
The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100 CPU Review: A Budget Gaming Bonanza - jjuhl
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15774/the-amd-ryzen-3-3300x-and-3100-cpu-review
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gambiting
So I was recently looking at those as options for a very low budget video
editing PC for someone, and yes, AMD destroys intel in raw CPU performance for
the same price, however in those low-budget applications Intel has an upper
hand - integrated GPU. With AMD you either have to go with the super crappy
3400G, which is a really poor CPU(but also very cheap), or for literally
anything else + a dedicated GPU(which increases the cost significantly above
Intel's offering). I was surprised to find out it's actually cheaper to go
with say i5 9400 with an integrated GPU than with Ryzen 5 3600 + cheapest
dedicated GPU. Yes the dedicated gpu will be better than intel's
offering(marginally so) but if you only care about the CPU performance, don't
have a lot of money and yet you need _something_ to drive your monitor, then
Intel has that integrated GPU to offer that AMD lacks.

~~~
pedrocr
This is really annoying when building a NAS too. Great value CPUs with ECC
support make the configurations great and then you need to spend 50-100€ to
just get boot graphics even though the machine will be headless 99% of the
time. Buying something second hand or from aliexpress defeats the purpose of
trying to build something reliable. The market for low-end discrete GPUs has
all but vanished thanks to Intel integrated GPUs. AMD should add a very basic
GPU to every CPU part just good enough for boot graphics and consoles. All the
motherboards already include the outputs themselves so only a little bit of
silicon in the CPU is missing.

~~~
derefr
> and then you need to spend 50-100€ to just get boot graphics even though the
> machine will be headless 99% of the time.

Buy a serial-over-USB patch cable; connect it from the NAS to your laptop;
open an STTY emulator on the laptop. No boot graphics needed.

~~~
toast0
Still need something for boot graphics for the BIOS, unless non-server
motherboards are coming with serial redirection default enabled and nobody
mentioned it.

~~~
derefr
I mean, why _not_ use a server motherboard (i.e. one supporting AMT; not
necessarily one that requires RDIMMs) if you're building a NAS? NASes _are_
servers in terms of their workload. Take advantages of the features designed
for server customers.

~~~
pedrocr
Availability and cost naturally. A big part of the appeal here is the low
price point for a great spec bare-bones home server using these consumer
parts.

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greendave
I like Anandtech. They have some really great deep dive articles on CPUs and
system architecture. Which is why this type of 'test' is just weird. None of
the CPUs they compare seem to be in the same price bracket. Many aren't even
from the same generation. 7700K? 8086K? 4900HS? Yes, sometimes you have to
work with what you have, but c'mon - at least one somewhat comparable CPU
would've been nice for reference (i3 8100 or i5 9400F).

~~~
all_blue_chucks
They are comparing it against previous gen gaming CPUs to help people trying
to decide if it is worth upgrading.

~~~
greendave
Fair enough. But I would imagine the vast majority of those folks will be
looking at $300-$700 CPUs in that case - going from a top-of-the-line CPU to a
low/mid-grade seems like an unusual choice.

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hellogoodbye
Intel can't match this performance to price ratio

~~~
jeffbee
Maybe but we can't tell from this article which should have compared against
the $75 Core i3-9100F or maybe the $160 Core i5-9400F, instead of filling
their graphs full of unavailable, ancient Intel parts like the 4th-gen core i7
that launched in 2014, and then listing the 2014 MSRP as if that was a
relevant point of comparison.

~~~
makomk
There's a hint as to why they didn't include the i3-9100F in the conclusion
section: "Even with this, Intel's ability to provide enough stock of these
low-end parts, depending on your location, is questionable as previously
mentioned. Case in point: the company never even made it as far as sampling
any of the 9th Generation i3 parts for review."

~~~
jeffbee
You can literally order this part for next-day delivery on Newegg. They are
also, literally, on the shelf at Central Computer.

[https://www.centralcomputer.com/intel-
core-i3-9100f-3-6ghz-4...](https://www.centralcomputer.com/intel-
core-i3-9100f-3-6ghz-4c-4t-fc-lga14-6mbcache-bx80684i39100f.html)

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reaktion
I wanted to update my system with the Ryzen 5 1600 AF, given its value at $85
- but it's no longer in stock anywhere at that price, so the 3300X is looking
appealing.

~~~
all_blue_chucks
Do you find upgrading low end CPUs to be less expensive overall than going
straight to mid range CPUs and skipping the upgrade cycle?

~~~
reaktion
I admit that I'm not as concerned with long-term performance for this system.
I've managed to stretch a Phenom II 1055T for more than 10 years now - my
interest in PC gaming fell off for a while there - so I've already skipped
more than a few upgrade cycles!

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tracer4201
I have a 5 year old Intel i7 CPU. Not to diverge too far from the topic, but
would I have any reason to upgrade my CPU for gaming?

I assume swapping my GTX 760 with a latest generation card would give me
better gaming performance.

~~~
gambiting
Depends which one - I have a 4790K + a GTX1080Ti and I see absolutely no
reason to upgrade. There are no games that I cannot play at near max settings
in 1440p. The only game that has somewhat stretched the CPU is Satisfactory,
but then I think all machines struggle with it once you have a large enough
factory.

~~~
leetcrew
as always, no need to upgrade if you're happy with your current setup. you're
definitely leaving some performance on the table with that combo though. I
just upgraded 4670K -> 9700K also with a 1080 ti and I've seen some nice fps
boosts in most of the games I play. as an added benefit, it's an absolute
beast for c++ compilation. takes less than half the time to build compared to
my actual work computer with a 7700.

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bzb3
How about single core performance? Many games are pegged to one or two cores
only. I've always found the AMD approach of throwing more cores at the problem
not to be optimal.

~~~
gambiting
>> Many games are pegged to one or two cores only

That hasn't been the case for a looong time. But to answer your question, they
are much faster than anything from Intel at comparable pricing:

[https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-amd-r...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-amd-
ryzen-3100-3300x-cpu-review)

"The results here are immediately interesting. Despite costing less than every
other CPU represented, the 3100 manages to tie the Core i5 9600K in single-
core performance and outperform the Ryzen 2600 and 2700X by around 12 per
cent. The 3300X is even more impressive, with a single-core score that exceeds
the Core i7 9700K and only falls behind the Ryzen 9 3900X and Core i9 9900K."

~~~
jdsully
I have a Ryzen 3900X, and also an i5 for software development. With
unoptimized code the Ryzen is pretty close to the i5. But when you start to
really optimize it becomes obvious the i5 has more execution resources and is
faster single threaded.

~~~
ccffpphh
Is this including SPECTRE, etc. mitigations?

~~~
jeffbee
Why would anyone enable speculative execution mitigations on a computer used
to build software?

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londons_explore
Building software with lots of opensource libraries is effectively giving
shell access to the authors of those libraries. They can stick whatever they
like in those build scripts, and there's so many thousands of them I bet you
don't check all of them by hand.

Given that, I'd prefer they had shell access as a low privilege user than be
able to read my ssh keys from RAM...

Obviously if you compile software as your regular linux user account like most
users, you're already a sitting duck, so might as well throw in a few more
vulnerabilities.

