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
Benchmarking Performance: CPU Office Tests
The office programs we use for benchmarking aren't specific programs per-se, but industry standard tests that hold weight with professionals. The goal of these tests is to use an array of software and techniques that a typical office user might encounter, such as video conferencing, document editing, architectural modeling, and so on and so forth.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Chromium Compile (v56)
Our new compilation test uses Windows 10 Pro, VS Community 2015.3 with the Win10 SDK to compile a nightly build of Chromium. We've fixed the test for a build in late March 2017, and we run a fresh full compile in our test. Compilation is the typical example given of a variable threaded workload - some of the compile and linking is linear, whereas other parts are multithreaded.
PCMark8: link
Despite originally coming out in 2008/2009, Futuremark has maintained PCMark8 to remain relevant in 2017. On the scale of complicated tasks, PCMark focuses more on the low-to-mid range of professional workloads, making it a good indicator for what people consider 'office' work. We run the benchmark from the commandline in 'conventional' mode, meaning C++ over OpenCL, to remove the graphics card from the equation and focus purely on the CPU. PCMark8 offers Home, Work and Creative workloads, with some software tests shared and others unique to each benchmark set.
SYSmark 2014 SE: link
SYSmark is developed by Bapco, a consortium of industry CPU companies. The goal of SYSmark is to take stripped down versions of popular software, such as Photoshop and Onenote, and measure how long it takes to process certain tasks within that software. The end result is a score for each of the three segments (Office, Media, Data) as well as an overall score. Here a reference system (Core i3-6100, 4GB DDR3, 256GB SSD, Integrated HD 530 graphics) is used to provide a baseline score of 1000 in each test.
A note on context for these numbers. AMD left Bapco in the last two years, due to differences of opinion on how the benchmarking suites were chosen and AMD believed the tests are angled towards Intel processors and had optimizations to show bigger differences than what AMD felt was present. The following benchmarks are provided as data, but the conflict of opinion between the two companies on the validity of the benchmark is provided as context for the following numbers.
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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...