The AMD Ryzen 3 3100, like the Ryzen 3300X, is a quad-core, 8-thread CPU designed for budget gamers; the 3100 has a base clock of 3.6 GHz and turbo of 3.9 GHz, while the 3300X has a base clock of 3.8 GHz and turbo of 4.3 GHz The 3300X has a base clock of 3.8 GHz and Turbo is 4.3 GHz. On paper, the 3100 appears to be only slightly slower than AMD's 3300X, but in reality it is much more than that.

We have already discussed the features of the Ryzen 3 3100 in our review of the Ryzen 3 3300X, but it is still worth talking about the pros and cons of this slightly cheaper $99 chip, because while these two budget chips from AMD have a lot in common, there are enough differences to score them separately They are both different enough to score them separately.

Both the 3100 and 3300X lay out two quad-core CCXs, but while the 3100 has two active cores in each CCX, the 3300X has all four active cores in one CCX, with the other CCX dormant and probably not functioning at all. The advantage of this is that it reduces the latency of communication between cores in the same CCX, which has a noticeable impact on performance. Thus, even with the higher clock of the 3100, the 3300X still performs better.

However, the 3100 does have its advantages. I was able to increase the clock and voltage enough to compete with the 3300X in the Cinebench R15 synthetic benchmark. In practice, however, this is not reflected in the other tests, where the 3300X still holds an impressive lead. It is also not particularly practical or recommended to run the 3100 that hard, and even though the 3100 can be easily overclocked with the stock air-cooled cooler, it would really be preferable to run it at 4.2 GHz or even lower at 1.325V.

The main problem with overclocking this chip is that you will want to replace the included Wraith Stealth to keep it cool enough for long-term OC. The moment you do that, you begin to undermine the main reason for this chip's existence. In fact, the Ryzen 3 3100 feels like it exists solely to say that AMD got a competitive gaming chip for under $100. [But when it becomes obvious that you can get the Ryzen 3 3300X for only $20 more and it is a much better chip, the whole reason for its existence starts to fall apart. Basically, I can't imagine a scenario where I would recommend saving $20 and getting the 3100 over the 3300X. the performance difference that the 3300X has over the 3100, even when heavily overclocked on a cheaper chip, is substantial. it's not that the Ryzen 3 3100 is a bad CPU It is not that the Ryzen 3100 is a bad CPU, but rather that the 3300X is far superior. [The 3100 lags behind its slightly more expensive sibling in almost all tests, and even against the quad-core, 8-thread Intel Core i7/7700K we used for comparison, it doesn't fare much better. It did not fare much better against the 7700K either. [As with the 3300X, the impending release of the B550 motherboard is important to the overall value proposition, but the B550 is generally expected to cost $100, much more than you can currently get for a B450 board, so to keep the overall outlay down It may be happier to combine this chip with the B450 to reduce the overall expense. This means that there will no longer be support for PCIe Gen-4 NVMe drives, but given that this is an expensive storage solution anyway, it may make more sense if your budget is limited.

Again, there are no integrated graphics here, so it would need to be paired with a graphics card. A general rule of thumb is that you should spend about twice as much on the GPU as on the CPU, which in the case of this $99 CPU is equivalent to something like a GeForce GTX 1650 Super. This inexpensive Turing card can be had for about $160, and the Radeon RX 5500 XT 4GB, which offers about the same performance, can be had for about $170 (the Radeon RX 5500XT 8GB is slightly better than the 1650 Super, but usually starts at $200).

So what about the Ryzen 3 3100? To be honest, it's a bit difficult to say. On its own, it's a great budget processor that will outperform more expensive chips. But it is still the Ryzen 3 3300X that matters here. The only thing the 3100 has going for it is that it can be overclocked, which might be interesting for those who genuinely like to tinker with such things.