AMD Ryzen R7 1700 AM4 8-Core Processor Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Ryzen 7 1700 comes in at just £332.60, a far cry from the flagship, 1800X which costs £488.99. On Amazon UK. That makes the R7 1700 around the same price at the Intel Core i7-7700K (mostly thanks to recent Intel price cuts).

Overview

The Ryzen hype has been a lot of fun this last week or so, and while it hasn’t gotten off to a perfect start, few new hardware launches do. There’s still some major issues with memory performance that we’re eagerly awaiting a fix for, but will this have a huge impact and improve real-world performance? Perhaps, but most likely for rendering applications, where the Ryzen platform excels, even beating out the equally priced 7700K at times; with some help from an overclock, of course.

This chip is pretty impressive overall, and in applications that can take advantage of the full range of cores and threads, it does a fantastic job of keeping up with the competition at a similar price range. At stock clocks, the results just weren’t that impressive, often scoring quite low or even at the bottom of our charts. However, all Ryzen chips are overclockable, and it’s so easy to push the overclocks up that you would be mad not to get this chip up to 4GHz. Of course, this is a pretty toasty chip, as are any other 8-core desktop CPUs, so get a big air cooler like a Noctua NH-D15, or a high-end AIO water cooler on there so you can keep your temps low and not suffer the noise of high fan RPMs.

While the 1800X did pull ahead in some tests, the Ryzen 1700 came damn close to the same performance while overclocked as the overclocked 1800X, making it great value for money to anyone eager to invest in the new AMD platform. With that in mind, I would strongly suggest you invest in either the B370 or X370 chipset motherboards, as they’re the only chipsets that allow for overclocking on Ryzen and are going to give you the best value for money overall.

With Ryzen introducing a new architecture, support for better connectivity with M.2, DDR4, and more. The chips also see the return of the excellent overclocking improvements that AMD used to be well-known for; it’s certainly an exciting product. With a few tweaks and improvements, it may be getting better very soon too, and we’re eager to retest once any memory latency issues are resolved.

Pros

• Competitive price
• 8-Core w/ 16 Threads
• New AM4 platform
• Very easy to overclock
• Can closely match the 1800X while overclocked
• Precision Boost and XFR
• Excellent performance in rendering (Cinebench)
• Good gaming performance

Cons

• None

Neutral

• Memory performance still has a few bugs, but we expect these to be fixed with a BIOS update
• Like all 8-core chips, it can get quite warm, so a powerful cooler is recommended
• Price is very similar to the more established i7-7700K

“The Ryzen R7 1700 is a competitively priced offering that can give you 90% of the thrills of the R7 1800X (while both are overclocked), making it an attractive choice for those building an AM4 based gaming system or workstation.”