Reviews AMD Ryzen 3 1300X Review

What are you including in that APU system and why are you comparing it to a system spec'd with a 1060? Cheapest AM4 APU on scan is £47, cheapest R3 is £99, add an additional £105 for a 1050. £157 price difference between the two systems.

You can also find cheaper mobos than £87, cheapest B350 board on scan is £65.

 

1200 + 1050 Ti or 1300X + 1060 is a great combination, especially if you can OC a little. You're not comparing against APU, this is entry i5-esq quad at i3 prices. People don't ever consider i5s or i3s for their IGPs. Just because the AMD APU is capable, doesn't mean people should exclusively consider it. Look at the i3 barebone prices.
You've also got to consider that you can OC an R3 even on a sub-100 board, which is non-existent on Intel. Many gaming systems are built with cheaper CPUs and mainstream-mid range GPUs.

Memory prices will remain high globally until next year at the earliest. It's not just GBP, it's global in this respect. 8GB of memory is plenty for an mainstream gaming system.

 

Not at all. If anything PCs without graphics cards are becoming less common because they are being replaced with laptops. Entry/mainstream PC gaming is a big deal and consumers buy on brand and feature: they want a graphics card. That's why even 1030s or 550s still sell. AMD's biggest uphill struggle is that non-technical consumers buy an "Intel i7" and "Nvidia GeForce".

 

The console price doesn't hold up to scrutiny:
1: Console games are more expensive.
2: Consoles have subscriptions you'll end up paying for.
3: You'll still need a PC to do all the things a console can't do.
4: Remember that there are entire genres of games consoles don't have access to and that some of the most popular games on the planet like Dota, LoL, WoW, CS:Go, Overwatch and so on run perfectly fine on a random PC found in the dump that had a used ebay GPU added to it.

 

Sub £500 is what most think of as a budget pc including monitor and windows, when I have been asked to do these builds in the past it's always a struggle to hit this price point.

APU is a must and your still on a very cheap case HDD.

Biggest upgrade most budget pcs can have is a SSD.

Even if you knock the memory down on the 1060 system I listed above, to overclock your spending it on a cooler.

I would like to see someone try to do it without cheaping out on a rubbish cash or power supply which nobody here could recommend.

£600 before windows and monitor and keyboard mouse is still another £200 on these.

Mid range is £600 - £1000 in most people's eyes.

 

Again, you're complaining that a system built with the R3 will be too expensive. You've said an APU system can be built for £400, I'll assume you've included all the peripherals + windows for that amount. As I said before, the difference in price between an AM4 APU and the R3 + Nvidia 1050 is £157, making a PC based off of your £400 come to £557.

Techspot reviewed both the 1200 and 1300x and overclocked both using the stock cooler and while the 1300x got a bit warm for their liking they attributed it purely to voltage as the 1200 was fine. Not that you can overclock if you opt for an A series motherboard.

 

As a system refresh, so excluding PSU/case/storage/etc:

Ryzen 3 1200 £100
MATX B350 Board £65-75
8GB RAM £70
1050 Ti £130
=£370

I'd imagine, while not being blazing fast, this would be a pretty capable system for 1080p gaming.

 

This isn't hypothetical though. You say it "isn't a PC" without those things and that consoles have a longer lifespan. My monitor, case, PSU and storage are all older (in some cases a lot older) than the the current generation of consoles and all perfectly compatible with the aforementioned system.

I'm not convinced "gaming on a budget is done on a consoles" is at all clear cut.
If you like PC games/gaming and/or want/need a reasonably powerful PC anyway then adding a discrete GPU to a system might well make more sense than a console (or current APUs) for gaming. I'm pretty sure such systems are hardly uncommon.

 

There is one pc in my house these days used to be 3 I have sold all the low end apu systems we used to have, tablets and smartphones replaced them.

Even my pc sees less and less usage on a week to week basis and I probably spent about £2.5k on it lol.

 

Indeed, budget and console don't really go together.
On a PC you never get emails like this nice surprise that was in my inbox today:

https://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/pc-gaming-hardware-market-minting-billions

 

The Prophet of Doom hath spoken...

 

Mining isn't dead, not by a long shot.

Also, the RAM prices are up globally, not just in the UK. My RAM is up by $15 since I bought it not all that long ago.

 

Very capable. Or push it a 1060 3GB or last gen 970/980 and you're laughing. The Ryzen might not take on Sky/Kaby but how many are satisfied with prior gen Intel CPUs that the R3 will happily keep up with? It's not going to tempt existing Intel quad-core owners, but if you're upgrading from anything else this is a solid buy.

 

Would the Ryzen 3 1200 be an worth while upgrade from my i5 3470?

 

Probably a sidegrade at best, pre overclocked it is a tiny upgrade. 1400 is less than 25% upgrade for info in most benches.

I usually suggest looking for 50% minimum in cpu upgrades. 1500 meets that requirement, if I was upgrading it's what I would be looking to go to from that cpu as a minimum.

 

Nah, none of the current quad core offerings from either Intel or AMD would be worth an upgrade from that, only reason to upgrade would be going for extra cores, doing it for other reasons such as M.2, USB3.1 or just for the plain old fun of tinkering around.

 

Agree here simply because the 3470 was the fastest clocked Ivy. Although a 1500X or 1600 would be a tempting upgrade if you're also making the M.2 jump etc

 

Just picked up one of these with a bargaintastic GTX 1060 3GB from Novatech.