CPU Performance

Pricing is good, but performance is where it’s at. For that, I tested both CPUs through our entire test suite which allows us to also compare how they perform against current and past CPUs. Sadly I don’t have either of the direct comparisons from Intel with the Core i3-9100 for the Ryzen 3 3100 and the Core i5-9400 against the 3300X. But I’m most excited about seeing how they compare against some of the 4 core CPUs from the past like the 7700K. My first two tests were x264 focused with x264 HD 4.0 and 5.0 and both CPUs wouldn’t be my first choice when looking at encoding performance but they didn’t do too bad, especially in the older 4.0 benchmark where the 3300X excelled.

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Sticking with the encoding I also tested with Handbrake, taking a 4K video down to 1080p30. There both CPUs look lower on the charts, but there aren’t any of the older CPUs for comparison. Even running close to the 2600. Then in blender, rendering their quick benchmark took 1289 seconds for the 3300X and 1422 for the 3100 which was better than the 8086K which is impressive considering its 6 cores and higher clock speed.

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For the always popular Cinebench, I ran the older R15 test which better fits a 4 core CPU and the new R20 for high core count CPUs. Both came in ahead of the 7700K for multithreaded in R15 and the 3300X stayed ahead in the single-core testing. In R20 the 3300X did even better for the single-core test, running with the big boy 3000 CPUs of course in the multi-threaded test they fell off and were back closer to reality with the 3300X outperforming the 7700K there and the 3100 just behind it.

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For ray tracing tests I ran POV-Ray and V-Ray. PVO-Ray is tested at both single and multi-core which I always love. The 3300X and the Intel 8400 were right with each other in the multi-core test, not bad for a four-core vs a 6 core, and the 3300X pulled ahead in the V-Ray benchmark slightly.

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For CPUz I ended up running two sets of tests. The normal CPUz benchmark that I’ve been running which tests single and multi-core performance. Then the new test which drops that and looks at CPU and FPU performance. The results were similar to what I’ve seen in the other tests where the 3300X really excelled in the single-core performance and ran with higher core count CPUs like the i5 8400 and was ahead of the R5 1500X which is the first generation Ryzen 4 Core CPU with a higher clock speed than the 3300X which really shows how much things have improved.

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Going back to the basics I tested with wPrime which is an old overclocking favorite that takes a look at the time it takes to calculate prime out to 1024 million. The 3300X outperformed the i7 7700 here and the 3100 even outperformed that six-core i5-8400!

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For testing file compression and decompression, I used 7-Zip where I took a look at an overall combined result and then both compression and decompression results. In the combined test both the 3300X and 3100 came in ahead of the i7-7700K and not far behind the 1600X which while a little older was a fast 6 core CPU at the Ryzen launch.

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Jetstream 2 is a compilation browser-based test that takes different Java and HTML5 tests and runs them all three times and combines them for an overall score. I like the test because your browser will most likely see more sue than any other. It does like to favor lower threaded CPUs sometimes when they have good clock speeds which is why you see the 3300X up at the top ahead of CPUs like the 9900K.

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Next, I went with Passmark Performance Test 9 which they have version 10 out now but when testing I didn’t have an updated key. Passmark runs a few tests and combines all of the results together for an overall CPU score. It likes to favor high core count CPUs which you can see with those Core-X CPUs up at the top but even then the 3300X did well, outperforming the 2600X and the 1700 and both outperforming the i7-7700K and the 1500X.

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For more of a general look, I like PCMark 10 which runs a series of real-world usage tests like web browsing, Excel, and Word documents, video calls, and other uses. The 3300X again did really well here, even outperforming the 8700K and the 3100was down near the middle of the chart but ahead of all of the older Ryzen CPUs as well as running right with that 6 core i5-8400.

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Dolphin 5.0 isn’t a benchmark that you see often but I love that it is an emulator test and it doesn’t care much at all about the number of cores you have making it a great example of an older program that doesn’t support high core counts. The 3300X did well, completing the test is the exact same amount of time as the 3900X and the 3100 beat the 2700X by a big amount as well.

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Diving into gaming a little I start with the synthetic 3DMark benchmark. Specifically, the Fire Strike test and I look at the Physics Score which is a CPU specific result. This is a test where Intel normally does better and you can see that with both CPUs below the halfway mark. But still, the 3300X outperformed the 7700K and the 3100 wasn’t far behind.

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For actual in game testing, I ran a few different tests, but I am looking at them all together. I tested using Ashes of the Singularity which is almost more of a synthetic than a game, Ghost Recon Wildlands, TF2 for a look at an older game, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Far Cry 5 for something new, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. All were tested at 1080p and all were tested at medium to high detail with the exception of TF2 which is done with the settings cranked. I want to see actual performance that you would see in real life, not an ultra-low resolution or detail. But at the same time, I also don’t want it to be all 4k and high detail with the GPU being the main thing affecting the results. That 4.3 GHz boost clock on the Ryzen 3 3300X really helped. You can find it in the top half of the chart every time and in cases, like TF2 it outperformed all of the older high-end Intels with just the 9900K out ahead. The 3100 didn’t do nearly as well. But was still far from the bottom of the charts which given its place in AMD's product stack is impressive. The 3100 outperformed a lot of the older Ryzen CPUs as well which shows the big improvements AMD has made in gaming with higher clock speeds and bigger and lower latency cache and memory.

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I did also run the whole series of tests in AIDA64 which let us take a look at aspects like memory speeds, latency, and cache performance. There are so many results though I am unable to graph them all and keep them readable. Things that stood out to me were how the 3300X’s cache speeds and latencies were noticeably better than the 3100 due to it not being split up 2x2 like the 3100.

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