The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100 CPU Review: A Budget Gaming Bonanza
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 7, 2020 9:00 AM EST*We are currently in the middle of revisiting our CPU gaming benchmarks, but the new suite was not ready in time for this review. We plan to add in some new games (Borderland 3, Gears Tactics) and also upgrade our gaming GPU to a RTX 2080 Ti.
Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.
Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Spunjji - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
The issue is that it's not informed. It's codswallop.PeterCollier - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
You're talking about the article.Spunjji - Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - link
🤡psychobriggsy - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Considering it shows the $120 AMD offering comprehensively beating the old i7-7700K, and says the current Intel budget offerings will be slower, and recommends the AMD processors, I find this comment rather brain dead.WaltC - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
One question I had is why AT chose to use the 2600 instead of the 3600...? Makes no sense to me, as the 3600 runs at 65W and the 3600X runs at 95W--just like the 2600--only the 3600 is appreciably faster--but costs the same! 3600 is MIA. No question but that the review benchmarks clearly demonstrate the superiority of the AMD offerings, but we already knew that. I see the omission here--deliberate--of the 3600--while including $425 Intel 6c/12t offerings--as surely an apology for Intel's inability to compete. Such is not needed, really. Apologizing in subtle ways for Intel is, I think, a pretty poor way to write a review on CPUs Intel cannot at the present time compete with--the 3100/3300. Getting right down to it--there was no need to include *any* 6c/12t CPUs here, right? Should have been comparisons only with Intel/AMD 4c/8t cpus, exclusively, imo. Selection of CPUS for *this review* didn't make any objective sense that I could see--beyond the obvious, of course (at least you didn't forget and leave the 3100/3300 out...;))evilspoons - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
I'm guessing the omission of the 3600X has something to do with, at the time I read this, they hadn't even finished all the benchmarks for the 3100. You know, the one in the headline. I don't think it's a conspiracy, just a time constraint.crimson117 - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
They didn't rerun the 2600 for this, they used existing benchmarks.They haven't ever benchmarked the 3600 previously, so it's not listed here. They do have the 3700X, however, which is essentially the same performance as a 3600 (except in heavily threaded workloads): https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2520?vs=25...
MDD1963 - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
I saw other testers on Youtube use the 3600, and, the 3300X was VERY surprisingly close to it's performance...; the 3300X's clearly quite strong threads and lack of inter -CCX -RAM latency issues are reaping benefits!BenSkywalker - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
The choices they use to compare are utterly bizarre. A three and a half year old Intel i7 and last generation Ryzen parts....?Legitimately, this review is useless if you are shopping *today*, not just from a team red versus team blue, but where this processor sits in today's market, no clue after reading this. One of my friends was looking for a budget gaming build and I was looking at a 3200G/B450 setup, how does this compare? Instead let's assume people have a time machine and are cross shopping two gen old Ryzen and three green old Intel parts....?
The charts aren't bad, they are terrible. Have an old i7 in there for reference, ok, put current Ryzen 3 and i3 inn there and if you don't have enough time *only* include them.
rabidpeach - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
bro, they try to make a point with the reviews. if you want this comparison you use the cpubench feature of this website and compare any chip they tested on any of the tests they have. it's an actual feature not a bug. the point of this article and tests is to show entry level amd 100 price point is as powerful as 3 year old flagship-ish intel for the mainstream. it shows against the zen and zen+ hexacores that it catches up to them in many situations despite lacking in cores. this shows you amd is not just throwing cores at intel anymore. they have ipc too! ok any more spoon-feeding? would you prefer a spork?