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Sub $1000 Ryzen 1700 Build. Ryzen 1700 & Asus Prime BH 350 Plus Review
It has been a little over a month and we have finally got our hands on all the parts to a Ryzen Build. We initially wanted to do this review earlier but due to our BH 350 Plus motherboard coming nearly a month late after it was launched we had to wait over one month since the launch of Ryzen to put together a Ryzen 1700 Build and to provide a Review of the Ryzen 1700 along with the Asus BH 350 Plus review.
Ryzen has been a long time coming for AMD. This processor generation has been built from the ground up over the past 5 years with the help of Legendary CPU Engineer Jim Keller who built the original Athlon CPU in the late 90’s along with it’s many follow ups. Ryzen is still under progress even a month after it’s release as the AM4 motherboards are getting constant updates as we speak to offer better and more stable performance in Games and applications as updates are getting better to take advantage of Ryzen 7 series' 8 Cores. So, how does Ryzen 1700 perform? Below we will see that based on our test when compared to our Skylake Build and with the newer Core i7 7700K this is probably AMD’s best processor in over a decade.
To keep things simple and to the point. Ryzen is AMD’s biggest jump in performance in over a decade. With initial targets of over 40% increase in IPC over AMD’s Vishera processor. Not only have AMD managed to get over 40% increase in IPC but they have managed to surpass that and have reached nearly 52% increase in IPC performance. This has resulted in Ryzen catapulting over intel’s $1000 6900K’s performance at half the price with AMD’s Ryzen 1800X.
As shown below in our benchmarks when compared to Sklyake 6700K, the Ryzen 1700 easily steam rolls it and even matches or beats intel’s new Kably Lake Core i7 7700K processor which is similarly priced.
So, let’s get to the benchmarks.
We will be comparing the following Ryzen PC against our Skylake based PC (which is not far off from the newer Kaby Lake processor) which we will show with benchmarks against Kaby Lake from 3rd Party Sources.
Ryzen 7 1700 Build:
Ryzen 7 1700
Asus B350 Plus AM4
G. Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB DDR4 (2 x 8GB)
XFX Radeon RX 480 XXX OC Edition
NZXT S340 Plus
PNY CS1311 240GB Sata III SSD
EVGA 500W Power Supply
Our Skylake Build:
Core i7 6700K (Overclocked to 4.5 GHZ)
120 GB SSD
16GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance RAM
XFX Radeon R9 Fury X
GIGABYTE GA-Z170XP-SLI
Corsair CX850M
Crimson Drivers - 15.11
Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit
First we have an older DX 10 benchmark that we decided to use just to see how Ryzen 1700 does.
Unsurprisingly, Ryzen 1700 puts up an insane CPU score of 45,028 and overall score of P36,379. So playing older games with Ryzen 1700 should be a breeze.
Next, we move on to newer benchmarks starting with Time Spy:
We got a CPU Score of 7009 and an overall score of 3944. Due to time constraints we were not able to test our Skylake build with the Fury X.
Next is Cloud Gate:
We got a CPU score of 12066 and an over all score of 34,265. With the Core i7 6700K we got a Physics Score of 9235 and an over all score of 29,774. This means that Ryzen 1700 is 30.65% faster than Skylake, which is again an amazing jump.
Next we have Sky Diver:
We got a CPU Score of 14,707 and an overall score of 28,293 on our Ryzen 1700 Build compared to a score of 11,903 and an overall score of 30,414 on our Sky Lake build. This means that Ryzen 1700 was 23.56% faster that the Core i7 6700K which is again nothing short of amazing.
Next we have Fire Strike:
Ryzen 7 1700 gives us a Physics CPU score of 16,430 and a combined score of 9971. Whereas the Core i7 6700K gives us a Physics score of 12,987 and a combined score of 13,379. This means that the 1700 is 26.51% faster than the Core i7 6700K.
Lastly, in our Synthetic Benchmarks we have Uniengine.
Although, this is not a fair benchmark as these two systems uses different GPU’s. But the Ryzen system manages to pull ahead in overall performance.
Ryzen 7 1700 gets an average score of 94.4 while the Core i7 6700K get’s an average score of 66.8 which is nearly 30 FPS slower than Ryzen.
Next up we have Gaming Benchmarks. Due to time constraints we were only able to benchmark two games, Doom and Titan Fall 2.
Doom Benchmark
As one can see from Doom Maxed out Ryzen 7 1700 pulls in impressive numbers at 1080P and 1440P all maxed out. It is even playable at 4K with nearly 30 FPS. Note, this was done using OpenGL, with Vulkan we got nearly in the 40 – 50 FPS range meaning that you can easily play Doom in 4k with Ryzen 7 1700 and a RX 480.
Next up, we have Titanfall 2 with everything maxed out and AO off.
We were not able to test at 1440P and 4K as VSR was not working in Titanfall 2. But regardless, Titanafall 2 is more than playable at 1080P with Ryzen 1700 getting a whopping 143 FPS.
How does it compare to the Core i7 7700K?
While we do not have Core i7 7700K to review but 3rd party benchmarks provided by the Youtube Channel Joker Productions shows an overclocked Ryzen at 3.9 GHZ going head to head with an overclock 5 GHZ Core i7 7700K.
As the results show that the Ryzen 7 1700 is as good if not better than the Core i7 7700K. Due note, that the Ryzen 1700 is an 8 Core 16 threaded processor while the Core i7 7700K is 4 core 8 threaded processors. The Ryzen 1700 offers better multitasking performance along with better streaming performance and as more and more games takes advantage of 8 Core processors the Ryzen 1700 is easily the better processors over the Core i7 7700K. And since the core i7 7700K is not much different than Core i7 6700K, based on our performance showing of the Core i7 6700K we can confirm this with 100% certainty.
ASUS BH 350 Plus
The ASUS BH 250 Plus is an excellent choice with the Ryzen 1700 build. As shown in the picture below it is indeed a beautiful motherboard.
It has red LED light traces throughout the motherboard which gives it a nice look especially at night and along with the Wraith cooler which has a custom RGB lighting these two makes a perfect combination. With respect to features the Asus BH 350 Plus offers everything from USB 3.1 support to the newer M.2 standard for your Hard Drive. We used BIOS revision 0513 in our review which provided great performance and stability. Also, the BH 350 Plus is supposed to provide memory support up to 3200 DDR4 however in our review we were only able to reach 2133 speed. Now, as newer BIOS updates happen we hope to reach higher memory speeds and use our G Skill memory to it’s rated specs. With respect to overclocking, the ASUS BH 350 Plus offer a ton of options to adjust voltages and memory over clocking features. We were able to reach an over clock of 3.8 GHZ with voltage increase of around 1.375 in our system and we were able to run DOOM with no problems. However, when launching Titanfall 2 the system crashed and we had to settle back to stock CPU clocks. However, our lack of over clocking stability should not deter anyone from purchasing this motherboard. We feel that this AM4 mother board along with other AM4 motherboards have a lot of maturation to happen and as newer BIOS comes out supporting the stated up to 3200 DDR4 speed we feel the performance will only get better. Not to mention the build quality of this motherboard feels like it is closer to more expensive, higher end motherboard. But do note it’s current state with limited memory speed and lack of stability when over clocking.
Summary
So, what do we give Ryzen 1700 as final score? We give it an overall score of 9.5.
With respect to the Asus Prime BH 350 Plus we give it an overall score of 9.0.
This concludes our Ryzen 7 1700 and Asus Prime BH 350 Plus performance review. As one can see the Ryzen 7 1700 is easily the best price/performance processors on the market and the best processors for 2017 so far. We would go as far as to say this is possibly AMD’s best processor in over 10 years. And the fact that we were able to build this for less than $1000 shows that this is build is quite affordable. So, if you are looking to build a Gaming PC that can do other workloads like video editing and Game streaming among others without breaking the bank than the Ryzen 7 1700 is the way to go.
