AMD Ryzen 3 3300X And 3100 Review: Serious Quad-Core Value

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 07, 2020, 09:15 AM EDT

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AMD Ryzen 3 3100 & 3300X Review - System Level Benchmarks

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first made sure all firmwares were up to date, then we entered each system's respective BIOS / UEFI and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance" defaults. We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory frequency to the maximum officially supported speed for the given platform (without overclocking). The SSDs were then formatted, and the latest build of Windows 10 Pro x64 was installed and fully updated.

The AMD Ryzen 3 3100 & 3300X

When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers necessary for our components, disabled Auto-Updating and Windows Defender, and installed all of our benchmarking software. When that process was done, we performed a disk clean-up, cleared any temp and prefetch data, and optimized all of the SSDs using Windows' built-in utility. Finally, we enabled Windows Focus Assist to minimize any potential interruptions and let the systems reach an idle state before invoking a test.

HotHardware's Test Systems

Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2020

Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with the latest version of SiSoftware's SANDRA 2020, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in sub-system tests that partially comprise the suite with the Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cache and Memory, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the CPUs running at their default settings, with 16GB of DDR4 RAM running at 3,200MHz, in dual-channel mode, on the MSI MEG X570 Godlike motherboard.

AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Processor Arithmetic

AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Multi-Media

AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Memory Bandwidth

AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Cache And Memory

AMD Ryzen 3 3300X
Processor Arithmetic

AMD Ryzen 3 3300X
Multi-Media

AMD Ryzen 3 3300X
Memory Bandwidth

AMD Ryzen 3 3300X
Cache And Memory

What's immediate apparent by these early numbers, is that the Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X offer relatively strong performance, especially considering their price points. Both of the CPUs put up numbers in-line with 6th and 7th Generation quad-core Core i7 processors. Memory bandwidth is north of ~36GB/s and cache / memory latency is somewhat similar between the two processors (33ns vs. 31.9ns), though the Ryzen 3 3300X with its single-CCX setup technically had an edge in that regard.

Geekbench

Synthetic CPU Testing

In the GeekBench test, we're stressing only the CPU cores in a system (not graphics or GPU architecture), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The tests are comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and other general purpose compute processing workloads.

The Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X both outpaced the Ryzen 5 3400G in the GeekBench CPU tests. The Ryzen 3 3300X also outran the Core i5-9600K in the single-threaded test, but trailed slightly when under a multithreaded load.

PCMark 10

System Level Benchmark

Next, up we have some full-system testing with PCMark. We're reporting all test results from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, including the Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation and and total PCMark score. The Essentials test covers workloads like web browsing, video conferencing and app start-up times, while Productivity tests everyday office apps from spreadsheets to word processing. Finally, the Digital Content Creation test evaluates performance of a machine with respect to photo and video editing, as well as rendering and visualization.

The Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X put up some nice scores in PCMark10. At their respective price points, both processors are strong performers. We see the Ryzen 3 3300X finishing well out in front of the Core i5-9600X, and the Ryzen 3 3100 lands somewhere in between the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X.

Speedometer 2.0

Web App Performance Testing

Next up, we have some numbers from the Speedometer 2.0 test available at browserbench.org. The Speedometer Benchmark Suite uses a wide array of latency and throughput benchmarks to evaluate web application performance, and all of the results are tabulated into a final score. The benchmark measures performance of an array of browser-based technologies used on modern, rich web applications. Scores in this benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing and running advanced web apps.

All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Microsoft's Edge browser, with default browser settings, on a clean install of Windows 10 Professional x64.

The Ryzen 3 3300X's higher clocks and single-CCX setup (which lowers intra-core and cache latency) allowed it to significantly outperform the Ryzen 3 3100 in Speedometer. In fact, it was so speedy in this test that it was about to outrun the Core i9-9900K. Its updated architecture also allowed the entry-level Ryzen 3 3100 to outperform the previous-gen flagship Ryzen 7 2700X.