AMD Ryzen 1700 and X370 Review

One of the unique things in our reviews is the overclocking aspect where we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  This helps give you an idea as to what a system is capable of when overclocked over a stock system.  The effective overclock for these tests is 4.0Ghz with straight multiplier adjustments and a little bit of memory tweaking.

The Aorus AX370 Gaming 5 is really picky when it comes to what memory you install.  For instance the UEFI tops out at 3200Mhz and for our system to run at 4Ghz I had to back the XMP profile down to 3000Mhz to become stable enough to complete the benchmark suite.

Overclocking the Ryzen 1700 was actually rather straight forward and not unlike overclocking an AMD FX or any other AMD processor.  Some of the ease was due to an obvious lack of overclocking controls in the Aorus AX370 Gaming 5 motherboard where I only had control over CPU and Memory multipliers.  However, since that was the board AMD included with my processor there wasn’t much I could do about that. 

The quest to 4Ghz was a little rocky however once I figured out the memory issue and started getting agressive with CPU voltage things settled down nicely.  In terms of overall performance the synthetic numbers scaled as you would expect along with a 35GB/s boost in memory bandwidth.  Unfortunately that didn’t translate to AIDA64 where overall latency went down however actual transfer speeds got slower.  I attribute this to memory support in the UEFI and will likely get better over time.

The biggest gains came with UT3 and COD4 game performance with an extra 100FPS across the board.  For this I can only point to an increase in memory bandwidth which is a known enhancement for Cinebench R15 too. 

It would seem we once again have an AMD CPU that responds well to memory speed and should overclock nicely when things drop below zero.