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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MajGenRelativity - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
You make a couple good points. Ryzen 3 is definitely on my watchlistiwod - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
What are the Power Load for each CPU and not whole system? Zen is more SoC like and harder to compare to Intel.Ian Cutress - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
System is variable. CPU numbers in a CPU review.ampmam - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Great review but biased conclusion. Any idiot can sense it.MrCommunistGen - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
For us idiots, can you possibly elaborate what bias you're seeing?vMax65 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
ampmam, good to know you are an idiot...Great review Ian.Ian Cutress - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Biased in what way? I've been called an Intel shill and an AMD shill this week, will be glad to listen to what you think.Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Then don't open yourself up for these accusations by doing things like kneecapping Zen with 2400 speed RAM.If you think 2400 speed RAM is more beneficial than not then, at least, show the best case results for 3200 speed RAM and say "See — it's not important"
It's not good to see the same site that overclocking by telling people testing for serious stability isn't important and which pumps unwise levels of voltage in hobbling the RAM that's used to test Zen, a platform that most everyone knows benefits more from faster RAM than Intel does.
silverblue - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
Perhaps it does, but it's not massive. Also, Ian did say he would test at faster settings at a later date.RAM prices are quite high at the moment for the higher clocked parts, which brings about an interesting observation - the Ryzen 3 is the cheapest part of this entire setup.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link
The RAM that he used was rated at 3000 and he chose to downclock it.