Ryzen 3 3300X

The 3300X is a 4-core Ryzen CPU. Priced at just $120 USD, it offers far better value to gamers than all the previous Ryzen CPUs. This is great news for potential buyers, but bad luck for gamers that recently spent nearly three times more on the 8-core 3700X. The reduction from eight to four cores results in more efficient caching and higher boost clocks. AMD’s marketing has abruptly broken from the firmly established “moar cores” mantra to a conveniently realistic: four cores are actually okay. Shifting goalposts this quickly reveals an unhealthy focus on first time buyers and a brazen disregard for existing customers. Sales tactics aside, unfortunately the 3300X remains constrained by architectural latency and the associated gaming bottleneck (frame drops). Comparing an overclocked 3300X pegged at 4425 MHz to a stock Intel Core i3-10100 running at 4100 MHz shows that the i3-10100 delivers better gaming performance in four out of five games. The 10100 also includes an iGPU with QuickSync hardware encoding. Since additional cores make little difference to gamers, there are no significant upgrades beyond the 3300X in the Ryzen product stack. In order to achieve better gaming performance, it is necessary to upgrade to a higher tier Intel CPU. Despite the barrage of anonymous hearsay pushed on social media, users will be hard pressed to find actual use cases that favor the 3300X over the i3-10100, especially when the 10100 is not handicapped by 2666 MHz RAM. Gamers are bottlenecked by the Ryzen architecture and desktop users need integrated graphics. ^{[Jun '20 CPUPro]}