 So you've been waiting for AMD Ryzen. Now you've seen what it can do. You're ready to do your best impression of Philip J. Fry! But wait... AMD has left the keys in the proverbial ignition and decided to keep their frequency multipliers unlocked. So could you potentially save yourself a hundred bucks going for the 1700x instead of the 1800x and get the same performance? I always recommend that before you start haggling with your local CPU dealer You take her out for a test drive. So let's do that then shall we? Welcome to our AMD Ryzen 7 overclocking guide GFuel is the sugar-free energy drink formula that can help you maintain focus during long workdays and gaming sessions. Use offer code Linus to save 40% for a limited time. So since we don't have to spend extra on a special unlocked CPU to enable overclocking we can use any motherboard with an AMD X370 or B350 chipset like our X370 based Asus Crosshair 6. Cool, but what CPU should we buy? Well AMD's own guidance indicates that non X chips aren't expected to overclock as well. So the logical course of action appears to be to just crank up the clocks on a 1700x and save ourselves a C note, but is it really going to be that easy? In theory yes, but it's complicated by the fact that Ryzen doesn't give you very much control. While you do have dead simple access to change the multiplier and the base clock, the means by which the clock speed or frequency of a CPU is derived, both in the BIOS and in AMD's Ryzen Master software you can't simultaneously enable AMD's automatic turbo functionality precision boost. Ryzen immediately locks to the clock speed and voltage that you set, meaning that if you want to actually match the potential of an 1800x, your 1700x will have to be able to do up to 4.1 GHz all day long. Not an easy task considering even the 1800x will only hit 4.1 with XFR under certain workloads out of the box. So let's get down to it then and see if our 1700x has what it takes. Using our usual Ryzen bench and a 1080 Ti will venture first into the BIOS for the greatest degree of control. Simply by setting the multiplier to 40 and the V-Core voltage to 1.375, we managed a stable overclock of 4 GHz over the 1700x's stock 3.4 GHz base frequency. Not bad for a CPU that's only supposed to boost to 3.9 using XFR. Sadly though, we couldn't push any further even if we cranked the voltage to AMD's recommended maximum of 1.45 volts. We're not sure why this is exactly, but even when we dove into more advanced base clock overclocking, we were only able to eke out an extra 100 MHz on the CPU. Not really worth the time or effort. The same was true of our 1800x which tells us that at least for our chips the limiting factor may be elsewhere. Armed with this knowledge, we now know the relevant voltages and frequencies we need in order to perform an overclock. First, the CPU multiplier shown in our BIOS as CPU core ratio. This works in increments of 0.25 and by default ranges from 22 to 63.75. You'll generally want to ignore custom CPU core ratio, but if you do use it, you'll be greeted by a multiplier called FID and a divider called DID, which go from 16 to 255 and 8 to 48 respectively. To be clear, the only reason you would want this kind of control is if you were base clock overclocking. So you can access it with AI overclock tuner, but quite frankly, we don't really recommend it because it adjusts other sensitive system frequencies like PCI express for no real world performance benefit. One useful thing you can do with the AI overclock tuner is set what ASUS calls DOCP, which is fancy talk for DRAM overclock profiles like Intel's XMP. Now in the future, you'll be able to use this to set your high speed RAM to the correct frequency and timings automatically, which is key because Ryzen really does seem to perform better the higher you can crank the memory speed and the lower you can get the timings. But bear in mind that most RAM right now is tuned for Intel platforms, so you'll need to shop for special memory to be able to take advantage of this. And we actually didn't have a ton of success running even the memory that AMD provided or one of these AMD specific memory kits any higher than 2666 megahertz, so your mileage may significantly vary as far as that goes. In any case, it's likely you'll end up manually keying in your RAM timings to get them as low as you can before hitting a wall. Moving on to voltages, our main concern is V-Core, shown here as CPU core voltage. By default, when you set an overclock, Ryzen will snap to a rather strange arbitrary voltage of 1.3625. As for what to set it to, we found that 1.375 is the sweet spot for overclocking with high-end air cooling, while Asus recommends no higher than 1.425 with strong liquid cooling. DRAM voltage defaults to 1.2, but most higher-end kits are asking for about 1.35. If you do adjust this, you'll want to tweak the CPU SoC voltage, whose default is 0.99. Turning this voltage up can improve memory overclocking and for us did seem to help with stability. You'll also want to set your memory termination voltage, in our case labeled VTT DDR in Tweaker's Paradise, to half of your DRAM voltage. If you're trying out base clock over clocks, then you can also find Sensom Ice-Gue here, which you'll want to enable for stability, though again, we really don't recommend this. Phew, okay, so we're overclocked. How does it run? Well, thanks to the Crosshair 6's AM3 mounting holes, we can test not only our AM4 base Noctua U12S and Cooler Master Hyper 212+, but also our Corsair H100i all-in-one water cooler, so we can give you guys a good idea of what to expect pretty much across the board for temperatures. Under AIDA64's stability test, our Hyper 212+, managed 82 degrees, which I would consider to be acceptable, while our Noctua ran at 83.5, so that's warmer, but it should be noted that this was with a much quieter fan. Our H100i, meanwhile, managed to keep things down to a cozy 74.5 degrees. If you want to compare these results to your own, bear in mind that currently, AMD's Ryzen X-series CPUs are reporting temperatures a whole 20 degrees higher than they actually are in some applications. We took our readings from AMD's own Ryzen Master software, though, so they should be accurate. As for performance at 4 GHz, our 1700X sits at the top of the X-Class Ryzen lineup for FPS per dollar at 1080p, a likely target for all of you out there buying high refresh rate monitors. Games like Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Rise of the Tomb Raider, For Honor, GTA V, and Doom all showed close or better performance. Synthetics like 7-Zip, PCMark, Y-Cruncher, Cinebench, and Reelbench all showed the overclock mostly meeting or exceeding the 1800X, sometimes by a wide margin. So combining these scores and average FPS, well, it gets extremely close to the Core i7-7700K's performance per dollar. In many ways, actually, the overclocked Ryzen 7 1700X reminds me of the Athlon XP 2500+. It wasn't the fastest CPU on the market, but it was fast enough for most uses and could be counted on to consistently overclock about as high as AMD's top of the line and more expensive 3200 plus back then. On top of that, like the 2500 plus, it's priced just right for a wide range of users, consumers, prosumers, and gamers. So in short, while some enthusiasts might have hoped that Ryzen would overclock like a bat out of hell and be a return to the Athlon 64 and X2 days with AMD on top of the performance heap, that isn't what we got. But hey, a chance to relive the Athlon XP days? That's not too shabby either. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, maybe consider checking out where to buy your own Ryzen CPU and motherboard at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store and our community forum, both of which you should totally check out.