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
Shadow of Mordor
The next title in our testing is a battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (SoM for short). Produced by Monolith and using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
A 2014 game is fairly old to be testing now, however SoM has a stable code and player base, and can still stress a PC down to the ones and zeroes. At the time, SoM was unique, offering a dynamic screen resolution setting allowing users to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. This form of natural oversampling was designed to let the user experience a truer vision of what the developers wanted, assuming you had the graphics hardware to power it but had a sub-4K monitor.
The title has an in-game benchmark, for which we run with an automated script implement the graphics settings, select the benchmark, and parse the frame-time output which is dumped on the drive. The graphics settings include standard options such as Graphical Quality, Lighting, Mesh, Motion Blur, Shadow Quality, Textures, Vegetation Range, Depth of Field, Transparency and Tessellation. There are standard presets as well.
We run the benchmark at 1080p and a native 4K, using our 4K monitors, at the Ultra preset. Results are averaged across four runs and we report the average frame rate, 99th percentile frame rate, and time under analysis.
For all our results, we show the average frame rate at 1080p first. Mouse over the other graphs underneath to see 99th percentile frame rates and 'Time Under' graphs, as well as results for other resolutions. All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6GB Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire R9 Fury 4GB Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire RX 480 8GB Performance
1080p
4K
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haukionkannel - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
You can install Ryzen 1200 and use Nvidia 1080ti and run games at 4K easily, so there is a point of these prosessors.There will be Ryzen based APU later in this or next year for Office computers and maybe even htpc usage and laptops. Those Are budget CPU for gaming and you can pair them as fast GPU as you like and still get reasonable good results!
The Intel 7700 is in the top, but if you run games at 4K I think that you can save a big deal by usin amd 1200 instead of Intel 7700! The difference is so small in speed and so big in money!
kaesden - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
dont forget that ryzen 1200 with a 1080ti could also have a 1700 dropped in down the line when budget allows, or when more cpu performance is needed. And the ryzen based APU's are coming eventually for those who just want basic integrated graphics. AMD isn't finished yet with their roll out.zodiacfml - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
The purpose is to make use/sell of disabled chips. This could be the reason why AMD and Nvidia started selling the new, lowest end discrete graphics cards. Desktop APUs will arrive early 2018.I wonder if AMD will ever have to cripple these Zen parts in the future as some articles mention they have high pretty good wields.
lefty2 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
They aren't "making" a $100 CPU with no iGPU, they are just re-badging a $500 CPU. Much cheaper in research costs than having to design a new die. ...and the same logic applies to the 7700Kbennyg - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
I think the price/perf discussion should be a it broader in scope than just comparing CPU alone. The need to find or buy a GPU for the R3 compared to the Intel competition is a noticable omisson. Even the budgestest secondhandest GPUs will throw out the metrics of a $30 price comparison, but the extra graphics performance and/or features you may get from a dedicated GPU over iGPU should also be considered.bennyg - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
should be a *lot* broader. typoManch - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
That's why these were tested with the higher end GPU's. To eliminate the IGP as a performance factor and compare CPU only. As you said, the extra performance you would get from even a low end discrete would be an unfair advantage for AMD. If you got one that was crappier than the IGP(if possible) then it would be an unfair advantage to Intel. It would be hard to decide which Discrete card would be the official stand in. On that note, doesn't AMD have discrete R7 cards that are paired with their APU's that are pretty much a copy of the IGP? They're not VEGA cores though so it wouldn't be a good way to predict the performance of the upcoming APU's. It would however give an idea as to what Bristol would have been using ZEN cores.extide - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link
Latest AMD APU's are still construction cores (Excavator) with Polaris based graphics. Ryzen with Vega based will come later.Alexvrb - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
I don't know... maybe... gaming on a relatively small budget? Ryzen 3 plus a $150-200 graphics card is clearly better than an equivalent i3 build, plus they overclock even with a cheap B350 board.serendip - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
For a cheapo gamer like me, Ryzen 3 + a $100 card is fine, but how big is that market anyway?AMD needs to go beyond servicing enthusiasts, it has to get OEMs to use Ryzen in cheap PCs for basic use in schools, homes and businesses. These segments won't bother going for Ryzen 5 or i5, they just want the cheapest computer available. AMD doesn't have a good name in the low end of the market because of its terrible APUs.