AMD Ryzen 7 1700, 1700X & 1800X Review

For the original German article, see here.

AMD definitely created the biggest hype of the new year: After years of a niche existence on the market, the new Ryzen CPUs are supposed to be the big deal. Our review shows that the first three processors are actually impressive pieces of hardware, even though we cannot give a blind recommendation for them.

Before we dive into the review, we want to note one thing: Ryzen is a brand-new CPU generation, so both general drivers as well as dedicated software and games in particular still have to be optimized. A couple of weeks after the launch, there should at least be updated BIOS versions by now, but we cannot rule out further performance improvements – AMD already talked about it and individual developers mentioned corresponding patches as well.

Ryzen is nothing less than a quantum leap for AMD. While the previous generation was still based on outdated 32-nm and 24-nm technology, respectively, the Ryzen CPUs are manufactured in the modern 14-nm-FinFET process. Despite the slightly inferior manufacturing, there is a size advantage of around 10%, which is mainly a result of the physically smaller cache (not in terms of capacity!).

The very challenging decrease of the structural size offers more advantages: You can put more transistors into the same space, both theoretically and in practice, and the efficiency benefits as well.

AMD decided to equip all Ryzen CPUs with a free multiplier, so overclocking is easy. However, it is only supported by X370, B350, and X300 – so these are the interesting chipsets for enthusiasts. Multi GPU setups are only supported by the X370 and X300 according to the manufacturer; the B350 is only supposed to support CrossFire, but not SLI.

Another new feature: The AM4 platform uses DDR4, which was introduced in the end of 2015 with Intel's Skylake generation. Advantages are higher (theoretical) clocks and reduced power consumption. Ryzen has some limitations regarding the memory where the internal organization (single/dual rank) has a big influence – but you can only see it in the spec sheet of the RAM module.

Four dual rank modules (up to 64 GB) can reach 1866 MHz, single rank modules 2133 MHz. Two RAM modules on the other hand reach clocks of up to 2400 or 2667 MHz, respectively, so you basically have to choose between capacity and performance – even though 32 GB should not even limit prosumers over the next couple of years, especially since the use of RAM Disk is not as attractive anymore thanks to fast PCIe-SSDs. The potential performance deficit by slower RAM modules is also countered by a larger L3 cache to a certain extent.

We also want to mention that the listed frequencies are the official specifications, all other settings are overclocking and there is no guarantee it will work properly.

We had the chance to review all three available Ryzen CPUs very thoroughly. The three models basically only differ in terms of clock and the TDP (thermal design power). We already mentioned that the model without the "X" in the designation only reaches a higher clock of 50 MHz instead of 100 MHz via Extended Frequency Range when the situation requires and the consumption allows it. All models feature eight cores, SMT, and 16 MB L3 cache.

We compare the three AMD CPUs with multiple Intel processors. Cinebench tests both the single-core as well as multi-core performance and benefits from SMT or Hyper Threading, respectively, in multi-threaded applications.

We start with the multi-core performance, where all three Ryzen CPUs clearly beat the desktop competition from Intel we use for the comparisons – the 1800X is more than 50% faster than the Intel Core i7-7700K. Only the extremely expensive server CPUs like the Xeon E5-2697 v2 and E5-2680 v2 can beat Ryzen in this benchmark – but the difference is small.

The single-core performance on the other hand is less convincing: Both the i7-7700T as well as the i7-7700 and i7-7700K are much faster than the current Ryzen models, which can be an issue for Ryzen users in applications that hardly benefit from multiple cores.

The comparison between the single and multi-core performance is also an indicator for the advertised multi-threading: All three processors heavily benefit from SMT; the actual multi-core performance is at least 20% higher than the expected performance for eight cores. At least the Intel rival i7-7700 reaches a lower advantage below 20%. The Ryzen CPUs did not have a problem to sustain the high performance over long periods.

This benchmark, which is not completely synthetic, determines the encryption performance of the CPU with the AES, Twofish and Serpent protocol. The 1800X is almost twice as fast as the Core i7-7700K, and the other Ryzen CPUs scale based on the clocks – not a surprise considering the otherwise similar specs. The Core i5-7600K is far behind and the encryption performance is not even 50% of the smallest Ryzen R7 1700.

wPrime calculates square roots based on the Newton method, so it executes mathematical operations and benefits from multi-threading. The three Ryzen chips once again scale as expected, which can also be said about the difference compared to the Intel competitors i7-7700K and i5-7600K.

The older versions of WinRAR and x264 (Avisynth) did not show results that correspond with the performance, so we did evaluate them. At least colleagues that used newer versions of x264 determined good results for Ryzen.

All the three tested CPUs are high-end models, so a powerful graphics card is required for good test results. We use the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, which is currently the fastest GPU and test different resolution as well as settings to show the raw CPU performance as well as the practical performance. We use the mainboards Asus Crosshair VI Hero for the Ryzen CPUs, the Asus Z97-Deluxe for the i7-4970K, the Asus X99-E for the socket 2011 CPUs and the Gigabyte Z270-Gaming K3 for the Kaby Lake desktop processors. 2x 8 GB DDR4-3000 RAM modules are provided by Corsair (Intel at 2133 MHz) or Crucial, respectively (also all four for the 2011 mainboard). The operating system is stored on a Samsung 840 Pro 250 GB; games on a Toshiba OCZ SSD.

The 1800X, 1700X, and 1700 are competing with the i7-7700K and i5-7600K, which provide a significantly higher single-core performance compared to their AMD counterparts. We also recorded the frame time while playing The Witcher 3, where we compared the results with the Core i7-4790K and the i7-7700K.

The first and at the same time most important result: SMT cannot always improve the performance. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, For Honor, and Farming Simulator 2017 run at a lower FPS number when we activate the Hyper Threading counterpart. This might sound like a small issue, but it is actually a problem: You can only deactivate SMT in the BIOS, which will be annoying for enthusiasts.

It is possible that the SMT performance will be improved by patches, but you should not take that as granted. New titles should probably benefit from SMT, so Ryzen can be seen as an investment for the future. Whether the performance decrease with active SMT is actually relevant in practice will also depend on the graphics card. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, for example, is already limited by the extremely powerful 1080 Ti with the Ultra preset and Full-HD resolution.

We are not always impressed by the three Ryzen CPUs in the direct comparison with the Intel Core i7-7700K. Even the R7 1800X (without SMT) is clearly beaten (25%) by the much less expensive Intel competitor in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

The performances start to level off in the highest settings or the 4K resolution, respectively, due to the GPU limitation. The difference between the three Ryzen models is almost negligible in this benchmark; we can only see up to 5% between the 1800X and 1700.

However, the results are poor with active SMT, where the Intel i7-7700K can be up to 59% faster than the AMD 1800X.

We can see similar results in For Honor and Farming Simulator 2017: The Intel CPU can clearly beat the R7 1800X, even though the difference (8%) is much smaller compared to For Honor – where we can see 30% (without SMT) at low settings. Those settings are mostly irrelevant for practice, but show the CPU performance. The performance deficit caused by SMT is the smallest in Farming Simulator 2017, but it is still significant. The situation is similar for the i5-7600K, which can already beat the AMD competition in every single benchmark, although the differences are smaller. The gaming benchmarks completely reverse the advertised performance ratio by AMD: The Kaby Lake processor beats the Ryzen competition, which is twice as expensive.

We reached a stable frequency of 3.9 GHz for the 1700X (without voltage increase) in a short overclocking attempt. The Cinebench R15 Multi score of 1680 points is 9.4% better. Another 100 MHz resulted in an 11.3% higher score, but the processor was not running properly with a voltage increase.