AN AFFORDABLE POWERHOUSE
THERE’S LITTLE DOUBT in our minds that the Ryzen 7 1700 is an incredible chip, and it offers some great opportunities for building systems at a number of price points. Our plan was to build a system that offered strong performance, but was still reasonably priced, and to an extent we hit that main requirement with little hassle. As we’re at the very start of a new family of chips, we haven’t had chance to try all the different motherboard SKUs yet, and there are some questions over memory performance at this stage, so we’d expect to tweak a mainstream build like this as we find out more, but it certainly shows promise.
Before we say anything else, we’d like to call out the Antec P9 Window for being a great case to build in. For a sub-$100 chassis, it offers plenty of features to make life easier, and while things are cramped in the back, it’s better than a lot of cases we’ve looked at. The tool-free drive cages work well, and removing them couldn’t be any easier, should you need to make room for a longer graphics card.
On to performance. Normally we compare our monthly build with our standard desktop zero-point, but that machine costs considerably more than this system, so we’ve instead compared it to last month’s build, which was based on AMD’s FX-8370E, and rolled in at roughly the same price.
The differences are impressive, and show just how far AMD has managed to come with Ryzen compared to the outgoing Bulldozer architecture. The Cinebench R15 scores clearly show the advances: The multi-threaded score is to be expected when you’re going from an 8-thread chip to one with 16 threads, but it’s the single-thread performance that really stands out. That 61 percent improvement shows that this is a significantly different core more than anything else.
The gaming scores aren’t as straightforward to interpret, as we’re going from a last-gen GTX 960 with 2GB of RAM to a current-generation RX 480 with 8GB of RAM, which costs $60 more. Still, the differences are stark, and in many cases represent a shift from having to dial down settings in order to hit smooth frame rates, to being smooth off the bat. In real terms, you may have to ease back on some settings on newer releases, but this is a machine that will last some time— and if you’re serious about gaming, a faster graphics card makes for a wise investment.
Overall, we’ve enjoyed building this machine, and we’re happy with the end result. That hasn’t stopped us looking forward to seeing what the rest of the Ryzen family serves up, though—we should have the first Ryzen 5 chips next month, with Ryzen 3 dropping later in the year. We’re also intrigued to see what the first Ryzen APUs dish up.