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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Ian Cutress - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
AMD doesn't use the R3 / R5 / R7 nomenclature - that's for graphics.Gothmoth - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
i don´t care about gaming or heating my house with a cpu..... so ryzen makes more sense for me. :)x299 was such a disappointment.
MrCommunistGen - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Ian, first off, thanks for the benchmark numbers! I look forward to seeing the rest once they are completed.As far as data is concerned, is there a chance that the DigiCortex results have the wrong numbers next to a couple CPUs?
I'm specifically looking at the i3 7100 being the fastest Intel CPU at 0.63, compared to the rest of the offerings clustering together at 0.37-0.38. To me it looks like the 0.63 should be the i5 7400 and the 7100 should be with the other dual cores.
On another note, it looks like the RoTR Geothermal Valley scene really HATES AMD's HyperThreading - at least on Nvidia hardware/drivers. At first I thought there might be another set of numbers transposed somewhere since the Ryzen 3 CPUs perform SO MUCH better than the 1500X. But I looked back at the 1600X review and the numbers seem consistent -- bad performance on HyperThreaded AMD on a GTX 1080. Prophet's Tomb seems to behave better. Just shows how much architecture and software optimizations for said architecture can either oppose or compliment each other.
As for small typos, there's also a couple spots where the 1200 is referred to as "1200X". There was another one I found during my initial read that I can't find now that I'm commenting.
MrCommunistGen - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Not the typo I was looking for, but I just noticed that the intro/description for Civ6 looks like it has a typo I've missed in previous articles:"...but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fifth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master."
"it a game" should probably be "is a game"
Not a criticism, just trying to help out where I can. :)
MrCommunistGen - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Gah... brain fart this morning. Please read my references to AMD "HyperThreading" as "SMT"... smhIan Cutress - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
i3 7100 should be 0.363x on DigiCortex. I've corrected three 7100 results today in our database from my personal master copy. I think I'll have to go through them all and double check.RoTR Geothermal on 1080p with a GTX 1080 really loves quad cores without hyperthreading, AMD or Intel. I'm not sure what it is with that test on that benchmark - in our KBL-X review, all the i5s got top results by a good margin. I think it's been optimized specifically for quad-core, or there's something iffy in the game code/drivers.
Appreciate the typo point outs for sure. These things are always last minute and you can never have too many eyes on it. :)
DanGer1 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
The review is lacking, especially the value charts. Ryzens come with a cooler, their motherboards cost less and they are overclock-able. Adjusting the cost for the motherboard and the cooler changes the value charts significantly in R3's favor. Overclocking on stock air makes makes performance and value a no contest in favor of the R3s.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Intel's processors also come with a cooler.wallysb01 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Basic 1511 boards that would go into i3/Pentium builds are really not much more, if at all, than the lower end AM4 boards. Plus, the Intel stuff has an iGPU and if you're buying a low end desktop, you probably don't care a lot about heavily multithreaded workloads. So, I'd actually argue the i3/Pentiums are getting under sold in the value charts.Its kinda funny how the landscape has switched, in that Intel might actually be the better low-end, value winner, while AMD is the best mid/mid-high end value winner.
Gothmoth - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
+1 for overclocking.the tested intel cpus are sure not k models.
as for intel having internal GPU.. i never used them not even on my cheapest system builds.