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
Grand Theft Auto
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).
To that end, we run the benchmark at 1920x1080 using an average of Very High on the settings, and also at 4K using High on most of them. We take the average results of four runs, reporting frame rate averages, 99th percentiles, and our 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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Ian Cutress - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
lol yup, just saw it. Should be 889, not 89.T1beriu - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Congrats on getting the review out on day one!Blender 2.78 chart has wrong result number for 1300X.
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11658/8919...
Ian Cutress - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
We always get CPU reviews out on day one... ;)Blender is fixed.
T1beriu - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Another chart that needs a little bit of edit - "Title" at the bottom.http://images.anandtech.com/doci/11658/combined_cp...
jjj - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
For value,in the real world mixed or lightly threaded should have more weigh, especially in the lower end where low core count and lower clocks can be a limitation.For power, when comparing diff numbers of cores , the system power is important too- lets say you can have a dual core system at 60W vs a quad at 70W peak. Even if the dual core is more efficient, at the system level the quad wins.
nathanddrews - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Performance is nice and price is good IF you have a dGPU. For entry-level gaming/HTPC builds, that Intel IGP is more valuable than most people think, especially given the amount of media decode/encode power it has. All you need is i3 and you can be watching Netflix 4K or UHD Blu-ray and then switch to playing 1080p 60fps Rocket League. You can do the latter with R3 if you buy a dGPU, but sadly there's no current way to do Netflix or UHD Blu-ray without Intel SGX.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
I think that's why AMD also picked this time to release Bristol Ridgemczak - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Yes, imho these cpus are only mildly interesting.In this cpu performance segment, chances are pretty high that a integrated gpu would be good enough. (Sure there's always someone who has a need for high cpu / low gpu, or low cpu / high gpu performance, but I don't think that's the norm.)
So, if a integrated gpu is good enough, with factoring in the cost of an additional gpu amd can't compete on price here. The really interesting competition from AMD in this lower end market has to come from Raven Ridge APUs.
nathanddrews - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
In the wise words of Peter Klavin, "Totes McGotes."T1beriu - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Done! Thanks.When should I come back for the full review?