The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100 CPU Review: A Budget Gaming Bonanza

[harlan4096]

When AMD announced the new Ryzen 3 processors built on Zen 2, I was under the impression that these were essentially the reject parts from AMD’s successful Ryzen 3000 line. Inside is a single chiplet with only four cores active out of eight, pushing up to 4.3 GHz; but the kicker was the low price of $120 for the high frequency version, or $99 for a bit slower. AMD has sold quad-core CPUs at $99 for a while, but this is the new core and the new manufacturing process, so would this be any different? We put them up against a $350 quad core from three years ago. It seemed like a crazy idea at the time.

AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs: Chiplets Go Mainstream

After successful launches of the Ryzen 9, Ryzen 7, and Ryzen 5 families of Zen 2 hardware, AMD has been sitting pretty at north of $200. At each price point, the company offered a compelling option against the competition, as we’ve noted in our reviews of hardware like the 3950X, 3900X, and 3700X. Others, like the Ryzen 5 3600, are some of the best sellers in Amazon’s top list. As we noted in our recent CPU buyers’ guide, out of the top 10 spots on Amazon’s best seller list for CPUs, AMD has 8 of them, and the first 5.

That’s all well and good for the higher end of the market, however in the sub-$200 category, this is where the volume often is. Intel has been neglecting this market of late, due to the abnormally high demand for Xeon silicon forcing manufacturing to spend more time on 28-core hardware than quad-core hardware. This leaves the door open for AMD, so it was always going to be interesting what the company did here. For a long time, AMD did nothing, pushing users to its Ryzen 2000 hardware or Ryzen 3000 APUs, namely because they were selling really well (the Ryzen 2600 / 1600 AF offers 6 cores for as low as $85).

With the recent launch of AMD’s latest Ryzen Mobile generation APUs, based on Zen 2 and Vega, we were unsure whether AMD would fill this sub-$200 gap with desktop versions of those APUs, or offer lower binned Ryzen 5 3000 parts. After a very successful launch of Ryzen Mobile 4000, leading to some stellar reviews, it was clear that the mobile silicon was commanding a strong premium in the market, and so we get Matisse based CPUs coming to the sub-$200 segment instead. With that, on April 21[sup]st[/sup], AMD announced its new Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 processors.

AMD 'Matisse' Ryzen 3000 Series CPUs

AnandTech Cores Threads Base Freq Boost Freq L2 Cache L3 Cache PCIe 4.0 Chiplets IO+CPU TDP Price (SEP)

Ryzen 9 3950X 16C 32T 3.5 4.7 8 MB 64 MB 16+4+4 1+2 105W $749
Ryzen 9 3900X 12C 24T 3.8 4.6 6 MB 64 MB 16+4+4 1+2 105W $499
Ryzen 9 3900 12C 24T 3.1 4.3 6 MB 64 MB 16+4+4 1+2 65W OEM
Ryzen 7 3800X 8C 16T 3.9 4.5 4 MB 32 MB 16+4+4 1+1 105W $399
Ryzen 7 3700X 8C 16T 3.6 4.4 4 MB 32 MB 16+4+4 1+1 65W $329
Ryzen 5 3600X 6C 12T 3.8 4.4 3 MB 32 MB 16+4+4 1+1 95W $249
Ryzen 5 3600 6C 12T 3.6 4.2 3 MB 32 MB 16+4+4 1+1 65W $199
Ryzen 5 3500X 6C 6T 3.6 4.1 3 MB 32 MB 16+4+4 1+1 65W OEM
Ryzen 3 3300X 4C 8T 3.8 4.3 2 MB 16 MB 16+4+4 1+1 65W $120
Ryzen 3 3100 4C 8T 3.6 3.9 2 MB 16 MB 16+4+4 1+1 65W $99

Filling the bottom at price points of $99 and $120 is very aggressive. Here is AMD’s latest generation Zen 2 hardware, on a 7nm TSMC high performance manufacturing node, bundled with a 14nm IO die from GlobalFoundries, packaged together with frequencies up to 4.3 GHz. At the time of the announcement, we noted that AMD is going to be competing with itself a lot here, for performance and price. Suddenly that $85 Ryzen 5 1600AF only looks appetizing if you want six Zen 1 cores – four Zen 2 cores at higher frequencies and higher IPCs for $99 on paper is probably the better deal.

Both processors officially support DDR4-3200, and AMD is reiterating that DDR4-3600/3733 is a nice sweet spot for those purchasing faster memory. Both chips also have 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes from the chipset: 16 for PCIe, 4 for an M.2 drive, and 4 for the chipset. For X570 chipsets, these should be running in PCIe 4.0 mode – for B550 chipsets and others, these chipset lanes will run in PCIe 3.0 mode (see below).

AMD sampled us both the Ryzen 3 3300X and the Ryzen 3 3100 for review. These only arrived recently, so we are still in the process of benchmarking the chips on a few benchmarks.

Elephant in the Room: B550 MotherboardsOne of the key points for a cheaper build is often a cheaper motherboard. AMD and Intel both supply the market with mid-range and low-end chipsets, which motherboard manufacturers then use to build something more palatable in the $60 to $120 range. Technically AMD is also launching the B550 chipset today too, offering PCIe 4.0 from the CPU and PCIe 3.0 from the chipset, however news on these motherboards has been quite thin. We haven’t received one to test with these processors, which makes an X570 + Ryzen 3 review somewhat non-real world.
AMD has provided us will a full list of motherboard compatibility charts for all of the AM4 processors aligned with all of the AM4 motherboards. Due to technical limitations around BIOS size (i.e. motherboard vendors using too small of BIOS chips), only various families of hardware are verified in different motherboards. Most motherboards will likely accept processors outside these designations, especially if the vendor has used a larger BIOS chip, however AMD is putting these guidelines in to make it easier to follow. So while AM4 is heralded as a platform that can support ‘A-Series to 16-cores’, and it does, but only across several boards - very few boards (if any) will support the full gamut of hardware.

As for B550, the chipset looks very similar to B450 but with some upgrades. Rather than PCIe 2.0 support from the chipset, we get PCIe 3.0, with a PCIe 3.0 uplink to the processor. B550 motherboards will also be engineered to support PCIe 4.0 from the CPU, which means at least the first (and perhaps the second) PCIe slot will be PCIe 4.0 enabled, and there should also be an M.2 slot.
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[harlan4096]

Another review: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd...cpu-review