In these last few days, AMD has begun to close the circle of its Zen architecture. With EPYC, Threadripper, and the first two Ryzen series occupying their respective places, the next step for Sunnyvale is attack the low-end, a space that Intel has largely occupied with quite robust Pentium and Core i3 chips. The Ryzen 3 processors will seek to break that dominance by delivering four real cores and unlocked overclocking for less than $130, a very attractive cost for users with tight budgets.
After a long wait, AMD's Ryzen family is complete. Including the higher-end Threadripper models and the Pro variants aimed at the enterprise market, Ryzen now offers a total of seventeen processors. No matter how complex or limited the user's budget is, it is likely that they can find something based on the AM4 socket that fits their resources. The only piece missing from the puzzle was the low-end. We still don't have details on what will happen with the APUs and the Athlon/Sempron series, but for now we have the new Ryzen 3, which basically exploded on the Web.
AMD's plan is to pressure Intel's alternatives, which in this particular territory are the Core i3-7100 and the new "Pentium trio" with Hyper-Threading enabled (G4560, G4600, and G4620). The popularity of that silicon has been so great that we detected several availability issues, but AMD has no intentions of staying behind. The two models that just entered the fray are the Ryzen 3 1200 and the Ryzen 3 1300X. In both cases we find four cores and four threads (4C/4T), a total of 512 KB of L2 cache per core, 8 MB of L3 cache, and a TDP of 65 watts. The Ryzen 3 1200 has frequencies of 3.1 / 3.4 / 3.45 GHz, while the Ryzen 3 1300X follows the same line as the Ryzen 5 1500X, with 3.5 / 3.7 / 3.9 GHz.
If we start comparing benchmarks, the results are more or less at the level we expected. When running multi-threading applications, the new Ryzen 3 processors manage to place above their direct rivals thanks to the presence of four real cores, but in the case of games and other programs very focused on single-thread, Intel's silicon retains the advantage. However, the Ryzen 3 processors have one last detail in their favor: unlocked overclocking. All they ask in return is a compatible chipset (the AMD B350 is probably the best option), and perhaps an external cooling solution. The Ryzen 3 1200 has a price of $109, and the Ryzen 3 1300X rises to $129. Personally, I lean toward the 1300X, but the 1200 has shown good overclocking results, further improving its price-performance ratio.
