AMD Ryzen 3 1200 & Ryzen 3 1300X Linux Performance
At the end of July AMD began shipping the Ryzen 3 entry-level Zen processors. While it may not be as exciting as a 16-thread Ryzen 7 or Threadripper, the Ryzen 3 1200 and Ryzen 3 1300X offer surprising value with being quad-core parts priced at just above $100 USD. With Linux users especially craving multi-core systems if running Arch or other distributions where you are frequently compiling your own packages, the Ryzen 3 CPUs can make for a low-cost but practical Linux system. Here are my initial benchmarks of these first two Ryzen 3 processors.
I just received the Ryzen 3 1200 and Ryzen 3 1300X yesterday, so have been rushing to get out these initial Linux figures for those curious how they compare to the many Windows results that came out last week. In this article are the initial Ryzen 3 Linux benchmark results compared to a variety of Intel and AMD CPUs on Ubuntu Linux. In the days ahead I intend to do several more Ryzen 3 powered articles including a fresh look at Mesa Git with KHR_no_error support enabled, an OpenGL vs. Vulkan comparison with these low-end CPUs, and possibly a fresh compiler comparison and more. If you have any other Linux test requests for Ryzen, feel free to let me know by commenting on this article in our forums.
The Ryzen 3 1200 CPU is priced at just about $110 USD and features four physical cores but without any SMT. These four cores feature a 3.1GHz base frequency, 3.4GHz boost frequency, and 3.45GHz XFR frequency. All Ryzen 3 CPUs feature an 8MB L3 cache and 512KB L2 cache per core. All of these current Ryzen 3 CPUs feature a 65 Watt TDP, which is the same as the Ryzen 7 1700 series as well as most of the Ryzen 5 line-up. It's a bit disappointing the TDP isn't any lower, but later in this article are our own power figures.
The Ryzen 3 1300X quad-core meanwhile offers higher clock frequencies while still having a 65 Watt TDP and costing only about $20 USD more than the Ryzen 3 1200, or about a $130 USD retail price. The 1300X has a 3.5GHz base frequency, 3.7GHz boost frequency, and 3.9GHz XFR frequency. The other specifications are similar to the Ryzen 3 1200.
Both the Ryzen 3 1200 and Ryzen 3 1300X feature an AMD Stealth heatsink fan. From my Ryzen 5 1400 testing, this heatsink fan works out quite fine and is quiet while does a fine job cooling the CPU, at least if you don't plan on overclocking the CPU. I don't have any Linux CPU thermal results to share though for this combination or Ryzen 3 in general though since AMD still hasn't added support to the Linux kernel (at least as of 4.13 Git) for being able to read the CPU core temperatures under Linux. Nor have I seen any patches yet for such a driver and have not heard about AMD when they may expose Zen CPU temperature reading under Linux.