AMD is back with some new CPUs in the Ryzen line up. The Ryzen 3 3300x and the Ryzen 3 3100 are on the lower or cheaper end of the CPU segment. At this point in the Ryzen 3xxx series, we’ve covered the high and mid-end CPUs. Now we’re going to take a look at the budget CPUs. The Ryzen 3 3300x CPUs are priced at $120 whereas the Ryzen 3 3100 is priced at just $99. Both CPUs are built off of the latest Ryzen 7 nm and include PCIe 4.0 as well as the other benefits of the Ryzen 3 lineup, couple that with the latest motherboard chipset from AMD, the B550, and a cheaper GPU, and you’ll have yourself a sweet little inexpensive PC.

Specifications AMD Ryzen 3 3300X AMD Ryzen 3 3100
# of CPU Cores 4 4
# of Threads 8 8
Base Clock 3.8GHz 3.6GHz
Max Boost Clock Up to 4.3GHz Up to 3.9GHz
Total L1 Cache 256KB 256KB
Total L2 Cache 2MB 2MB
Total L3 Cache 16MB 16MB
Unlocked Yes Yes
CMOS TSMC 7nm FinFET TSMC 7nm FinFET
Package AM4 AM4
PCI Express® Version PCIe® 4.0 PCIe® 4.0
Thermal Solution (PIB) Wraith Stealth Wraith Stealth
Default TDP / TDP 65W 65W

This time, AMD didn’t send samples in retail packaging, my samples arrived in the small blister packs. So, pictures will be much lighter than usual.

Up top, the Ryzen 3 3100 and the Ryzen 3 3300x look no different than the rest of the Ryzen CPU family. The same style of heat spreader is used. The names of the CPU are embossed on the heat spreader in the same manner as other Ryzen CPUs. The pin count is the same as well and these CPUs are compatible with AM4 sockets.


Test System and Benchmarks »« AMD Ryzen 3 Introduction | Multimedia, Compression, Synthetic, and Gaming »

Test System and Benchmarks

AMD Ryzen Test Bench
Component
Product Name Provided By
Processor AMD Ryzen 3 3300x and AMD Ryzen 3 3100 AMD
Motherboard Aorus X570 Master ASRock
Memory G.Skill Trident Royal F4-3600C16D-16GTRG 16-16-16-36 (XMP) G.Skill
Drive Samsung 240 EVO 256GB SSD, Crucial MX500 1 TB SATA III SSD Samsung/Crucial
Video Cards Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Founders Edition Nvidia
Monitor BenQ EL2870U 28 inch 4K HDR Gaming Monitor 3840×2160 @ 60 Hz
Case DimasTech EasyXL DimasTech
Power Supply Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 1500W Cooler Master
Operating System Windows 10 1903 x64 Pro with latest patches and updates

The Ryzen 3 3300x and Ryzen 3 3100 is configured similarly as when I’ve reviewed past Ryzen CPUs. Neither of my samples came with retail packaging nor did they come with the stock coolers. With that, I rarely, if ever, use the stock coolers in performance testing. The CPUs are installed with a custom loop that features a 360mm radiator and the EKWB AMD Velocity water block.

For synthetic benchmarks, each benchmark was run on each system three times. Then we picked the best of the three results. The system was allowed to idle in between each benchmark for no less than 30 minutes. This gives the processor time to cool down a bit before the next test is performed. The ambient temperature is kept as close to 21°c, or 70°f as possible. We use both Core Temp and Hardware Monitor to record temperatures and CPUZ to validate clock speeds and voltages.

I don’t have any Intel CPUs to directly compare the Ryzen 3 3100 or the Ryzen 3 3300x so, I included the result for the Intel i7 8700k which is the closest Intel CPU that I have one hand to the Ryzen 3 CPUs and is put in the charts for reference purposes only. These CPUs are not meant to compete with each other.  I put the new Ryzen 3 CPUs at the top of the charts since they are the newest.

Testing and Performance

AIDA64 ENGINEER

AIDA64 has a set of several 64-bit benchmarks to measure how fast the computer performs various data processing tasks and mathematical calculations. Multi-threaded memory and cache benchmarks are available to analyze system RAM bandwidth and latency. Benchmark pages of AIDA64 Extreme provide several methods to measure system performance. These benchmarks are synthetic, so their results show only the theoretical maximum performance of the system. The AIDA64 suite has various benchmarks for CPU, FPU, GPU, storage, and memory testing.

Memory read and memory copy bandwidth is extremely close across the entire chart. Typically we see the Ryzen CPUs with about 1/2 the bandwidth on the write performance when compared to the read performance. This is pretty much standard across the Ryzen lineup except for the Ryzen 9 3900X. Even the Ryzen 7 3700X tops out at 28800 in the AIDA memory test.


CPU testing lands right where I’d expect for the difference between the Ryzen 5 series CPUs on this chart and the Ryzen 3 CPUs. Really, there are no surprises here.

Cinebench R20

Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench Release 20 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D’s ability to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to the average user.

Having the CPUs so close together doesn’t really help AMD. Performance between the Ryzen 5 3600s and the Ryzen 3 3300x is darn near identical and close enough that I would say the results are well within the margin of error. I ran this test multiple times and obtained the same result across all the AMD CPUs. IPC performance is still very strong as the CPU single-core tests are similar to each other as well.

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description and is available for a variety of computer platforms. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for the Amiga computers. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray[6] raytracer contributed by its author Alexander Enzmann. POV-Ray is free and open-source software with the source code available under the AGPLv3.

In POV-RAY, the extra cores on the 3600s allow the multi-threaded tests to eclipse the Ryzen 3 series considering the Ryzen 3 CPUs are 4 cores/8 threads vs 6 cores/12 threads on the 3600s. However, when we take it back to single-core performance, the 3300x has a very strong showing and matches the 3600s. The 3100 has a small MHz disadvantage but still shows strong performance here.

Multimedia, Compression, Synthetic, and Gaming

HandBrake is a free and open-source video transcoder, originally developed in 2003 by Eric Petit to make ripping a film from a DVD to a data storage device easier. Essentially, it can convert video to almost any modern format. HandBrake is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The workload video file is a file that I’ve used for years called Sintel. It is a 1.09-gigabyte file that is full HD. I used the Apple 240p preset for this test.

Handbrake is less of a synthetic benchmark and more real-world performance as you can actually use it to encode videos. The Ryzen 3 3300x came in with a time of 111 seconds with an average Frame rate of 191.8 and the Ryzen 3100 finished the job in 131 seconds with a 164.1 average frame rate.

7-Zip

The 7-zip benchmark shows a rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with the results of the Intel Core 2 CPU with the multi-threading option switched off. So, if you have a modern CPU from Intel or AMD, rating values in single-thread mode must be close to real CPU frequency. There are two tests, compression with the LZMA method and decompression with the LZMA method. Once the total passes reach 100, the score is taken. 7-Zip gives the resulting score for decompressing, compressing, and an overall score.

The differences between the two lower-end CPUs is minor at best and is because of a frequency difference. The Ryzen 3 3100 scored 36350 MIPS in compressing and 43732 in decompressing. The Ryzen 3 3300x scored a little better with 39657 in the compressing test and 48892 in the decompressing tests.

PCMark 10

PCMark 10 is a system benchmark for Windows PCs that focuses on common tasks performed in the office. PCMark 10 offers a variety of workloads categorized into four groups. The Essentials group includes web browsing, video conferencing, and app start-up time. The Productivity group includes tests based on spreadsheets and writing. The Digital Content Creation group includes photo editing, video editing, and a rendering and visualization test. The final group, Gaming, includes tests for real-time graphics and physics. It has three different benchmarks, PCMark 10, PCMark 10 Express, and PCMark 10 Extended.

PCMark 10 shows how little performance difference in office style applications there really is between these two CPUs. The differences are minor at best and still come close to the 6 core CPUs included in the graph.

3DMARK

3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark (now UL) used to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. It does this through a series of graphics and physics and or CPU tests. I ran the extreme and ultimate version as I wanted to see how well AMD could handle the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080ti and keep the testing platform consistent.


3D mark testing starts down the path of the gaming tests. In these tests, the 6 core CPUs enjoy a little bit of a lead but not much. In Time Spy and Firestrike the two Ryzen 3 CPUs score close to each other. The Ryzen 3 3100 scores 4448 overall and 2243 in the CPU category were the Ryzen 3 3300X scores 4588 overall and 2476 in the CPU category in the TimeSpy Extreme tests. In Firestrike Ultra, the Ryzen 3 3100 scores 6748 overall and 13622 in the CPU category whereas the Ryzen 3 3300X scores 6833 overall and 15279 in the CPU category.

For the gaming tests, I took a few tests that we use in our GPU testing and set the resolution to 1080p with medium quality in-game settings. I am a big fan of 1st person shooters as well as flight simulators. Lately, FPS games have become more multi-core aware and utilize more cores. Flight simulators, on the other hand, tend to do best on fast single cores.

As one would expect, the Ryzen 3 CPUs don’t have quite the FPS punch that the Ryzen 5 CPUs do. However, these CPUs can pull their weight. In Xplane, the Ryzen 3 3100 averaged 82 FPS, In Shadow of the Tomb Raider it averaged 119 FPS, in Ghost Recon Wildlands 121 FPS, in FarCry New Dawn 104 FPS, and Assassin’s Creed Odessey 101 FPS. The Ryzen 3 3300x averaged 94 FPS in Xplane, 127 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, 125 FPS in Ghost Recon Wildlands, 116 FPS in FarCry New Dawn and 110 in Assassin’s Creed.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

The Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300x CPUs round out the Ryzen 3000 series from AMD. I’ve had the opportunity to test most of the Ryzen 3000 series from AMD and I’m still amazed how closely they perform to each other. When looking at “office” type applications such as Microsoft Word or video conferencing, our PCMark 10 test showed that there is little difference between the Ryzen 3 CPUs and the Ryzen 5 CPUs that were tested. Granted, the Ryzen 5s is faster, but not by much. This means the Ryzen 3 CPUs would make good office PCs as well.

Based on the performance when compared to their higher-end cousins (3600 CPUs) I’d assume performance to be equal or better than the Intel i3 9100 or the i5 9400. Honestly, any of these CPUs at this price segment are going to be good performers. AMD is bringing the competition to all corners of the CPU market. However, Intel’s 10th gen CPUs are right around the corner and when those budget CPUs from Intel launch, I can’t wait to see how that battle shakes out.

One of the things I’ve been doing since the clock speed issues with the Ryzen 3900x & 3700x launches is running a frequency monitoring application while POV-RAY runs. This shows the frequency of each core while the test runs. From the graphs below, you can see the boost clock issue has been pretty solid on the Ryzen 3 CPUs. There tends to be a little more frequency variation on the Ryzen 3300x compared to the Ryzen 3 3100. But nothing major and it’s only a few MHz.

Ryzen 3 3300X
Ryzen 3 3100

Gaming performance was good. When you take into consideration that now a budget CPU has 4 cores and 8 threads we’re able to kick up the performance a bit on the lower end market. One time, not too long ago, 4 cores/8 threads was a top-end CPU. I did the test with a 2080 Super from Nvidia which, is the standard for my testbench and they were able to keep up pretty well. I also tested at medium settings to put more of a load on the CPU. Increasing the image quality, these CPUs should be able to maintain 60 FPS at high or even ultra settings, game depending.

As far as overclocking, for me, AMD has been a difficult nut to crack on their new Ryzen CPUs. With the Ryzen 3 CPUs, I could get all cores to run at their maximum boost speeds however, increasing the frequency any further resulted in blue screens as Windows tries to load.

Anecdotally, I finally swapped out my HTPC guts that resided in a Corsair Bulldog chassis. I was running an Intel i7-6700k. Now, I’m running the Ryzen 3 3300x on the Aorus X570 Pro Wifi. Some days I tend to game from the couch with this system, others I watch movies, etc. I’ve noticed that the system has a bit more pep to it, however, not by leaps and bounds. Keep in mind,  I replaced a system that was launched back in 2015 with a CPU that was just launched in 2020. I’d expect it to run better. Even then, the system tends to run cooler as well and I don’t hear the fans spin up as much.

At $99 for the Ryzen 3 3100 and $120 for the Ryzen 3 3300x, I think AMD has these CPUs priced just right. However, I think there’s going to be a bit of confusion on the consumer side as performance is pretty close between the two different Ryzen lines. Even then, the price difference is pretty significant. I’ve already swapped the 3300x into a build that I personally own. As enthusiasts we like to look and talk about the highest-end CPUs and GPUs but, that’s not always needed nor can everyone afford them. Personally, I’d love to see more players make the jump from console to PC. But that’s just me. If you’re looking to build a good performing and an inexpensive PC, these CPUs will get the job done.

By FYIPC

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