Today, AMD revealed the long-rumored updates to the Ryzen 3 lineup. The new Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X bring Zen 2 cores to gamers on a budget. 4 cores with SMT should work just fine for gamers playing at 1080p unless of course, the occasional hard-hitting game arrives. If you didn’t catch the news earlier, here are the specs of the new chips:
| MODEL | CORES/ THREADS | TDP | BOOST/BASE FREQ. (GHz) | Retail Price |
| AMD Ryzen 3 3300X | 4 Cores/8 Threads | 65W | 4.3 Ghz/3.8 GHz | $120 |
| AMD Ryzen 3 3100 | 4 Cores/8 Threads | 65W | 3.9 GHz/3.6 GHz | $99 |
At the sub $100 range, AMD has a selection of older Zen/Zen+ CPUs in the market. You can get yourself an older Ryzen 5 1600AF. However, with the new chips there are certain advantages –
- SMT – The 3100 and 3300X have 4 cores and 8 threads, which should help more in multi-tasking.
- Faster Clock Speeds – The newer chips also have a higher base and boost speeds. The 3300X, in particular, has clocked in the same range as the Ryzen 5 3600X.
- Zen 2 Efficiency Advantages – The new CPUs are also built on the 7nm process, which improves IPC significantly over the older Ryzen chips. They also feature 16MB of cache, a nice step up from the older budget CPUs.
- PCIe 4.0 Future-ready – With AMD moving into the PCIe 4.0 space with their latest Radeon RDNA based GPUs, all Zen 2 chips are ready for the new platform. This includes the newly launched budget CPUs.
These are the main changes you need to know about the new desktop CPUs. Compared to the competition, AMD does lack some features like dedicated graphics cores. Intel’s i3 variants in a slightly higher budget range come with integrated graphics. However, when talking strictly within the price range of the 3100 and 3300X, AMD will be rivaling the F-versions of the i3 processors without the iGPUs. We also recently reviewed the Radeon RX 5500 and 5600 XT, the latter of which was positioned as a default GPU for 1080p gamers by AMD.
At the moment, 4 cores are still fine for 1080p gaming. Sure, there are certain games like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey which makes use of more threads, but there’s still a good couple of years before 6+ cores are used more. With the next-gen consoles also using Zen 2 cores, games will be more optimized for those cores once they come out. Even then, a lot of games, at least for the first year or so, will be built with the older consoles in mind considering the large player base on PS4 and Xbox One. Take a look at Tech Deals’ benchmarks for 4, 6 and 8 core CPUs for gaming:
We’ll have more info, including direct comparision with Team blue’s offerings closer to launch. Until then, we can only go by the numbers that AMD has provided in the press release.