AMD continues to hammer Intel at every single segment of its CPU market and that includes at the very low end. Instead of lowering the prices of its Ryzen 3000 series too low to make a serious profit, though, it's retooling some of its older hardware to stay competitive, while retaining affordability. Its most recent effort there, has been in the remaking of its Ryzen 3 1200 CPU into the 1200 AF model, which uses a Zen+ architecture for its four cores.
Originally competitive with the Intel i5 7400, the 1200 has now been made almost as fast as the Core i3 9100F, a much more contemporary CPU. That is with overclocking, as WCCFTech's coverage explains, but it's an impressive performance boost for a three year old CPU. In a Cinebench 20 run, the original Ryzen 3 1200 managed a score of 1,192 points, where the Ryzen 3 1200AF manages 1,368 instead.
The kicker comes from the increased overclocked headroom afforded by the new, more efficient architecture however, with the 1200AF able to overclock to 4GHz with relative ease across all cores. That helped push its score to a much higher 1,590, a 33 percent increase in performance over the original 1200.
Considering the price remains around $80 for this chip, that makes it one of the best budget gaming CPUs in the world. It easily outstrips the dual core Athlon 3000G — itself an excellent budget gaming processor, even if it is $30 cheaper and puts it in direct price and performance contention with the 9100F.
When you factor in the upgrade support of AMD's Ryzen motherboards, that makes this a great gaming CPU and puts even more pressure on Intel's CPU lineup.
