Overclocking
Finally, we overclocked the Ryzen 7 1800X using AMD’s own RyzenMaster utility to see how far it could go. We managed to hit 4.05GHz at 1.4V with our Noctua cooler, which is a bit disappointing given that the XFR boost actually goes up to 4.1GHz. Still, we were working with a relatively modest Noctua air cooler, and it's entirely possible that you may see better results with a more robust cooling solution.
That said, this translated into an 8 per cent increase in the Cinebench R15 multi-threaded benchmark, and a small 3 per cent increase in the single-threaded scores. In comparison, the Core i-7700K managed a 13 per cent improvement in multi-threaded scores, and a 12 per cent boost in single-threaded numbers.
Overclocking was a lot more impressive on the Kaby Lake chips, and we were able to overclock the Intel processor to over 5.0GHz on air.
So while the Intel chips clock higher and will probably lead in the moderately threaded workloads as seen from some of the earlier non-overclocked results, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X still has a significant lead in performance. This again suggests that AMD Ryzen excels well in applications that are highly designed to scale with the presence of multiple cores/threads even though it couldn't be clocked as much.