AMD Ryzen 3 1300X & 1200 Performance Review

Editor-in-Chief

Power Consumption

Without getting too technical, the way these two companies go about measuring TDP is fundamentally different from one another. What you need to know is that TDP values are a universally poor way to determine actual power consumption for end users since they are simply thermal design guidelines that are given to system integrators. As I say in every review, TDP is not actual power consumption so don’t take it as such.

As both Intel and AMD recommend, the best way to measure true power deltas between processors is via a simple (yet calibrated) power meter plugged into the wall outlet. That’s exactly what we do but add in a controlled 120V power input to eliminate voltage irregularities from impacting the results.

There’s no denying both of these new Ryzen 3 processors are quite efficient but they are also showing what happens when quad core parts go up against the dual cores. Remember these are in essence eight core chips that have half their logical processing nodes cut and that in itself leads to some efficiency losses. As a result, against Intel’s i3, Ryzen 3 really doesn’t fare all that well in the power consumption field.

This isn’t to say that Ryzen 3 is inefficient since it sips electricity when compared to AMD’s lineup of 6 and eight core chips but it won’t win many performance per watt competitions against Intel.

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