Overall and Final Verdict
Well AMD is finally finishing up their initial Ryzen launch with the Ryzen 3 1300X and 1200 that we are looking at today. While they are clearly budget focused CPUs, both really improve the idea of good performance without breaking the bank. They both had great power usage and the R3 1200 was really good on temperatures as well. They are both four core CPUs and while you don’t get twice as many threads like on the Ryzen 5 and 7 CPUs it is a big step forward compared to Intel only offering dual cores on lower end CPUs and even the current i5’s only have four cores with no Hyperthreading. Gaming performance was good, but when compared to the Ryzen 5s, Ryzen 7s, and high-end Intel CPUs there is a performance gap if raw gaming performance is your goal. Both excelled at productivity performance as well as in browser based tests. In other words day to day you aren’t going to see a difference running a Ryzen 3 CPU over anything else more expensive. It's only when you get into more CPU intensive uses or if you try to pair a GTX 1080 Ti with it will you notice any difference.
The 1300X stood out between the two. It is very similar to the Ryzen 5 1500X in most specifications and those similarities showed in a lot of the benchmarks. The extra clock speed over the R3 1200 helped a lot in tests like Cinebench, PCMark 10, and Dolphin benchmark. So while I like both CPUs, the 1300X is the one that really comes out looking like a diamond in the rough. In fact, I started thinking about where it would be best used and I put together a little build below. Having the cooler included helps save some money. With GPU prices still a little crazy the GTX 1050 Ti was really the only good option but if I were building a budget PC right now I would start keeping an eye out for used cards as the market drops. Beyond that, I included an SSD as well as a hard drive for the game storage. You could save a little more by dropping the SSD all together and looking at lower end boards without overclocking. But the Asus Prime B350 is a quality board, with overclocking and a good price point. Overall you could have a great looking build with quality components at about $700 that would handle anything you throw at it at 1080p.
|
Component |
Price |
Link |
CPU |
AMD Ryzen 3 1300X |
$129 |
|
Cooler |
Included with CPU |
N/A |
N/A |
Motherboard |
Asus PRIME B350-PLUS |
$89.99 |
|
Memory |
Corsair - Vengeance LPX 8GB DDR4-3000 |
$79.99 |
|
Storage |
SanDisk - SSD PLUS 240GB 2.5" |
$79.06 |
|
Video Card |
EVGA GTX 1050 Ti 4GB SC GAMING ACX 2.0 |
$149.99 |
|
Case |
NZXT - S340 (White) |
$69.99 |
|
Power Supply |
EVGA BQ 500W 80+ Bronze |
$54.99 |
|
|
$703 |
Total |
So for pricing, AMD went with $129 for the 1300X and $109 for the 1200. For comparison that puts the 1300X up against the Intel Core i3-7100 Kaby Lake and the 1200 against the Intel Pentium G4620. Both are dual core CPUs (but with hyperthreading) and as you may have noticed I had to look past the i3’s altogether to find an Intel CPU as cheap as the R3 1200. That’s ignoring the overclocking potential of both Ryzen CPUs. If Ryzen 5 and 7 didn’t hit Intel hard, this one will. It’s not really a surprise to see AMD having good CPUs for budget builds, but having four cores and performance numbers like these is a surprise. 2017 might just be the golden age, AMD is back at it.