Alongside AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600, the Ryzen 7 1700 was one of the best CPUs for enthusiasts that AMD released in 2017. It was considerably cheaper than the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X, but apart from lower stock speed frequencies, the two chips were identical. As a result, that if you were game for a bit of overclocking, a Ryzen 7 1700 could match an overclocked Ryzen 7 1800X in terms of performance, but for much less money. Both CPUs have enjoyed price cuts, though, and the Ryzen 7 1700 is now available for just £254 inc VAT, which is a bargain considering it has eight cores and 16 threads, and it was priced at £330 inc VAT when it launched.
READ NEXT: The best CPUs you can buy
The price difference between the 1700 and the flagship 1800X is fairly small now, at £30-40, which means the 1700 is really only worth considering if you plan to overclock it. The Ryzen 7 1700 has a base frequency of just 3GHz and can only boost to 3.7GHz. To compound this lowly stock-speed performance, it can only use XFR to boost a single core’s speed by up 50MHz, meaning it lags behind the Ryzen 7 1800X by up to 350MHz in lightly threaded scenarios, while the base frequency is 600MHz adrift.
Price-wise, the Ryzen 7 1700 is mainly up against Intel’s Core i5-8600K, as the two chips retail for around £250 inc VAT. The Intel CPU is certainly no slouch, with a single-core boost reaching 4.3GHz and a hefty all-core boost to 4.1GHz. However, what the AMD CPU lacks in clock speed it makes up for in cores and threads, with eight cores versus six for the Intel CPU, and 16 threads versus six for the Core i5-8600K.
Not surprisingly, this situation led to some fairly lowly results for the Ryzen 7 1700 in some tests at stock speed, with the Intel CPU managing considerably better performances in the image editing and multitasking tests. On occasions, the Ryzen 7 1800X was also noticeably quicker at stock speed, scoring over 200 points more in Cinebench R15. Even so, the Ryzen 7 1700 came second in our heavily multithreaded video-encoding test, third in Cinebench and also third overall in the system score.
It’s all about overclocking with the Ryzen 7 1700, though, and reaching an all-core frequency of 4.05GHz with a VCORE of 1.425V meant the 1700 eclipsed the Ryzen 7 1800X by a smidgen, beating it in every test as a result. Its nemesis, though, is the Core i5-8600K, and the latter’s monstrous overclock did see it edge out a big lead in the image-editing and multitasking tests, with an 8% lead in Ashes of the Singularity, too.
However, the AMD CPU was a huge 20% faster in the video-encoding test, where it was just behind the overclocked Core i7-8700K, and it was a massive 32% faster in Cinebench R15, where it eclipsed the Intel flagship by more than 100 points.
AMD Ryzen 7 1700 review: Verdict
AMD still has work to do in lightly threaded tasks, as the Intel chips have a lead here at both stock and overclocked clock speed, thanks to higher frequencies. We're hoping this situation will be rectified with AMD’s second-generation Ryzen CPUs later this year. However, the Ryzen 7 1700 is value for the money if you’re willing to overclock it, especially if you have software that will make use of all its cores and threads. In these situations, it batters the Core i5-8600K and is a match for the much more expensive Core i7-8700K too.