Running The Ryzen 7 1700 At 4.0GHz On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 5 March 2017 at 07:07 PM EST. Page 1 of 5. 79 Comments.

Many Phoronix readers appear rather intrigued by the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 on Linux as it offers good multi-threaded performance with eight cores / 16 threads and retails for just $329 USD. Making the Ryzen 7 1700 even more appealing to enthusiasts is that it overclocks well. For those curious, here are benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 1700 on Ubuntu Linux running at 4.0GHz.

As a reminder, the Ryzen 7 1700 eight-core processor has a 3.0GHz base clock frequency and a 3.7GHz turbo frequency. The Ryzen 7 1800X meanwhile has a 4.0GHz turbo frequency and 3.6GHz base frequency but costs $499 USD, and aside from the higher stock frequencies, is very similar to the Ryzen 7 1700 model.

With some processors going from 3.0GHz to 4.0GHz would be a pipe dream, but with Ryzen it's quite possible. There isn't any AMD/Ryzen overclocking software available for Linux, so it just leaves the BIOS/UEFI for overclocking. With ease I was able to push the Ryzen 7 1700 to 4.00GHz by feeding the CPU 1.3875V rather than the default 1.1~1.2V.

I was using air cooling, in particular the Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4 heatsink with one 120mm fan. I didn't run into any thermal issues while running at 4.0GHz. Unfortunately there isn't any thermal driver support yet for exposing the Zen CPU temperatures under Linux, so I don't have any temperatures to report on... But I'm certainly not the first one running the Ryzen 7 1700 on air-cooling at 4.0GHz+. The Ryzen 7 1700 was stable throughout all my testing at 4.00GHz with 1.3875V. Without being able to monitor the CPU core temperature under Linux, I didn't push the Ryzen 7 1700 past 4.00GHz due to cooling concerns.

AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Ubuntu Linux Overclocking Benchmarks

For those curious about this $329 eight-core processor running at 4.0GHz, on the following pages are some reference benchmark results. Enjoy!


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