That’s what they say, but actually yields have been really good so binning isn’t necessary and generally speaking, the 1700 doesn’t overclock noticeably worse than the 1700x.
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Has there ever been a 1700 that could not hit 3.8GHz on all cores? I am running mine at 1.35v and it is absolutely stable running mprime -t all day long. So unless you want to actually use the stock cooler and run the chip without touching it… save a few bucks if you can. The only real difference would be the temperature readout (stupid offset) and that you can use the 1700 as a 65W chip in your NAS when you upgrade the gaming rig or something like that.
TDP is just an upper limit there, the 1700 isn’t positively binned for running at high speeds at lower voltage like mobile CPUs. Really the only difference is the HSF and the distinct pleasure of knowing your cpu has that “X” at the end of its name.
My annoyance was that I needed to go 1.35 to get a stable 3.8 but only needed 1.21 for 3.75
minor annoyance though as I am loving my cpu
Theoreticlly that “should” be the case yes.
But “most” 1700 and 1700X´s get arround 4.0Ghz on a decent X370 board.
Unless you really loose the silicon lottery.
There is just nothing more to get out of it really, or atleast i have not seen it yet.
Its just that a 1700 might need a littlebit more voltage to get there.
I think that i only have heard about one or two occasions that a 1700 didnt go passed 3.8Ghz.
But then again they used crappy motherboards, which could very well be their biggest limmitation.
Still you can allways loose the silicon lottery ofc.
I have only seen a couple of 1800X sku’s hitting 4.1GHz.
But at its price point the 1800X is kinda an irrelevent cpu imo.
Unless you could find on a sale.
If the 1700 and 1700X are on the same price.
It just highlly depends on op´s budget, if the extra money for a cooler,
lets say about $35,- or so doesnt impact the selection on other important parts like a decent X370 board and a GPU.
Then i would also grab a 1700X definitelly, because it gives you guaranteed higher clocks out of the box.
The boxed cooler that comes with the 1700 is a reasonable cooler.
But its not good enough for 4.0GHz OC.
So if that is “op´s” goals, then he will need a a better cooler anyways.
Totally agree… The boxed 1700 cooler is good for 3.6-3.9Ghz…I as a sample size of 1 run fine at 3.8Ghz while it can run at 4Ghz if never loaded 16 threads . At 3.8 I can load up all cores and it gets hot but stable.
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Yeah, much like Pascal Nvidia GPUs and 2Ghz, most Zen1 CPUs will reach around 4Ghz and it doesn’t really matter which one you buy or how well you cool it as they’ll pretty much all do that. I would spend the money saved on high-end cooling on faster RAM, which really matters for Zen.
The really high-end motherboards have an overclock mode, so if you have one of those, do I dare say, you can use those push-button settings to OC.
I am a conservative overclocker
Typically I settle a fair bit lower than what I know are the maximum safety margins
I get why most people would not want to bother though…
but for me the gains equate to real world time savings in rendering.
I just wanted to throw in that I have a 1700, on the b350prime plus, with the stock cooler, and I am stable at 3.8.
Not making any promises for what you will see, but so far this seems to be fine for conservative OCs. I would probably have better luck with a better VRM, but it really wasn’t in the budget for me. Anyway best of luck.
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True, but then whenever i have a software crash it will be in the back of my mind: was it overclock related? And its too much of a pain in the butt to go trying to replicate the situation to find out.
I’m far more interested in not having crashes AT ALL than gaining a few frames per second in games (which is the only constant high CPU load thing i do).
I have a very low tolerance for system instability.
And yeah, fair enough if you have a 100% cpu bound workload you want to make run faster, maybe its worth it. But most people don’t.
I’m not saying i’m anti-overclocking if that’s your thing though. Just for me, my priorities are different.
They’re the same processor more or less, one is just faster then the other(stock).
one is 3.0 smt, other is 3.4 smt.
Id deffinetly go with the faster version, if same price.
albeit if you overclock etc, it gets wierd. since most likely they overclock
exactly the same. Give and take ~100Mhz.
Fair enough, but I’ve never heard of instability from a single-click overclock.
It’s probably very rare.
But again, real world i doubt i’ll notice much difference in the things i do between a 1700x or 1800x running at stock clocks with XFR vs. an automatic overclock, outside of synthetic benchmarks.
So even if it’s very rare, for me, i’d rather just not have to think about it.
Definitely though if you’re CPU bound and waiting for the CPU a lot, buying a 1700 and overclocking it is probably the cheapest / best bang for buck. the stock cooler is good enough. If you don’t want to overclock, the 1700x or 1800x, but you need to buy a cooler.
Right now though, i’m waiting for the 2xxx Ryzens. I suspect they’ll OC a lot better than the 1000 series, and even if they don’t, benchmark leaks tend to indicate an IPC improvement as well - 2600x looks to be getting 15% better performance from 5% frequency hike vs. the 1600x.
Or i keep putting money away for a threadripper (but by the time i can afford the RAM to necessitate the extra memory slots, it will probably be obsolete) 
Zen+ comes out in April and is on a smaller 12nm process, which should mean either lower power consumption or higher clockspeeds. And it’s AMD, we know they don’t give a damn about power consumption!
Hopefully Zen+ chips clock closer to modern intel CPUs, which would mean a good 20% clock increase. But in reality AMD is claiming the new process is worth 10% clocks, so it’ll probably be around there-- Zen+ clocking at ~4.5Ghz at the high-end. So still a bit slower than intel on single threaded tasks.
Zen2 is a 7nm process, and god only knows when Globalfoundries will get that working with sufficient yields to actually sell CPUs in volume. I doubt they make 2018.
AMD do care about power consumption. Ryzen is more efficient than what intel is putting out right now.
We aren’t dealing with bulldozer any more.
Vega and Polaris are also great in terms of efficiency too, when run at efficient clock-rate.
Thing is, AMD pushed vega’s clocks hard, if you run it on the power efficient bios it loses very little performance and drops power and heat a LOT.
I mean compare vega 8 on package graphics to say, an nvidia gtx 1030. Less power, very similar performance.
Yes, when run at an efficient clock. Which they don’t do, because performance wasn’t competitive.
Anyway, my point was that Zen+ could run cooler than Zen1. But it won’t, because that tradeoff doesn’t make sense for a desktop CPU that’s substantially slower than its competition. Zen needs higher clocks. It’s the right decision.
I can drop about 5% performance on Vega 64 for about 80-100 watts. In some things that’s still a lot faster than a 1080.
If you are caring about performance per watt at say, 100 watts, I think you’ll find Vega is very efficient. And this is why Vega 8 and 11 exist, and are destroying the low end GPU market.
They ramped clocks beyond the efficiency curve because
- they could, to get better performance (albeit at large power cost)
- possibly to cover for driver software being nowhere near there yet.
Stock coolers are decent, but for the best noise/temperature reduction ratio, you’re going to have to go aftermarket. The review site I use for heatsinks though hasn’t been testing AM4 yet though.
Out for a year now and not testing Ryzen at all? That’s ridiculous.