Review: AMD Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200

Conclusion

The introduction of a couple of Ryzen 3 processors provides PC enthusiasts with the opportunity of buying into the latest Zen architecture from as little as £100, with AMD targetting the £500-£750 base-unit market through a combination of these chips allied to the B350 chipset.

Bringing Ryzen 3 into play has presented AMD with a dilemma insofar as the best means by which to hit the appropriate performance points. The company has decided to use the same guts as on all other Ryzen CPUs - so an eight-core Zeppelin composed of two CCXes - but limit Ryzen 3 to four cores whilst also disabling performance-boosting SMT.

The upshot of such an approach is Ryzen 3 1300X and 1200 performance that is marginally better than Intel Core i3 in heavy-load scenarios but not as sharp for lightly-threaded tasks. Gaming is pretty much a tie once a decent graphics card is in place. However, if you can squeeze and extra £40 into the CPU budget, the SMT-enabled Ryzen 5 1400 is most likely a better bet.

AMD Ryzen 3 is a heavy-duty approach at solving the Core i3-beating problem, and by its very nature does not support integrated graphics, unlike the Intel competition. That said, it is hard to argue against the overall value, so if it was our money on the line and appreciating that both Ryzen 3s are hewn from the same cloth, we'd opt for the cheaper Ryzen 3 1200, at £105, and overclock it to 3.7GHz on all cores for plenty of bang for buck and solid all-round performance.

AMD Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200

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The Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 are available to buy from Scan Computers*

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