News + Trends

AMD Ryzen 3: The best budget chips in a long time?

8.5.2020

Translation: machine translated

With the Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100, AMD gives budget gamers a decent performance boost. The Ryzen 3 3300X even takes on the much more expensive i5-9600K.

Three years ago, AMD shook up the CPU landscape with the Zen architecture. Back then, the quad-core Intel i7-7700K was the measure of all things. However, the mainstream CPU market had been stuck with four processor cores for ten years. With the Ryzen 3 3300X and the Ryzen 3 3100, which are based on the Zen2 architecture, there are now already low-budget chips with four cores that outperform the i7-7700K.

An overview of the two new processors in the AMD line-up and comparison with Ryzen 5:

CPU	Cores / Threads	Base / boost clock in GHz	TDP in Watt	L3 cache in MB
Ryzen 3 3300X	4 / 8	3.8 / 4.3	65	16
Ryzen 3 3100	4 / 8	3.6 / 3.9	65	16
Ryzen 5 3600	6 / 12	3.6 / 4.2	65	32
Ryzen 5 3600X	6 / 12	3.8 / 4.4	95	32

The 3300X is the flagship of Ryzen 3 with four cores and eight threads as well as a base clock of 3.8 GHz and a boost clock of 4.3 GHz. According to AMD, this chip is intended to compete with the i5-9400F from Intel. With the 3100, AMD is attacking the i3-9100. The smaller model also has four cores and eight threads, but clocks slower with a base clock of 3.6 GHz and a boost clock of 3.9 GHz. Another difference is that the 3300X has lower latency due to the chip design.

The chips will run on the new B550 mainboards, which are set to be a lot cheaper than the X570 boards. These will be available from mid-June. Alternatively, the chips are also compatible with the B450 and X470 mainboards, but without PCIe 4.0 support.

This is what they do

Tom's Hardware comes to the conclusion that the Ryzen 3 3300X is the new gaming champion for budget customers. At default settings, the 3300X delivered similar performance to the Ryzen 5 3600 in games.

TechRadar compares the performance of the 3300X with that of the i5-9600. In fact, the AMD chip is only marginally behind the Intel chip in games. It even delivers better performance in some games. In contrast to Tom's Hardware, TechRadar does not see the 3300X as having an advantage over the 3100. The 3300X costs 20 per cent more, but does not deliver 20 per cent more performance.

Combuterbase is a little more critical of the chips. Although both are very powerful for quad-cores, they are neither a real novelty, nor extremely efficient or particularly cheap. The German portal therefore advises budget gamers to buy a Ryzen 5 3600, which is only slightly more expensive.

And for us?

At just under 140 francs (as of 8 May 2020), the 3300X is 54 francs cheaper than the Ryzen 5 3600 and 91 francs cheaper than the 3600X. In combination with a B450 motherboard, the 3300X is a great budget deal. You can put together a top gaming PC for less than 1000 francs, but you'll have to do without PCIe 4.0 and you're not really future-proof either.