Introduction
AMD has launched its 3rd generation Ryzen 3 Matisse lineup as of May 7th, 2020. The new AMD Ryzen 3 3300X has a great MSRP at $120 and the Ryzen 3 3100 is right at $99 MSRP. These appealing price points put 4 cores/8 threads of CPU performance into the hands of more people. Now people can afford to get into the PCEi 4.0 express supported platform that is AMD B550 and X570 with a 3rd generation Zen 2 core-based Ryzen 3 CPU.
In our Ryzen 3 3300X review, we found the Ryzen 3 3300X CPU to be a great value for the price. With its 4c/8t support and great IPC based on Zen 2 cores, it excelled at the top of the charts in everything compared to the competition Intel Core i5-9400.
The Ryzen 3 3300X offers performance that is faster than what a $305 CPU (the Intel i7-7700K) use to provide. That much performance is now capable of a $120 CPU. It is also less expensive than the competition Intel Core i5-9400 today, giving you better performance that is quite noticeable at a much lower price. Please read our full review of the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and our architecture breakdown of the CPUs. This is our AMD Ryzen 3 3100 review at TheFPSReview.
AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Today’s review is going to focus on how the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 CPU performs against the competition. To that end, we are going to compare the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 to an Intel Core i3-9100F CPU. The Intel Core i3-9100F is a 4 core/4 thread CPU and does not support HyperThreading. It operates at a base frequency of 3.6GHz and a max turbo frequency of 4.2GHz. This max turbo frequency is actually higher than the max turbo frequency of the Intel Core i5-9400.
In terms of core count though, the Ryzen 3 3100 has the same number of physical cores at 4, but of course, supports AMD SMT so that it also has 8 threads total, so we are pitting 4c/4t against 4c/8t. This should be very interesting to see if those four extra threads make a big impact on performance or not.
The Ryzen 3 3100 has a base clock of 3.6GHz and a boost clock of 3.9GHz, so technically the Ryzen 3 3100 runs slower. Both CPUs are a 65W TDP CPU. It will be very interesting to see how these two CPUs compare knowing that as well.
In terms of pricing, the official MSRP for the Intel Core i3-9100F, which lacks the iGPU, was $122. However, current pricing since its introduction has dropped and you can find it online as low as $75 at B&H and Amazon, or even $72.99 at Micro Center. So at launch, the Ryzen 3 3100 would be the cheaper CPU, but now you can actually get the i3-9100F for just a bit cheaper, about a $25 difference. Therefore we have to see how the $99 Ryzen 3 3100 lines up in performance.
