The AMD Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 CPU Review: Zen on a Budget
by Ian Cutress on July 27, 2017 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Zen
- Ryzen
- Ryzen 3
- Ryzen 3 1300X
- Ryzen 3 1200
Conclusion
For as much hype and excitement that has been generated around Zen and the Ryzen products so far, with everything focused on the high-end when we hit the lower elements of the stack and the volume parts, not much ‘excitement’ is to be had. We’ve already gone through the new fancy microarchitecture and the platform, and what matters at this end of the spectrum is a pure performance per dollar metric. So far the Ryzen 7 parts have certainly hit that goal, especially when originally compared to Broadwell-E when the Ryzen 7 parts per launched. For the Ryzen 3, the direct competition is Kaby Lake, and CPUs with a much higher IPC. But where Intel has two cores, AMD has four.
Diving straight into the graphs, the Single Thread performance graph is as follows. All data is shown relative to the performance of the Ryzen 3 1300X.
For the AMD CPUs, the 1300X and 1500X are near in base/turbo frequency (3400/3700 vs 3500/3700) and so score about the same, and the Ryzen 3 1200 at 3100/3400 scores about 13% lower.
The Intel CPUs here show a distinct curve from the Pentium G4560 at 3.5 GHz through the Core i3s at 3.9 GHz, 4.0 GHz and 4.1 GHz. The Core i5 7400 scores a lot lower here, with its base frequency of 3.0 GHz and a turbo up to 3.5 GHz.
For the multi-thread performance:
We shopped the graph here at +20% otherwise it would look odd, but the Ryzen 5 1500X with simultaneous multithreading gets a +40% boost over the 1300X, while the Ryzen 3 1200 sits again at around -12%. All the dual core intel parts lag behind here compared to AMD’s quad cores, although the Ryzen 3 1200 and the Core i3-7300 are closely matched – but the Ryzen wins on price by being ~$40 cheaper. The Core i5-7400, competes against the Ryzen 3 1300X here as they are both quad cores, and the Intel wins despite the lower frequency due to higher IPC – which comes at a $50+ premium.
For our combined all-in-one graph, we included our mixed workload data and weighted the results 40:50:10 for single:multi:mixed thread workloads.
If we ignore the Ryzen 5 1500X in the top right corner, there are a few stories here.
First is that the Ryzen 3 1200 does not look like an attractive option. It performs +2-3% of the Pentium but is $30 more expensive, and the Core i3-7100 beats it by 8% for only a sub-$10 cost.
Then there is the Ryzen 3 1300X. Compared to the Core i3-7300/7320 and the Core i5-7400, it clearly wins on performance per dollar all around. Compared to the Core i3-7100 though, it offers almost 5% more performance for around $10-15 more, which is just under 10% of the cost. Depending on budgets, each one could be an attractive option.
We’re still working through our gaming testing as this review goes live, and we’ll add graphs for that in a bit.
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dave_the_nerd - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Yes, obviously. That would be terrible.Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
I'm glad you're not a tech reviewer. You could just say "Obviously" for every technical detail and that would be your article.Gothmoth - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
you can overclock the cheap AMD cpus... what about the intels?i am to lazy to check but are the testets intels k models? i guess not.
ddhelmet - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
One thing I am really curious about is Citra performance. It would be an important test for single thread performance. All about that IPC.serendip - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
Sorry but I don't see the point of these chips. An i3 is supposed to be a cheap do-everything CPU for basic business and school PCs. The Ryzen 3 not having a GPU really hurts its chances in those segments and it probably won't get picked up by OEMs. AMD needs mass market sales right now and Ryzen APUs can't come soon enough.I'm also wondering if yields are good enough that Ryzen 7s are the main chips being produced, with few 5s and 3s left over from the 7s that didn't meet spec.
Outlander_04 - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link
The core count of the Ryzen chips is going to be a significant advantage over any dual core .Adding a basic graphics card will cost about $30 . For that you free up system RAM that the onboard would otherwise be using, and you get decent drivers that let you make some adjustments that intel removed when they dumbed down their drivers a few years back
serendip - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link
Yeah but most office tasks run fine on 2 cores. Most users probably won't even notice they're using quad core processor.That $30 extra is a lot when it comes to speccing thousands of machines. A cheap discrete GPU is also another potential point of failure that large enterprises might not want on a big rollout. I understand the enthusiast reasoning for a cheap but powerful CPU like the Ryzen 3 paired with a decent midrange card, but this setup doesn't make sense for large corporate orders. AMD needs to sell lots of chips to large clients to survive.
Outlander_04 - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link
It's not just the "Office tasks". Its the network services, antivirus and updating that goes on in what should be the background, but is not when you have a dual-core. I speak from experience. The HP desktops we have at work can be frustrating.buxe2quec - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
Posting a review with placeholders for the benchmarks is definitely not professional.Delay it two days and post it in full, or split it in two reviews.
Looks like clickbaiting...
supdawgwtfd - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
Ian. Your a shill. Or you just completely biased.Every single other review i have read has said the Ryzen 3 it the better option. In price and performance.
WTF has happened to Anandtech? Why are you guys spewing BS? Why can't you be unbiased?
Seriously?
Have been reading the site for almost 20 years. I think i will now have to officially NOT come here again...