Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200, AMD's budget-focused quad-core CPUs, launch today for $130 and $110 respectively. UK pricing is yet to be confirmed, but don't expect much change from £120 and £100 respectively.

Like the rest of the Ryzen line-up, Ryzen 3 offers more cores compared to a similarly priced Intel chip. The Ryzen 3 1200—which features four cores, four threads, a base clock of 3.1GHz and a boost clock of 3.4GHz—is priced below Intel's Core i3-7100, a dual-core chip with hyperthreading. The Ryzen 3 1300X—which is also a 4C/4T chip with a base clock of 3.5GHz and a boost clock of 3.7GHz—is cheaper than the 2C/4T Intel Core i3-7300. Both sport a TDP of 65W.

While the Intel chips offer higher out-of-the-box clock speeds along with better IPC performance, Ryzen 3 should perform better in multithreaded tasks. AMD's own Cinebench results put Ryzen 3 ahead of Core i3 by as much as 29 percent. AMD claims Ryzen 3 will match Core i3 in 1080p gaming performance too, thanks to its two extra physical cores.

Ryzen 3's price and theoretical performance makes it a compelling chip, but it's worth noting that it doesn't have a built-in GPU like the Core i3. That has been less of an issue for the more expensive Ryzen chips, where are more likely to be paired with a discrete GPU. But those building budget-minded systems for pure productivity tasks will have to factor in the cost of a discrete GPU to use alongside Ryzen 3.

Since Ryzen 3 uses the same die as the top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 1800X, it's compatible with the AM4 chipset and is fully unlocked for overclocking when paired with an X370 or B350 motherboard. AMD has confirmed that, like Ryzen 5, Ryzen 3 is a binned chip with disabled cores. Those are arranged in a 2+2 configuration, connected via AMD's Infinity Fabric.

Ryzen 3 launches ahead of AMD's appearance at the Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, where it's expected to launch new RX Vega graphics cards and 16C/32T Threadripper CPUs. RX Vega is expected to perform somewhere between Nvidia's GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti, coming in slightly faster than the productivity-focused Vega Frontier Edition, which launched in early July.

Meanwhile, the $1,000 Threadripper 1950X is expected to blow the socks off Intel's $1,000 i9-7900X—at least in multithreaded production tasks—by offering 16C/32T instead of Intel's 10C/20T. Expect more news, and hopefully reviews, of Threadripper and RX Vega following Siggraph at the end of July.