1700 is the lower default clock speed which should lead to some average stock scores in our graphs but hopefully provides us with a lot of headroom for our overclocking exploits. Although unlike the 1800X there is a lot less thermal headroom with the reduced 65W TDP. However, the strange thing about the Ryzen 7 CPUs is that there is a 20° offset on its reported temperature which means that you can use some careful BIOS manipulation and really overclock the nuts off it.

CPU Cores 8
Threads 16
Base Clock 3 GHz
Turbo Clock 3.7 GHz
L1 Cache 768 KB
L2 Cache 4 MB
L3 Cache 16 MB
Multiplier Unlocked Yes
TDP 65 W
Package AM4
Thermal Solution Wraith Spire LED

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