AMD Ryzen 3 - Younger brother with character
Over the past 5 years, AMD has been associated with the majority of two types of products - effective and attractive graphics solutions (the legendary Radeon HD7970 still stirs the minds of players) and low-end processor solutions (whether it is an APU or the well-known AMD FX). After the red giant lost the leadership in the upper price segments, few people expected to return the company to the market for the middle and upper thresholds of value, but after the release of Ryzen everything changed.
Nevertheless, the budget market has always been the backbone of AMD's well-deserved reputation - offering low-cost products, the company from Sunnyvale easily won the primacy in the price / performance category from Intel, and in the graphics sector from NVidia. AMD FX has gained new life with the emergence of emphasis on multi-threaded games, but until recently it was he who remained the only option for those who would like to build a budget computer based on AMD solutions. Ryzen 7 1700 was too expensive for most consumers, Ryzen 5 1600 turned out to be extremely seductive, but still asked a lot (while breaking sales records and pressing all the latest generation i5 in the charts), and many expected the release of the final line of processors called Ryzen 3 - those budget fellows are tired of long years of “fufiks”. And the threes came out - true
Continuing the Ryzen lineup, AMD has not moved away from the specifications of the ruler names - Ryzen 3 received the code names 1200 and 1300X, while losing multithreading (as we assumed in the review of the first two lines), but retaining low TDP, 4 decent cores and all features architecture. As always, the company did not limit the overclocking capabilities of even the most affordable processors - they, like their older brothers, can take the bar up to 4 GHz (depending on whether you won the "silicon lottery" or not).
Many owners of AMD FX of the eight-thousand series were probably interested in this particular processor duet - despite the modest number of cores and threads (for AMD), the Ryzen 3 shows decent performance in synthetics and games, successfully fighting both the G4560 ultrabudget gaming king and the unsightly and overvalued i3 7350k (however, AMD itself is positioning processors with competitors to the modest i3 7100 and i3 7300). Oddly enough, Ryzen 3 became an exception to the rule in synthetic tests where AMD dominance did not cause doubts - in the case of 1200 and 1300X, results like Blender or Adobe Premier can be called very modest (in some tests the red ones are even inferior to the notorious 7350k), but the comparison even with Ryzen 5, 1400 makes it clear that this is directly related to disabling SMT, which turned from a crutch into a red trump after a series of bios updates. The main principle of this line is saving, and in gaming tests the processor remarkably shows itself to be paired with a video card of the class GTX1060 or RX580.
Testing Ryzen 3 1300X in the game Watch Dogs 2 from the PRO Hi-Tech portal
Testing Ryzen 3 1300X in the Prey game from the PRO Hi-Tech portal
Testing Ryzen 3 1300X in the Battlefield 1 game from the PRO Hi-Tech portal
Processors cost Ryzen 3 line at the time of sale was $ 110 and $ 130, which is slightly more than the reference FX 8370 in boxed version (it also cost about $ 105-110). For this money, novices fight with all processors from Intel in the range from G4560 to i3 7300. Muscular dwarf i3 7350k costs $ 150, and does not require the cheapest motherboard for serious overclocking, so it’s difficult to call it a direct competitor to Ryzen 3.
However, in the case of AMD Ryzen, the younger line of processors will soon become cheaper - as was the case with 1800X, and 1700, and even 1600. Therefore, hardly anyone will be surprised at the price of $ 90 for Ryzen 3 1200 in the near future. Well, the most cunning ones are probably waiting for the fall in prices for the previous generation, because the FX 8370 at a price of $ 60- $ 70 will be a very tasty offer for owners of “Bulldozers” and younger AM3 + stones. If we draw conclusions, we can say one thing - everyone will benefit, and we look forward to reviews on the older line of HEDT processors AMD Threadripper.
The author of the text is Alexander Lis.
