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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ksec - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
It was only yday I asked on forum what is happening to Intel 7nm CPU. We know Tiger Lake is coming, then there is Alderlake. And that is it.Again, despite all these, AMD needs to "sell" better. The results from their quarterly report are no way near good enough.
outsideloop - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Hardware Unboxed includes the 9th Gen i3 and i5 parts against these new Ryzens, in their testing.CrystalCowboy - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
About the test setup: No PCIe 4.0 graphics cards. No PCIe 4.0 NVME SSD. You are handicapping these CPUs by not letting them take full advantage of their features. If an older or lesser CPU cannot support these features, well then it deserves to score lower for it. You did use DDR4-3200 RAM, thanks for that.Ian Cutress - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Users with a $99 CPU are going to use a PCIe 4.0 SSD? really?How do I keep the storage element consistent between tests then, to make sure I'm actually testing the CPU? How do I keep that storage constant for CPUs 10 years ago?
Makaveli - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Yup Ian,That complaint is ridiculous, almost no one is going PCIe 4 storage in a budget build.
MDD1963 - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
can't wait for a water block equipped X570 for $800 and the R3-3100 to get the best OC's possible with muh PCI-e 4.0 storage......!!!! :) (Who cares if PCI-e 4.0 drives sometimes fare 1-3% worse than the 970 EVO in some real world comparisons!)eastcoast_pete - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
Maybe it's because after buying a PCIe 4 capable MB and a PCIe 4 SSD, I wouldn't have any money left to buy a CPU for more than $ 100? Kidding, of course, this challenge makes no sense.That aside, it would be interesting to see what kind of CPU can actually make good use of PCIe 4 capable MBs and fast storage.
Deicidium369 - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
$500 Car w/ $10,000 rimsMDD1963 - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Yes, PCI-e 4.0 SSDs would have help *so much* on ... gaming frame rates.... <exaggerated overtly obvious eye roll> :)eastcoast_pete - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Thanks Ian! If possible, please add some performance numbers for the current i3 and i5 in. Right now, AMD owns the below $200 space for desktop CPUs. Also, data from other websites that had some i5-9100 on hand show that the 3100 A.K.A AMD's leftover dies, are outperforming Intel's offerings here.Really hope Intel steps up, and soon. I'm hoping to buy something later this year, so whoever gives me the most bang for my buck gets my money.