A
lthough Intel’s 10th-gen CPU launch has nabbed
most of the limelight in tech circles over the past
month, AMD hasn’t been sitting idle either.
Intel’s key desktop CPU competitor has stormed back into
the budget CPU market, bringing out two new sub-£120
CPUs – the Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100, which are
clearly designed to offer competition to Intel below the
Ryzen 5 3600.
Intel has now caught up with AMD on the multi-threading
front, by adding Hyper-Threading to its entire 10th-gen
product stack, including the Core i3 chips, so AMD needs to
compete at this end now too. Over the past couple of years,
AMD has only offered APUs with Radeon Vega graphics as
its more affordable options; no quad-core CPUs without
GPUs have been launched since the original 1st-generation
Ryzen line-up launched in 2017.
The two new CPUs, which we’ve reviewed over the next
few pages, offer four physical cores and eight threads via
Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) – AMD’s equivalent
of Hyper-Threading. However, under the hood, the two
chips are quite different from each other, not just in terms of
frequencies, but also in their topology. The Ryzen 3 3300X
has all its cores sitting on one Core Complex, while the
Ryzen 3 3100 spreads its four cores across two of them.
This means more inter-core latency in the latter, which in
turn means less performance in some tasks.AMD RYZEN 3
The B550 chipset
It’s been nearly a year since AMD introduced the X570 chipset,
along with its 3rd-gen Ryzen CPUs and the Zen 2 architecture,
but we’ve had no cheaper alternative and successor to the
popular B450 chipset until now. The B550 chipset is finally
here now, though, and next month we’ll be taking a look
at some motherboards, but for now there are some key
differences between this new chipset and its predecessor.
Initially, slides pointed at Zen 3 CPUs, which should be due
later in 2020, only being compatible with B550 and X570
motherboards, giving us a pretty good reason to upgrade to
either chipset. However, AMD has since bowed to community
furore online and backtracked, offering ‘an upgrade path’ to
Zen 3 with B450 and X470 motherboard owners.
This leaves just a couple of reasons for owners of these
older motherboards to upgrade to B550. While the new
chipset itself doesn’t offer PCI-E 4 support, with the downlink
from the CPU only supporting PCI-E 3, the CPU can support
up to two PCI-E 4 devices on a B550 motherboard –
namely your graphics card and an M.2 SSD, with full PCI-E
4 bandwidth. There’s also the benefit that
you won’t need to update the BIOS on
B550 boards in order to use a Zen 2 CPU,
although many new B450 boards ship with
compatible BIOS versions now anyway.
The key, then, given these limited
gains, will be the price. Thankfully, B550
motherboard prices that have slipped out
so far paint a very rosy picture, with them
sitting roughly in line with B450 models.
That’s great news for people looking to
build a new budget Ryzen system from
scratch. However, unless you really want
a high-speed PCI-4 SSD in your budget rig,
there’s little point in upgrading from a B450
motherboard to a newer B550 model,
unless a specific board takes your fancy.REVIEWS / PROCESSORS