AMD Ryzen 3 1200 & Ryzen 3 1300X Linux Performance

Lastly is a look at the overall AC system power consumption when running a variety of tests and monitoring the AC system power consumption via the Phoronix Test Suite. The Ryzen 3 1200 system had an average power draw of 122 Watts with a peak of 252 Watts, the Ryzen 3 1300X had an average power draw of 135 Watts and a peak of 283 Watts, and the Ryzen 7 1800X reference had an average power draw of 196 Watts with a peak of 291 Watts. More details via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

Overall I am very happy with the performance of the Ryzen 3 1200 and Ryzen 3 1300X processors. The performance under Linux was very good with these Ryzen 3 CPUs most of the time outperforming the similarly-priced Core i3 7100 processor except for in areas of single-threaded performance, where the first-generation Zen CPUs aren't quite up to the Skylake and Kabylake levels generally. But with common multi-threaded Linux workloads, the Ryzen 3 CPUs are very competitive for those wishing to spend a little more than $100 USD on the CPU. Even in some of these multi-threaded workloads, the Ryzen 3 CPUs tested were able to perform similarly -- or exceed -- the older AMD FX-8300 series processors. From Intel you certainly can't get a quad-core part for as cheap as AMD's Ryzen 3 offerings. For Linux users especially where multi-threaded workloads are arguably more common than Windows when routinely compiling software, etc, Ryzen 3 makes a lot of sense for a budget build.

These Ryzen 3 CPUs with a 65 Watt TDP are much more power efficient than older Bulldozer CPUs at 125 Watts when in some tests offering similar performance, but not quite up to the performance-per-Watt Intel has with Kabylake (i3-7100 at 51 Watt TDP for reference). But still these 65 Watt CPUs should be fine within small form factor PCs while packing quite a bit of performance.

Like the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 processors, the Ryzen 3 CPUs work fine under Linux though ideally want to be on a recent Linux distribution for ensuring motherboard compatibility (particularly if using onboard audio), etc. The only caveat to still point out is that AMD has yet to provide a thermal driver for being able to expose the CPU core temperatures under Linux. Hopefully we'll see something for Linux 4.14, but as of writing still haven't even seen any patches for said support. This is also why I haven't been doing any Ryzen overclocking is not being able to monitor the CPU temperatures under Linux.

Stay tuned for more Ryzen Linux benchmarks in the days ahead. If you would like to compare your own Linux system's performance to the results in this article, it's as easy as installing our fully-automated and reproducible benchmarking software, the Phoronix Test Suite, and then simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1708035-TY-RYZEN351587. Thanks to AMD for supplying these Ryzen 3 review samples.