Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Power Consumption & Temperatures
Direct Comparisons of Power Consumption
The 65W 1700 consumes slightly more power at idle than the 95W Ryzens.
Meanwhile, our mildly overclocked Core i7-6900K consumes more power at idle than its stock configuration because we reduced its single-core Turbo Boost frequency to achieve a 3.9 GHz clock rate.
The 1700's power consumption is impressive during the AutoCAD 2015 workload; it only consumes 29.3W. A stock Core i7-7700K uses considerably more power. But looking at these figures on their own can be misleading. Remember that Intel's top Kaby Lake-based CPU demonstrated a commanding lead in the previous page's AutoCAD workloads, so it ends up offering superior performance per watt.
AMD's Ryzen 7 1700 proves its frugal nature by drawing only 44.3W during our gaming benchmark. The -6900K consumes less power than Intel's Core i7-7700K, likely because the workload doesn't fully utilize all eight cores.
The 32nm FX-9590 is in a class of its own, which isn't a good thing. Still, it highlights one of the 14nm process' main advantages.
Prime95's Small FFT stress test pushes power consumption to the max, revealing one of the 65W 1700's best attributes: it consumes 23.3W less than the 1700X. The 1700's modest power use, coupled with a small performance delta between it and the 1700X in our application benchmarks, paints a convincing picture of efficiency.
Temperatures
We optimized our CPU cooler for Socket AM4 by using two nuts between the spring and bracket to increase the force on the package to 0.4Nm. That is why these results differ from those in our launch article, where we only used washers.
Both AMD and Intel employ different temperature measurement methodology. While these readings aren't entirely comparable, they do serve as a close approximation.
In its stock form, Ryzen 7 1700 runs cooler than the rest of the field due to its lower TDP. Of course, all bets are off once you start overclocking and dialing in higher voltages. In any case, AMD uses solder between its die and heat spreader, which generally provides better thermal transfer than thermal paste. Intel famously uses thermal paste and contends that it boosts processor longevity.
Even though our results aren't apples-to-apples, it's clear that the 1700's 65W TDP does convey an expected power and thermal advantage over the other Ryzen 7s.
