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 '20CPUPro]
The 5800X3D has the same core architecture as the 5800X but it runs at 11% lower base and 4% lower boost clocks. The lower clocks are in exchange for an extra 64MB of cache (96MB up from 32MB) and around 40% more money. For most real-world tasks performance is comparable to the 5800X. Cache sensitive scenarios such as low res. canned game benchmarks with a 3090-Ti ($2,000 USD) benefit at the cost of everything else. Be wary of sponsored reviews with cherry picked games that showcase the wins, conveniently ignore frame drops and gloss over the losses. Also watch out for AMD’s army of Neanderthal social media accounts on reddit, forums and youtube, they will be singing their own praises as usual. Instead of focusing on real-world performance, AMD’s marketers aim to dupe consumers with bankrolled headlines. The same tactics were used with the Radeon 5000 series GPUs. Zen 4 needs to bring substantial IPC improvements for all workloads, rather than overpriced "3D" marketing gimmicks. New PC builders have little reason to look further than the $260 12600K which, at a fraction of the price, offers better all round performance in gaming, desktop and workstation applications. Users with an existing AM4 build should wait just a few more months for better performance at lower prices with Raptor Lake or even Zen 4. The marketers selling expensive “3D” upgrades today will quickly move onto Zen 4 (3D) leaving unfortunate buyers stuck on an overpriced, 6 year old, dead-end, platform. [Mar '22CPUPro]
We calculate effective speed which measures real world performance for typical users. Effective speed is adjusted by current prices to yield a value for money rating. Our calculated values are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top CPUs. [CPUPro]
Welcome to our PC speed test tool. UserBenchmark will test your PC and compare the results to other users with the same components. You can quickly size up your PC, identify hardware problems and explore the best value for money upgrades.