The beauty of building a PC is that a diversity of parts allows users to construct a computer specifically designed to best serve their particular needs. AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X may not have taken Intel's crown for gaming, but the price vs performance ratio for just about everything else propels the fledgling line of processors well into contention. The Ryzen 7 1800X we recently reviewed isn't the only new AMD eight-core chip you can buy: cheaper 1700X and 1700 processors are available, and that is where the value really becomes difficult to ignore.
Fundamentally, not much separates the three Ryzen 7s except clock-speeds. The 1700X drops a couple of hundred megahertz, but saves you £130/$100. Meanwhile, the entry-level 1700 sees a 3.0GHz base clock - some way off the top-tier model's 3.6GHz - but offers exceptional value at £299/$330. It's cheaper than the i7 7700K here, but offers twice as many cores and threads and absolutely monsters it in most - but not all - multithreaded tasks. All the Ryzen chips are can overclock, and all have the maximum L3 cache. Provided they OC to approximately the same level, it must be said that the entry-level 1700 looks particularly compelling.
Going into this review, we were considering the kind of processor that we would choose if we were building one of our office PCs, now dominated by enthusiast-level i7s and older, ten-core Xeons (amazingly cheap, and tend to slot into older Sandy Bridge-E boards). Our systems need to accommodate gaming, but just as important, if not more so, is multi-threaded performance for video editing and encoding. Ryzen 7 1800X offers great value against the eight-core i7s, but we suspect that the fight would be closer, up against an overclocked six-core enthusiast chip (our very own John Linneman runs an i7 5820K at a rock-solid 4.5GHz). However, the Ryzen line is cheaper, and processors can be run on cheaper motherboards - all of which overclock the processor if required.
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