The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100 CPU Review: A Budget Gaming Bonanza
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 7, 2020 9:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Web and Legacy Tests
While more the focus of low-end and small form factor systems, web-based benchmarks are notoriously difficult to standardize. Modern web browsers are frequently updated, with no recourse to disable those updates, and as such there is difficulty in keeping a common platform. The fast paced nature of browser development means that version numbers (and performance) can change from week to week. Despite this, web tests are often a good measure of user experience: a lot of what most office work is today revolves around web applications, particularly email and office apps, but also interfaces and development environments. Our web tests include some of the industry standard tests, as well as a few popular but older tests.
We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks
Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a accrued test over a series of JavaScript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.
Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics. We report this final score.
Google Octane 2.0: Core Web Compute
A popular web test for several years, but now no longer being updated, is Octane, developed by Google. Version 2.0 of the test performs the best part of two-dozen compute related tasks, such as regular expressions, cryptography, ray tracing, emulation, and Navier-Stokes physics calculations.
The test gives each sub-test a score and produces a geometric mean of the set as a final result. We run the full benchmark four times, and average the final results.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: Core Web Compute
Even older than Octane is Kraken, this time developed by Mozilla. This is an older test that does similar computational mechanics, such as audio processing or image filtering. Kraken seems to produce a highly variable result depending on the browser version, as it is a test that is keenly optimized for.
The main benchmark runs through each of the sub-tests ten times and produces an average time to completion for each loop, given in milliseconds. We run the full benchmark four times and take an average of the time taken.
3DPM v1: Naïve Code Variant of 3DPM v2.1
The first legacy test in the suite is the first version of our 3DPM benchmark. This is the ultimate naïve version of the code, as if it was written by scientist with no knowledge of how computer hardware, compilers, or optimization works (which in fact, it was at the start). This represents a large body of scientific simulation out in the wild, where getting the answer is more important than it being fast (getting a result in 4 days is acceptable if it’s correct, rather than sending someone away for a year to learn to code and getting the result in 5 minutes).
In this version, the only real optimization was in the compiler flags (-O2, -fp:fast), compiling it in release mode, and enabling OpenMP in the main compute loops. The loops were not configured for function size, and one of the key slowdowns is false sharing in the cache. It also has long dependency chains based on the random number generation, which leads to relatively poor performance on specific compute microarchitectures.
3DPM v1 can be downloaded with our 3DPM v2 code here: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)
x264 HD 3.0: Older Transcode Test
This transcoding test is super old, and was used by Anand back in the day of Pentium 4 and Athlon II processors. Here a standardized 720p video is transcoded with a two-pass conversion, with the benchmark showing the frames-per-second of each pass. This benchmark is single-threaded, and between some micro-architectures we seem to actually hit an instructions-per-clock wall.
GeekBench4: Synthetics
A common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench 4 is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.
I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).
We record the main subtest scores (Crypto, Integer, Floating Point, Memory) in our benchmark database, but for the review we post the overall single and multi-threaded results.
249 Comments
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Spunjji - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
What a worthless comment. Sure, they included high-end Intel CPUs in the gaming sections - but the review isn't *about* high-end CPUs, it's about what you get for the money with these specific AMD CPUs. Comparing AMD's budget gaming CPU to the best available to see how little you lose is a valid comparison to make.jjjag - Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - link
Anandtech can no longer write a simple factual article anymore about any processor. Even this article, which is supposed to be a simple article about a new low-cost processor, uses the word "Bonanza" in the title, mysteriously It also takes multiple jabs at Intel in the body, even though it servers no purpose to the actual content. Every Anand article is now an opinion piece instead of responsible reporting.Spunjji - Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - link
"I hate content with flavour. I want lists of graphs with no words."Good for you. Off you go to userbenchmark, for worthless, context-free information that's appropriately biased towards your preferred team.
rdgoodri - Friday, May 15, 2020 - link
Its pretty positive for AMD, don't catch your angle here.Meteor2 - Tuesday, August 4, 2020 - link
This article absolutely rips into Intel, and rightly so.Your comment is bizarre.
PeterCollier - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
And what's the point of these new benchmarks? I prefer PCMark and Userbench. Basically no one is using their new CPU to simulate the neurons of a sea slug, for example. Utterly irrelevant to real-life usage.Mansoor - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
The purpose of a benchmark is to produce repeatable and reliable numbers. Just "doing real-life stuff" is not repeatable and will generate different numbers for everyone. If you have a specific use case in mind, you can observe relevant or related benchmarks.PeterCollier - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
None of my use cases mesh with any of the lousily selected benchmarks in this review.Korguz - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
then why are you here reading this article ?PeterCollier - Saturday, May 9, 2020 - link
I read articles from all sources, including the silicon-equivalent of Faux News. I find it a good practice to read from sources that you disagree with, or worse, purposely mislead you, because it's important not to create an echo chamber for one's self.