In our testing, the 1700 performs surprisingly good, and in some benches, better than expected. This is likely down to the ongoing optimisations, and the ironing out of any bugs that may have reared its head since release. There are more optimisations expected to be coming, either in the form of BIOS updates or Windows based updates that can too help improve the performance. In our various CPU based benchmarks, it is revealed that Ryzen 7 CPUs have a huge amount of power, and specifically with the Ryzen 7 1700, we get an impressive blow for blow performance, even against the i7 6900K, the competitor the 1800X is targeting. It seems that Ryzen is very strong in the areas it matters most, with many of the short comings seeming to be down to older instructions that are being utilised less in current times.



There are some situations where the high clock speeds and marginally superior IPC of the Intel Chips win out, again, this is something that is definitely seen in memory intensive workloads, as well as the Photoshop performance. However, AMD is not significantly lagging behind as displayed by the older FX-8350 CPU.

The 1700 is again worth considering not just for its price but its efficiency, and multi-threaded advantage. At stock frequency, the real results dance around the same ball park as the i7 6900K, yet it uses significantly less power idle and a little less fully loaded. For the gamer, many are debating whether to choose the i7 7700K due to its highly clocked cores providing that extra NOW performance. Though we feel that many optimisations are to come both in the OS environment and in developing games that will give 8core+ CPUs a margin of advantage that will continue to grow. Outright gaming performance for now will still be decided by your graphics card, this is displayed by the fact that the entirely outclassed FX-8350, a 5 year old CPU, still gives a reasonable gaming performance. So it is fair to conclude that the Ryzen 7 1700 will not be the gamers favourite in regards to outright bang for buck.

By definition, the Ryzen 7 line up is for the prosumers, the enthusiasts, streamers, and content creators, so if you fall into these categories, it is difficult to imagine one would be disappointed by the Ryzen 7 1700; especially when overclocking can give a massive bump of additional CPU horsepower. In that regard, the price/performance offered defies the market norm, enough for us to believe that choosing to spend the equivalent amount of money on a 'quad-core' solely for gaming purposes is outright lunacy, despite the short-term performance benefits.

If you are looking for a stable workhorse CPU with low power use, the Ryzen 7 1700 and its 65W TDP teaches us a lesson in efficient, high-performance computing. On the flip side, enthusiasts less concerned about power use will find that this is the most accessible 8C/16T CPU currently on market that has an abundance of power waiting to be unleashed.



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