Announced earlier this month, the review embargo for AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 is now gone. The two new SKUs bring fresh wind to the entry-level segment, with good performance and great pricing. While AMD has enjoyed tremendous success with 3rd generation Ryzen in the high-end and upper midrange, the entry-level desktop market hasn't been able to enjoy the technological marvels of the Zen 2 architecture. Previous desktop APU releases and the Athlon 3000G were only Zen and Zen+ based. Besides the Ryzen 3 3300X in this review, we also have a review of the Ryzen 3 3100.

While Intel has been disabling HyperThreading on all their recent quad-core processors, AMD has SMT active on both new CPUs to offer four cores and eight threads, which will definitely help with future-proofing the product. The new processors come at competitive price points, have a fully unlocked multiplier, and support PCI-Express 4.0. Since both are "Matisse" based, they lack an integrated GPU. Under the hood, the two processors are different beyond just clocks and price—their quad-core configuration is achieved using two CCXs on the Ryzen 3 3100 and one CCX on the 3300X. We talked about this on the architecture page and ran some extra testing in all our benchmarks to investigate performance differences.

Ryzen 3 3300X does very well in applications, beating the Ryzen 3 3100 by a significant 12%. The secret sauce is the CCX core design, which puts all CPU cores into a single CCX, whereas the 3100 uses a 2+2 CCX configuration, incurring a latency penalty when cores talk across CCX boundaries. Instead of splitting the L3 cache into two 8 MB partitions, the L3 cache on the Ryzen 3 3300X is one large slab of 16 MB, which all cores have direct access to. This ensures that data isn't duplicated and that cores see a larger overall cache. This also overcomes any imperfections which may exist in Windows 10 thread scheduler that cause the workload to jump between CCXs. Compared to the rest of the market, the Ryzen 3 3300X beats all first-generation Ryzen 5 CPUs, as well as the Ryzen 7 1700. Zen+ doesn't do much better—here, the Ryzen 5 2600X is only able to match the Ryzen 3 3300X. On the Intel side, only the Core i5-x600K models can beat the Ryzen 3 3300X. AMD's six-core Zen 2 processors are around 18% faster, and the 3900X is 50% faster, thanks to its twelve cores. Especially given Ryzen 3 3300X's attractive price point, I'm almost convinced that spending $50-$80 more for a six-core Ryzen 5 3600/3600X is barely worth it for application performance unless most of your apps are heavily multi-threaded. The same goes for Intel, their six-core Core i5's (without HTT) are definitely not worth the investment—they are much more expensive than the Ryzen 3 3300X and can barely keep up in performance because the 3300X has SMT enabled to bring the thread count to eight, which helps in multi-threaded workloads. Overall, the Ryzen 3 3300X is a great step up from the Ryzen 3 3100, especially in lightly threaded applications, where the 3300X can play out its clock advantage, too.

For gaming, the Ryzen 3 3300X is an even more impressive choice. It achieves framerates that are neck-to-neck with Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X. The Ryzen 7 3700X is only 4% faster at 1080p, and Ryzen 9 3900X is 5% faster. If you're planning on 1440p gaming, the Ryzen 3 3300X is still convincing because at higher resolutions, the bottleneck shifts from the CPU to the GPU. Here, the difference to the higher-end Zen 2 processors is almost negligible, only Intel's CPUs can make a difference. For example, the Core i9-9900K can deliver 3% higher frames at 1440p, and the 9900KS gets 5% more—at much higher cost, of course. If you're building a gaming rig, I'd strongly recommend looking at the 3300X as its low cost lets you spend more money for the graphics card, which will net you higher FPS in the end.

In this review we investigated how big the performance difference is between two identically clocked processors—one with four cores spread over two CCXs and the other with all four cores running in a single CCX. These results are highlighted in our "4.0 GHz Fixed" benchmark charts. If you go through them one by one, you'll notice that the differences depend very much on the application. Overall, the difference in apps is around 4%, and for gaming, it's 12% at 720p, 7% at 1080p, 5% at 1440p, and 1% at 4K. These differences are significant, and I'm sure AMD is working on improving them for Zen 3. AMD's next-gen architecture reportedly does away with CCX, placing all cores on the CCD sharing a single slab of L3 cache. The Ryzen 3100 and 3300X may not be the CPUs enthusiasts dream of, but their comparison provides powerful pointers as to where Zen 3 will take AMD's performance proposition.

On a side note, these two new processors not only make Ryzen more attractive for consumers, they also help AMD with "harvesting." This process is the reason why we have so many CPU and GPU variants on the market that are built using the exact same silicon, but with wildly different specs. AMD is now able to make processors using dies that have minor defects, making them unfit for their higher-end CPUs in terms of maximum frequency or because of defects in one CCX, for example.

Energy efficiency of Ryzen 3 3300X is excellent; it's actually the most efficient Zen 2 we ever tested in single-threaded workloads. It seems that running in a 4+0 CCX configuration makes a difference here because the second CCX can be turned off completely, so it won't consume any power. Multi-threaded efficiency is great, too. Here, the 3300X is the most efficient quad-core CPU on the market, beating even Intel's offerings by quite a big margin.

While there was some controversy in the past over which boost speeds Zen 2 should achieve, and whether "up to" is a reasonable excuse, this is no issue on Ryzen 3 3300X. It is marketed with "up to 4.3 GHz" boost and our sample boosted to 4350 MHz most of the time, only reducing clock speeds slightly with six active threads and beyond. We expanded our clock frequency analysis to test not only one load, but floating-point, SSE SIMD, and AVX Vector to determine if there's any difference in clocking depending on the application type. Some differences are visible, but minimal and not worth worrying about.

While overclocking on the Ryzen 3 3100 worked great, the Ryzen 3300X doesn't do so well here despite the "X" suffix. Our highest stable overclock was 4250 MHz, even higher voltage didn't let us go much beyond that. This result is lower than even the rated 4.3 GHz boost of the 3300X. We were puzzled at first, but after some testing realized that depending on the load, the default clocking algorithm of the 3300X will dynamically adjust clocks and voltage to ensure maximum performance without causing instability. We ran our whole benchmarking suite at 4.25 GHz, and if you look at the individual results, you can see that sometimes the stock CPU is faster than that, while slower at others. This means the CPU will sometimes run below 4.25 GHz at stock, sometimes higher. The problem is that manual overclocking doesn't give you enough control. You must ensure that one frequency and voltage fits it all: light loads, heavy loads, and stress tests, with some even using AVX instructions. That's why there's no reason to try overclocking on the Ryzen 3 3300X, at least based on my review sample—the default processor configuration will automagically maximize everything for you, just like on all other Zen 2 Ryzens but for today's Ryzen 3 3100, where overclocking really makes a difference. Even if you are lucky and end up with a Ryzen 3 3300X that can do 4.4 GHz, I'm not convinced it's worth going through all the trouble of getting it stable and cooled for such a tiny performance increase.

Priced at $120, the Ryzen 3 3300X isn't much more expensive than the Ryzen 3 3100 yet offers tangible performance benefits. On the other hand, if cost matters most to you, the Ryzen 3 3100 is definitely worth checking out. For gamers, Ryzen 3 3300X is my new budget top pick. It ensures great framerates that are barely lower than what the more expensive Ryzen 5 or Core i5 processors can offer. Gamers looking for the absolute highest FPS can consider the much more expensive Intel Core i7 and i9 models, but it makes little sense from a price/performance perspective. What I do miss is an integrated GPU in the Ryzen 3 3300X. While not relevant for gamers, the lack of integrated graphics will drive up cost for all other system builders, which might lure them into Intel territory because some competing processors do have integrated graphics that are good enough for desktop usage and media playback.