Overclocking
We've seen Ryzen hit dizzying speeds when liquid nitrogen is introduced to the equation, but for most users there isn't likely to be a great deal of headroom using off-the-shelf coolers. We managed a stable speed of 4.1GHz on the Ryzen 7 1800X and the second-rung 1700X was able to deliver an all-core speed of 4.0GHz with a small increase in voltage.
The overclock is enough to put the 1700X ahead of a stock-clocked 1800X, but there isn't a great amount of headroom to play with. This shouldn't come as too big a surprise, mind, as AMD is overcoming multiple hurdles in one fell swoop - a new architecture, on a new process, represents challenges in terms of maximum frequency and we fully expect future Zen-based processors to scale higher as manufacturing matures.
