AMD Ryzen 3 1300X And 1200 Processor Review: More Affordable Zen

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. It has a built-in benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model. We used a CPU-focused BMW model for these tests here...

Blender 3D Rendering Benchmark

The Ryzen 3 processors trailed the pack in Blender. Keep in mind, however, that both of these Ryzen 3 processors are quad-core / quad-thread parts, so it's not surprising to see them trailing processors with higher core and thread counts. What's most interesting is that these entry level quad-cores are nipping at the heels of AMD's previous-generation, flagship 8-core processor. That'll be especially impressive when you see the power consumption data further down the page...

Overclocking Ryzen 3 Pushing The 1300X

We also spent some time overclocking our AMD Ryzen 3 1300X processor in the ASRock AB350 Gaming K4 to see how much additional frequency headroom the chip had left under its hood. Before we dive into the results, however, we want to reiterate some points we made about Ryzen and overclocking from our original review.

Overclocking still seems like a work-in-progress at this point in time with Ryzen. There are handful of overclocking-related features enthusiasts have grown accustomed to that are just not available just yet. It's also unclear whether they'll be coming to the platform in the near term. For example, there are no per-core turbo / multiplier settings available. If you want to overclock Ryzen, simple multiplier adjustments affect all CPU cores, across the entire chip. There are also no memory / BCLK straps. And while you can change the memory multiplier, fine tuning via BCLK adjustments will also alter your PCI Express clock, etc.  Manually setting CPU multipliers also automatically disables features like turbo boost and XFR. The processors essentially work in two modes -- Default mode, which enables all of the power and clock gating features, and Overclocked mode which allows the CPU to ride along at the specified settings.

The kind of overclocked speeds we're seeing with early Ryzen processors may also seem quizzical. Take the Ryzen 3 1300X, for example. This processor is specified as having a 3.4GHz base clock, with a 3.6GHz all-core turbo boost clock, and up to a 3.7 - 3.9GHz dual/single-core boost clock with XFR. Since overclocking requires altering speeds on all-cores, however, overclocks without exotic cooling solutions will likely hover in the 3.9-4.1GHz range without using up the processor's thermal budget. With liquid-nitrogen, AMD was able to break a record at its tech day event, but the CPU they used only hit 5.2GHz.

AMD is doing some things to make overclocking as easy as possible though. Its latest version of the Ryzen Master utility looks very much like the Wattman tool available with Radeon GPUs. Ryzen Master is an application that lets you alter multipliers and voltages from within Windows, monitor temperatures and clocks, and save settings to different profiles. The software even gives users the ability to disable cores, if they'd like to push a fewer number of cores as high as possible, but that feature requires a system reboot. Although there are individual sliders per core, they all work in tandem at this time. As we said, there are no per-core overclocking features available just yet.

To overclock our Ryzen 3 1300X we experimented both with Ryzen Master and the BIOS on the ASRock AB350 Gaming K4 motherboard and topped out at an all-core overclock of 4.05GHz, with 1.375 volts supplied to the CPU. For cooling, we stuck with the tower-type Thermaltake Contact Silent 12 we showed you in our Ryzen 7 coverage. At these settings, the CPU topped out at just shy of 70'C and was perfectly stable -- though we're not confident Ryzen Master was reporting proper temperatures. Bumping things up to 4.1GHz seemed to work and the system would boot, but we actually got lower performance in some tests and the system randomly locked-up under load. With more voltage and more powerful cooling, somewhat higher clocks would likely be possible. Just don't expect to hit the same kind of frequencies Intel's 14nm processors are capable of with this generation of Ryzen at least.

While overclocked we re-ran a couple of tests and have the results for you above. Cinbench showed a nice gain and pushed the 1300X closer to the Core i5-7600. The performance boost in the 3DMark Physics test, however, allowed the Ryzen 3 to outpace the Core i5s and even the FX-9590.

Total System Power Consumption Tested at the Outlet

Before wrapping things up, we'd also like to talk a bit about power consumption. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our Ryzen-based test system was consuming with a power meter to compare it to the other test systems we used for benchmark comparisons. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling at the Windows desktop and while under a heavy CPU workload. Keep in mind, this is total system power consumption being measured at the outlet with only the processor loaded and not the the individual power of the CPUs alone.

The AMD Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 were power-friendly processors. Under both idle and load conditions, the processors consumed the least amount of power of the bunch, and sandwiched the Core i3-7350K running with its integrated graphics engine. With a discrete GPU installed, however, the Core i3-based system used more power.