At a list price of just $129, the quad core, Ryzen 3 1300X is a great budget CPU. The Ryzen 3 series is based on AMD's powerful and energy efficient Zen core architecture as already featured in the mainstream Ryzen 5 series and performance Ryzen 7 series, both launched earlier this year. The 1300X is fully unlocked with a stock base clock speed of 3.5 GHz running up to 3.7 GHz for boost and has a TDP of 65W. The 1300X comes with AMD's Wraith Stealth cooler, but significantly, it is devoid of integrated graphics. Although this can be inexpensively rectified, it may be a stumbling block to those at the entry-level of the market. By comparison, Intel's dual core, four thread i3-7350K comes with 630 HD integrated graphics. In terms of effective speed, early benchmarks for the 1300X just pip the 7350K to the post but results in specific games will depend on the extent to which the game is able to use more than two processing cores simultaneously. The 1300X scores around 20% higher on quad-core tests whereas the 7350K scores 16% higher on single-core tests. The Ryzen 1300X has been released alongside the similar Ryzen 3 1200 which is also an unlocked quad-core with slightly lower base / boost clock speeds of 3.1 / 3.4 GHz and a slightly lower price of just $109. [Jul '17 CPUPro]