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
Civilization 6
First up in our CPU gaming tests is Civilization 6. Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Civilization 6 has sliders for MSAA, Performance Impact and Memory Impact. The latter two refer to detail and texture size respectively, and are rated between 0 (lowest) to 5 (extreme). We run our Civ6 benchmark in position four for performance (ultra) and 0 on memory, with MSAA set to 2x.
For reviews where we include 8K and 16K benchmarks (Civ6 allows us to benchmark extreme resolutions on any monitor) on our GTX 1080, we run the 8K tests similar to the 4K tests, but the 16K tests are set to the lowest option for Performance.
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
8K
16K
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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Teknobug - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
Guess the Rzyen 3 1300X isn't much of an upgrade over my other PC which is i5 3550 (OC'd to 3.9GHz) system then.jamyryals - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
It's great to have some competition going on again!Mumrik - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link
If you run a 0% line horizontally through a graph like you do on page 17, and especially if it actually moves around a bit from graph to graph, I'd suggest making that line thicker than the others.harobikes333 - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link
AMD pretty much has all the CPU segments covered <3Planning on a build soon!
LostPassword - Sunday, July 30, 2017 - link
i know a lot of people will say it doesn't matter. but the beauty about these ryzen 3 is that they are unlocked. i see alot of youtubers hit 3.7-3.8ghz on stock cooler.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, August 2, 2017 - link
Tom's Hardware used 3200 RAM for its review. I suggest reading that one because it paints a different picture than this one which uses slow RAM.Mugur - Thursday, August 3, 2017 - link
I think the author missed the point with this review: Ryzen 3 is obviously targeted towards gaming to a very tight budget, not B2B, not Enterprise, not Office, etc...Of course, this doesn't mean that certain cpu benchmarks shouldn't be used, but the test bed should definitely include overclocking (using the included Stealth cooler) and 3200 Mhz RAM (I wonder about AGESA 1006?). I don't care as much for "normalizing" benchmarks and Anandtech bench (a useful tool though), but just make me see how those 2 cpus are performing in the kind of environment they will be used. And add 2 entry level cards like RX 560 and GTX 1050/Ti; I know the reason about using a high end graphics card and I agree on paper, but this is not how those cpus will be used. It's an academical exercise.
Not everything should be a PhD dissertation, especially for this low level, budget components. If I have to reconmmend someone a cheap gaming machine I need to know whether a Ryzen 1200@3.9 Ghz + 8 GB 3200 DDR4 + RX 560 4 GB is a viable option (or not), better than a G4560 + 8 GB 2400 + GTX 1050 for example, especially in the long run.
Oxford Guy - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Worrying about RAM speed when you're using a low-grade GPU is unwise. You'll be very GPU-limited most of the time.No, what this review needed was 3200 RAM plus relevant GPUs. At the very least the 3000 speed RAM in the machine they tested with shouldn't have been heavily downclocked.
chiname - Saturday, November 18, 2017 - link
This actually depends on where you live.I did a pc a week ago.It's just an small entry level pc for kids to play some games.The price to performance was favoring AMD.I really wouldve liked to get an intel i3 7100 but the cost was higher than the 1200 amd.So hench we went with amd.Complete amd pc cost 6.5k include gfx card.intel wouldve cost us over 8k.
John_M - Sunday, April 29, 2018 - link
"We’re still working through our gaming testing as this review goes live, and we’ll add graphs for that in a bit."I've read that so often on this site but the promise is seldom fulfilled.