The 3300X is a 4-core Ryzen CPU. Priced at just $120 USD, it offers far better value to gamers than all the Ryzen CPUs before it. This is great news for potential buyers, and bad luck for gamers that recently spent nearly three times more on the comparable 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 okay. Maybe they had an epiphany: “less coars”! Shifting goalposts this quickly reveals both an unhealthy focus on first time buyers and a brazen disregard for existing customers. Marketing aside, the 3300X remains constrained by high architectural latency and the associated gaming bottleneck (frame drops). Comparing the 3300X to the Intel Core i3-10100 shows that, for similar money, the i3-10100 delivers around 10% better gaming performance. Aside from the mob of marketers that steamroll social media with anonymous accounts (reddit, forums, comments etc.), gamers will be hard pressed to find arguments that favor the 3300X over the i3-10100. In order to remain viable, the higher end Ryzen CPUs will need to see substantial price cuts over the coming days. ^{[May '20 CPUPro]}

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