When AMD announced the new Ryzen 3 processors built on Zen 2, I was under the impression that these were essentially the reject parts from AMD’s successful Ryzen 3000 line. Inside is a single chiplet with only four cores active out of eight, pushing up to 4.3 GHz; but the kicker was the low price of $120 for the high frequency version, or $99 for a bit slower. AMD has sold quad-core CPUs at $99 for a while, but this is the new core and the new manufacturing process, so would this be any different? We put them up against a $350 quad core from three years ago. It seemed like a crazy idea at the time.

AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs: Chiplets Go Mainstream

After successful launches of the Ryzen 9, Ryzen 7, and Ryzen 5 families of Zen 2 hardware, AMD has been sitting pretty at north of $200. At each price point, the company offered a compelling option against the competition, as we’ve noted in our reviews of hardware like the 3950X, 3900X, and 3700X. Others, like the Ryzen 5 3600, are some of the best sellers in Amazon’s top list. As we noted in our recent CPU buyers’ guide, out of the top 10 spots on Amazon’s best seller list for CPUs, AMD has 8 of them, and the first 5.

That’s all well and good for the higher end of the market, however in the sub-$200 category, this is where the volume often is. Intel has been neglecting this market of late, due to the abnormally high demand for Xeon silicon forcing manufacturing to spend more time on 28-core hardware than quad-core hardware. This leaves the door open for AMD, so it was always going to be interesting what the company did here. For a long time, AMD did nothing, pushing users to its Ryzen 2000 hardware or Ryzen 3000 APUs, namely because they were selling really well (the Ryzen 2600 / 1600 AF offers 6 cores for as low as $85).

With the recent launch of AMD’s latest Ryzen Mobile generation APUs, based on Zen 2 and Vega, we were unsure whether AMD would fill this sub-$200 gap with desktop versions of those APUs, or offer lower binned Ryzen 5 3000 parts. After a very successful launch of Ryzen Mobile 4000, leading to some stellar reviews, it was clear that the mobile silicon was commanding a strong premium in the market, and so we get Matisse based CPUs coming to the sub-$200 segment instead. With that, on April 21^st, AMD announced its new Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 processors.

AMD 'Matisse' Ryzen 3000 Series CPUs
AnandTech		Cores Threads		Base Freq	Boost Freq	L2 Cache	L3 Cache	PCIe 4.0	Chiplets IO+CPU	TDP	Price (SEP)
Ryzen 9	3950X	16C	32T	3.5	4.7	8 MB	64 MB	16+4+4	1+2	105W	$749
Ryzen 9	3900X	12C	24T	3.8	4.6	6 MB	64 MB	16+4+4	1+2	105W	$499
Ryzen 9	3900	12C	24T	3.1	4.3	6 MB	64 MB	16+4+4	1+2	65W	OEM
Ryzen 7	3800X	8C	16T	3.9	4.5	4 MB	32 MB	16+4+4	1+1	105W	$399
Ryzen 7	3700X	8C	16T	3.6	4.4	4 MB	32 MB	16+4+4	1+1	65W	$329
Ryzen 5	3600X	6C	12T	3.8	4.4	3 MB	32 MB	16+4+4	1+1	95W	$249
Ryzen 5	3600	6C	12T	3.6	4.2	3 MB	32 MB	16+4+4	1+1	65W	$199
Ryzen 5	3500X	6C	6T	3.6	4.1	3 MB	32 MB	16+4+4	1+1	65W	OEM
Ryzen 3	3300X	4C	8T	3.8	4.3	2 MB	16 MB	16+4+4	1+1	65W	$120
Ryzen 3	3100	4C	8T	3.6	3.9	2 MB	16 MB	16+4+4	1+1	65W	$99

Filling the bottom at price points of $99 and $120 is very aggressive. Here is AMD’s latest generation Zen 2 hardware, on a 7nm TSMC high performance manufacturing node, bundled with a 14nm IO die from GlobalFoundries, packaged together with frequencies up to 4.3 GHz. At the time of the announcement, we noted that AMD is going to be competing with itself a lot here, for performance and price. Suddenly that $85 Ryzen 5 1600AF only looks appetizing if you want six Zen 1 cores – four Zen 2 cores at higher frequencies and higher IPCs for $99 on paper is probably the better deal.

Both processors officially support DDR4-3200, and AMD is reiterating that DDR4-3600/3733 is a nice sweet spot for those purchasing faster memory. Both chips also have 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes from the chipset: 16 for PCIe, 4 for an M.2 drive, and 4 for the chipset. For X570 chipsets, these should be running in PCIe 4.0 mode – for B550 chipsets and others, these chipset lanes will run in PCIe 3.0 mode (see below).

AMD sampled us both the Ryzen 3 3300X and the Ryzen 3 3100 for review. These only arrived recently, so we are still in the process of benchmarking the chips on a few benchmarks.

Elephant in the Room: B550 Motherboards

One of the key points for a cheaper build is often a cheaper motherboard. AMD and Intel both supply the market with mid-range and low-end chipsets, which motherboard manufacturers then use to build something more palatable in the $60 to $120 range. Technically AMD is also launching the B550 chipset today too, offering PCIe 4.0 from the CPU and PCIe 3.0 from the chipset, however news on these motherboards has been quite thin. We haven’t received one to test with these processors, which makes an X570 + Ryzen 3 review somewhat non-real world.

AMD has provided us will a full list of motherboard compatibility charts for all of the AM4 processors aligned with all of the AM4 motherboards. Due to technical limitations around BIOS size (i.e. motherboard vendors using too small of BIOS chips), only various families of hardware are verified in different motherboards. Most motherboards will likely accept processors outside these designations, especially if the vendor has used a larger BIOS chip, however AMD is putting these guidelines in to make it easier to follow. So while AM4 is heralded as a platform that can support ‘A-Series to 16-cores’, and it does, but only across several boards - very few boards (if any) will support the full gamut of hardware.

As for B550, the chipset looks very similar to B450 but with some upgrades. Rather than PCIe 2.0 support from the chipset, we get PCIe 3.0, with a PCIe 3.0 uplink to the processor. B550 motherboards will also be engineered to support PCIe 4.0 from the CPU, which means at least the first (and perhaps the second) PCIe slot will be PCIe 4.0 enabled, and there should also be an M.2 slot.

These are the cheaper motherboards, so we’re not expecting any miracles here. B550 is designed to support 3000-series Matisse CPUs only, so AMD is suggesting that current APUs in the market (3200G/3400G) aren’t really suited for this board if they work at all.

AMD claims there are over 60 B550 motherboards in development. Some of them look very flash, which makes me wonder if there won’t be $300 B550 models on the shelves. That’s a scary thought.

A Word on Competition

With Intel staying on the Skylake microarchitecture for another generation in Comet Lake, and the competitiveness of Ryzen 3000 so far, I was keen to see if AMD is able to surpass Intel at the quad core level. Intel finally stopped giving us quad cores at the top Core i7 after Kaby Lake (7th gen Core), with the Core i7-7700 at 65 W and i7-7700K at 91 W. These were $350 parts in 2017, offering 4.2 GHz base frequency and 4.5 GHz turbo for the 7700K. That’s a frequency advantage over the 3300X, but the 3300X has a better IPC.

• AMD Ryzen 3 3300X: Zen 2, 4C/8T, 3.9-4.3 GHz, 65 W, DDR4-3200, 24x PCIe 4.0, $120
• Intel Core i7-7700K: Kaby Lake, 4C/8T, 4.2-4.5 GHz, 91 W, DDR4-2400, 16x PCIe 3.0, $350

Can AMD’s $120 CPU in 2020 give the same performance as Intel’s 2017 flagship CPU at only a third of the cost???

Sounds insane, doesn’t it?

There’s a Difference between the 3300X and 3100

Without probing any deeper, one might assume there’s little to separate the Ryzen 3 3300X and the Ryzen 3 3100 aside from a few hundred MHz and some cost. To our surprise, it goes deeper than that. Due to whatever binning is in place, AMD is using two different core configurations for these chips, despite both being quad core.

Both Ryzen 3 processors have a single eight core chiplet, from which only four cores are active.

On the Ryzen 3 3300X, all of those four cores come from the same quad-core CCX, providing a unified latency platform for the cores to use. It comes in a ‘4+0’ configuration, with one CCX fully active, and the other one disabled.

On the Ryzen 3 3100, the four cores come from two different CCXes, which adds extra complexity to the latency structure. If a core in one CCX wants to communicate with the other CCX, it has to send a request out through the Infinity Fabric, which adds latency. This is called the ‘2+2’ configuration.

Both designs are built with 16 MB of L3 cache, and with the 3300X that is all on one CCX, but split for the 3100.

The performance penalty this incurs is difficult to predict. Because of the lower core count than the other Ryzen hardware, the effect of this split on the Ryzen 3 3100 is going to be more pronounced than others. On our part, we ran our core-to-core latency tests.

For the Ryzen 3 3300X, as you can see, we have a unified latency topology.

Whereas for the Ryzen 3 3100, as it is slower and has the dual CCX layout, this translates to a 5+ nanosecond addition to go within a CCX, but a 50+ nanosecond additional between CCXes. Aside from the frequency difference, this will be a driving factor in our review.

For completeness, here's the Core i7-7700K, which is almost 33% faster on core-to-core transfers against core-to-core within a CCX.

 

Read on to find out more.

Power Consumption and Frequency Ramps

On the box, both processors are listed as having 65 W TDPs. With its Zen-based hardware, AMD has been relatively good at staying around that official on-the-box value, even during turbo. In the last generation, AMD introduced a feature called PPT, or Package Power Tracking.

1. For 105 W processors, PPT is >142 W
2. For 65 W processors, PPT is >88 W
3. For 45 W processors, PPT is >60W

This allows the processor to raise its power limits, assuming it isn’t breaching thermal limits or current limits, and consequently raise the frequency. As a result, while we see 65 W on the box, the real world power consumption during most tasks is likely to be nearer 88 W, unless the current or thermal lines are crossed.

As a new element to our testing, we are recording power over a number of benchmarks in our suite, rather than just a simple peak power test.

AMD Ryzen 3 3300X

For the faster chip, we saw a peak power in both of our tests of around 80 W.

With yCruncher, which is somewhat of a periodic load, the power consumption dropped over time to nearer 75 W.

3DPM is more obvious with its idle steps between loads, being 10 seconds on then 10 seconds waiting. The power almost peaked at a similar amount here.

In both of these graphs, the package power when idle is around 16-17 W. I looked back through the data, and noticed that out of this power only 0.3 W was actually dedicated to cores, with the rest being towards the big IO die, the memory controllers, and the Infinity Fabric. That’s still pretty substantial for an idle load.

At low loads, the power per core was around 14 W, while at full load it was slightly less depending on the test. This is a bit away from the 20 W per core we get from the high end Zen 2 processors, but these only go to 4.3 GHz, not 4.7 GHz+. This is about in line with what we expect.

On our frequency ramp test, the Ryzen 3300X went from an idle state to peak power within 17 milliseconds, or approximately a frame at 60 Hz.

One of the new features with Ryzen 3000 is CPPC2 support, which AMD claims to reduce idle-to-turbo ramping from 30 milliseconds to 2 milliseconds. We’re seeing something in the middle of that, despite having all the updates applied. That being said, the jump up to the peak frequency (we measured 4350 MHz, +50 MHz over the turbo on the box) is effectively immediate with zero skew across a range of frequencies.

AMD Ryzen 3 3100

Given that the TDP number on the side of the box says 65 W as well, any reasonable user would assume that the power of this chip would be equal, right? Regular readers will know that this isn’t always the case.

In our yCruncher test, because the turbo frequency is lower than the 3300X, it means the voltage can be lower, and thus power is lower. Our history of testing Zen 2 has shown that these cores get very efficient at lower frequencies, to the point where our processor doesn’t even break that 65 W threshold during yCruncher.

Similarly the 3DPM peaks are also lower, barely going to 55 W during an AVX2 workload.

On the frequency ramp side, we see another instance of a 16-17 ms transition.

Summary

For the peak power out of all of our testing, we saw the Ryzen 3 3300X hit a maximum of 80 W, and the Ryzen 3 3100 go to 62 W. When we compare that to the Core i7-7700K, at 91 W TDP / 95 W peak, combined with most of the results on the next few pages, AMD by comparison is more efficient.

Test Bed and Setup

As per our processor testing policy, we take a premium category motherboard suitable for the socket, and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the manufacturer's maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS, and most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users as well as industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.

Test Setup
AMD Ryzen 3000	AMD Ryzen 3 3300X AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Motherboard	GIGABYTE X570 I Aorus Pro (1.12e)
CPU Cooler	AMD Wraith
DRAM	G.Skill FlareX 2x8 GB DDR4-3200 C14
GPU	Sapphire RX 460 2GB (CPU Tests) MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G (Gaming Tests)
PSU	Corsair AX860i
SSD	Crucial MX500 2TB
OS	Windows 10 1909

 

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our multiple test beds. Some of this hardware is not in this test bed specifically, but is used in other testing.

Hardware Providers
Sapphire RX 460 Nitro	MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X OC	Crucial MX200 + MX500 SSDs	Corsair AX860i + AX1200i PSUs
G.Skill RipjawsV, SniperX, FlareX	Crucial Ballistix DDR4	Silverstone Coolers	Silverstone Fans

CPU Performance: New Tests!

As part of our ever on-going march towards a better rounded view of the performance of these processors, we have a few new tests for you that we’ve been cooking in the lab. Some of these new benchmarks provide obvious talking points, others are just a bit of fun. Most of them are so new we’ve only run them on a few processors so far. It will be interesting to hear your feedback!

NAMD ApoA1

One frequent request over the years has been for some form of molecular dynamics simulation. Molecular dynamics forms the basis of a lot of computational biology and chemistry when modeling specific molecules, enabling researchers to find low energy configurations or potential active binding sites, especially when looking at larger proteins. We’re using the NAMD software here, or Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics, often cited for its parallel efficiency. Unfortunately the version we’re using is limited to 64 threads on Windows, but we can still use it to analyze our processors. We’re simulating the ApoA1 protein for 10 minutes, and reporting back the ‘nanoseconds per day’ that our processor can simulate. Molecular dynamics is so complex that yes, you can spend a day simply calculating a nanosecond of molecular movement.

 

Crysis CPU Render

One of the most oft used memes in computer gaming is ‘Can It Run Crysis?’. The original 2007 game, built in the Crytek engine by Crytek, was heralded as a computationally complex title for the hardware at the time and several years after, suggesting that a user needed graphics hardware from the future in order to run it. Fast forward over a decade, and the game runs fairly easily on modern GPUs, but we can also apply the same concept to pure CPU rendering – can the CPU render Crysis? Since 64 core processors entered the market, one can dream. We built a benchmark to see whether the hardware can.

Smooth#canitruncrysis pic.twitter.com/k7x31ULndF

— 𝐷𝑟. 𝐼𝑎𝑛 𝐶𝑢𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠 (@IanCutress) May 4, 2020

For this test, we’re running Crysis’ own GPU benchmark, but in CPU render mode. This is a 2000 frame test, which we run over a series of resolutions from 800x600 up to 1920x1080.

Crysis CPU Render Frames Per Second
AnandTech	800 x600	1024 x768	1280 x800	1366 x768	1600 x900	1920 x1080
AMD
Ryzen 9 4900HS	11.50	8.75	7.44	6.83	5.21	4.30
Ryzen 5 3600	9.98	7.84	6.69	6.15	4.75	3.92
Ryzen 3 3300X	8.42	6.52	5.43	5.01	3.92	3.07
Ryzen 3 3100	7.50	5.78	4.87	4.5	3.54	2.77
Intel
Core i7-7700K	7.63	5.87	4.95	4.55	3.57	2.79
Core i7-9750H	6.78	5.17	4.37	3.99	3.12	2.46

 

Dwarf Fortress

Another long standing request for our benchmark suite has been Dwarf Fortress, a popular management/roguelike indie video game, first launched in 2006. Emulating the ASCII interfaces of old, this title is a rather complex beast, which can generate environments subject to millennia of rule, famous faces, peasants, and key historical figures and events. The further you get into the game, depending on the size of the world, the slower it becomes.

DFMark is a benchmark built by vorsgren on the Bay12Forums that gives two different modes built on DFHack: world generation and embark. These tests can be configured, but range anywhere from 3 minutes to several hours. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but after analyzing the test, we ended up going for three different world generation sizes.

Interestingly Intel's hardware likes Dwarf Fortress.

 

We also have other benchmarks in the wings, such as AI Benchmark (ETH), LINPACK, and V-Ray, however they still require a bit of tweaking to get working it seems.

CPU Performance: System Tests

Our System Test section focuses significantly on real-world testing, user experience, with a slight nod to throughput. In this section we cover application loading time, image processing, simple scientific physics, emulation, neural simulation, optimized compute, and 3D model development, with a combination of readily available and custom software. For some of these tests, the bigger suites such as PCMark do cover them (we publish those values in our office section), although multiple perspectives is always beneficial. In all our tests we will explain in-depth what is being tested, and how we are testing.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Application Load: GIMP 2.10.4

One of the most important aspects about user experience and workflow is how fast does a system respond. A good test of this is to see how long it takes for an application to load. Most applications these days, when on an SSD, load fairly instantly, however some office tools require asset pre-loading before being available. Most operating systems employ caching as well, so when certain software is loaded repeatedly (web browser, office tools), then can be initialized much quicker.

In our last suite, we tested how long it took to load a large PDF in Adobe Acrobat. Unfortunately this test was a nightmare to program for, and didn’t transfer over to Win10 RS3 easily. In the meantime we discovered an application that can automate this test, and we put it up against GIMP, a popular free open-source online photo editing tool, and the major alternative to Adobe Photoshop. We set it to load a large 50MB design template, and perform the load 10 times with 10 seconds in-between each. Due to caching, the first 3-5 results are often slower than the rest, and time to cache can be inconsistent, we take the average of the last five results to show CPU processing on cached loading.

 

3D Particle Movement v2.1: Brownian Motion

Our 3DPM test is a custom built benchmark designed to simulate six different particle movement algorithms of points in a 3D space. The algorithms were developed as part of my PhD., and while ultimately perform best on a GPU, provide a good idea on how instruction streams are interpreted by different microarchitectures.

A key part of the algorithms is the random number generation – we use relatively fast generation which ends up implementing dependency chains in the code. The upgrade over the naïve first version of this code solved for false sharing in the caches, a major bottleneck. We are also looking at AVX2 and AVX512 versions of this benchmark for future reviews.

For this test, we run a stock particle set over the six algorithms for 20 seconds apiece, with 10 second pauses, and report the total rate of particle movement, in millions of operations (movements) per second. We have a non-AVX version and an AVX version, with the latter implementing AVX512 and AVX2 where possible.

3DPM v2.1 can be downloaded from our server: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)

 

Dolphin 5.0: Console Emulation

One of the popular requested tests in our suite is to do with console emulation. Being able to pick up a game from an older system and run it as expected depends on the overhead of the emulator: it takes a significantly more powerful x86 system to be able to accurately emulate an older non-x86 console, especially if code for that console was made to abuse certain physical bugs in the hardware.

For our test, we use the popular Dolphin emulation software, and run a compute project through it to determine how close to a standard console system our processors can emulate. In this test, a Nintendo Wii would take around 1050 seconds.

The latest version of Dolphin can be downloaded from https://dolphin-emu.org/

 

DigiCortex 1.20: Sea Slug Brain Simulation

This benchmark was originally designed for simulation and visualization of neuron and synapse activity, as is commonly found in the brain. The software comes with a variety of benchmark modes, and we take the small benchmark which runs a 32k neuron / 1.8B synapse simulation, equivalent to a Sea Slug.

Example of a 2.1B neuron simulation

We report the results as the ability to simulate the data as a fraction of real-time, so anything above a ‘one’ is suitable for real-time work. Out of the two modes, a ‘non-firing’ mode which is DRAM heavy and a ‘firing’ mode which has CPU work, we choose the latter. Despite this, the benchmark is still affected by DRAM speed a fair amount.

DigiCortex can be downloaded from http://www.digicortex.net/

 

y-Cruncher v0.7.6: Microarchitecture Optimized Compute

I’ve known about y-Cruncher for a while, as a tool to help compute various mathematical constants, but it wasn’t until I began talking with its developer, Alex Yee, a researcher from NWU and now software optimization developer, that I realized that he has optimized the software like crazy to get the best performance. Naturally, any simulation that can take 20+ days can benefit from a 1% performance increase! Alex started y-cruncher as a high-school project, but it is now at a state where Alex is keeping it up to date to take advantage of the latest instruction sets before they are even made available in hardware.

For our test we run y-cruncher v0.7.6 through all the different optimized variants of the binary, single threaded and multi-threaded, including the AVX-512 optimized binaries. The test is to calculate 250m digits of Pi, and we use the single threaded and multi-threaded versions of this test.

Users can download y-cruncher from Alex’s website: http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/

 

Agisoft Photoscan 1.3.3: 2D Image to 3D Model Conversion

One of the ISVs that we have worked with for a number of years is Agisoft, who develop software called PhotoScan that transforms a number of 2D images into a 3D model. This is an important tool in model development and archiving, and relies on a number of single threaded and multi-threaded algorithms to go from one side of the computation to the other.

In our test, we take v1.3.3 of the software with a good sized data set of 84 x 18 megapixel photos and push it through a reasonably fast variant of the algorithms, but is still more stringent than our 2017 test. We report the total time to complete the process.

Agisoft’s Photoscan website can be found here: http://www.agisoft.com/

 

CPU Performance: Rendering Tests

Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Corona 1.3: Performance Render

An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.

We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.

The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark

 

LuxMark v3.1: LuxRender via Different Code Paths

As stated at the top, there are many different ways to process rendering data: CPU, GPU, Accelerator, and others. On top of that, there are many frameworks and APIs in which to program, depending on how the software will be used. LuxMark, a benchmark developed using the LuxRender engine, offers several different scenes and APIs.

In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene on both the C++ and OpenCL code paths, but in CPU mode. This scene starts with a rough render and slowly improves the quality over two minutes, giving a final result in what is essentially an average ‘kilorays per second’.

 

POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing

The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.

POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/

 

CPU Performance: Encoding Tests

With the rise of streaming, vlogs, and video content as a whole, encoding and transcoding tests are becoming ever more important. Not only are more home users and gamers needing to convert video files into something more manageable, for streaming or archival purposes, but the servers that manage the output also manage around data and log files with compression and decompression. Our encoding tasks are focused around these important scenarios, with input from the community for the best implementation of real-world testing.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Handbrake 1.1.0: Streaming and Archival Video Transcoding

A popular open source tool, Handbrake is the anything-to-anything video conversion software that a number of people use as a reference point. The danger is always on version numbers and optimization, for example the latest versions of the software can take advantage of AVX-512 and OpenCL to accelerate certain types of transcoding and algorithms. The version we use here is a pure CPU play, with common transcoding variations.

We have split Handbrake up into several tests, using a Logitech C920 1080p60 native webcam recording (essentially a streamer recording), and convert them into two types of streaming formats and one for archival. The output settings used are:

• 720p60 at 6000 kbps constant bit rate, fast setting, high profile
• 1080p60 at 3500 kbps constant bit rate, faster setting, main profile
• 1080p60 HEVC at 3500 kbps variable bit rate, fast setting, main profile

 

7-zip v1805: Popular Open-Source Encoding Engine

Out of our compression/decompression tool tests, 7-zip is the most requested and comes with a built-in benchmark. For our test suite, we’ve pulled the latest version of the software and we run the benchmark from the command line, reporting the compression, decompression, and a combined score.

It is noted in this benchmark that the latest multi-die processors have very bi-modal performance between compression and decompression, performing well in one and badly in the other. There are also discussions around how the Windows Scheduler is implementing every thread. As we get more results, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

 

WinRAR 5.60b3: Archiving Tool

My compression tool of choice is often WinRAR, having been one of the first tools a number of my generation used over two decades ago. The interface has not changed much, although the integration with Windows right click commands is always a plus. It has no in-built test, so we run a compression over a set directory containing over thirty 60-second video files and 2000 small web-based files at a normal compression rate.

WinRAR is variable threaded but also susceptible to caching, so in our test we run it 10 times and take the average of the last five, leaving the test purely for raw CPU compute performance.

 

AES Encryption: File Security

A number of platforms, particularly mobile devices, are now offering encryption by default with file systems in order to protect the contents. Windows based devices have these options as well, often applied by BitLocker or third-party software. In our AES encryption test, we used the discontinued TrueCrypt for its built-in benchmark, which tests several encryption algorithms directly in memory.

The data we take for this test is the combined AES encrypt/decrypt performance, measured in gigabytes per second. The software does use AES commands for processors that offer hardware selection, however not AVX-512.

 

CPU Performance: Web and Legacy Tests

While more the focus of low-end and small form factor systems, web-based benchmarks are notoriously difficult to standardize. Modern web browsers are frequently updated, with no recourse to disable those updates, and as such there is difficulty in keeping a common platform. The fast paced nature of browser development means that version numbers (and performance) can change from week to week. Despite this, web tests are often a good measure of user experience: a lot of what most office work is today revolves around web applications, particularly email and office apps, but also interfaces and development environments. Our web tests include some of the industry standard tests, as well as a few popular but older tests.

We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks

Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a accrued test over a series of JavaScript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.

Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics. We report this final score.

Google Octane 2.0: Core Web Compute

A popular web test for several years, but now no longer being updated, is Octane, developed by Google. Version 2.0 of the test performs the best part of two-dozen compute related tasks, such as regular expressions, cryptography, ray tracing, emulation, and Navier-Stokes physics calculations.

The test gives each sub-test a score and produces a geometric mean of the set as a final result. We run the full benchmark four times, and average the final results.

Mozilla Kraken 1.1: Core Web Compute

Even older than Octane is Kraken, this time developed by Mozilla. This is an older test that does similar computational mechanics, such as audio processing or image filtering. Kraken seems to produce a highly variable result depending on the browser version, as it is a test that is keenly optimized for.

The main benchmark runs through each of the sub-tests ten times and produces an average time to completion for each loop, given in milliseconds. We run the full benchmark four times and take an average of the time taken.

3DPM v1: Naïve Code Variant of 3DPM v2.1

The first legacy test in the suite is the first version of our 3DPM benchmark. This is the ultimate naïve version of the code, as if it was written by scientist with no knowledge of how computer hardware, compilers, or optimization works (which in fact, it was at the start). This represents a large body of scientific simulation out in the wild, where getting the answer is more important than it being fast (getting a result in 4 days is acceptable if it’s correct, rather than sending someone away for a year to learn to code and getting the result in 5 minutes).

In this version, the only real optimization was in the compiler flags (-O2, -fp:fast), compiling it in release mode, and enabling OpenMP in the main compute loops. The loops were not configured for function size, and one of the key slowdowns is false sharing in the cache. It also has long dependency chains based on the random number generation, which leads to relatively poor performance on specific compute microarchitectures.

3DPM v1 can be downloaded with our 3DPM v2 code here: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)

x264 HD 3.0: Older Transcode Test

This transcoding test is super old, and was used by Anand back in the day of Pentium 4 and Athlon II processors. Here a standardized 720p video is transcoded with a two-pass conversion, with the benchmark showing the frames-per-second of each pass. This benchmark is single-threaded, and between some micro-architectures we seem to actually hit an instructions-per-clock wall.

GeekBench4: Synthetics

A common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench 4 is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.

I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).

We record the main subtest scores (Crypto, Integer, Floating Point, Memory) in our benchmark database, but for the review we post the overall single and multi-threaded results.

*We are currently in the middle of revisiting our CPU gaming benchmarks, but the new suite was not ready in time for this review. We plan to add in some new games (Borderland 3, Gears Tactics) and also upgrade our gaming GPU to an RTX 2080 Ti.

Gaming: World of Tanks enCore

Albeit different to most of the other commonly played MMO or massively multiplayer online games, World of Tanks is set in the mid-20th century and allows players to take control of a range of military based armored vehicles. World of Tanks (WoT) is developed and published by Wargaming who are based in Belarus, with the game’s soundtrack being primarily composed by Belarusian composer Sergey Khmelevsky. The game offers multiple entry points including a free-to-play element as well as allowing players to pay a fee to open up more features. One of the most interesting things about this tank based MMO is that it achieved eSports status when it debuted at the World Cyber Games back in 2012.

World of Tanks enCore is a demo application for a new and unreleased graphics engine penned by the Wargaming development team. Over time the new core engine will implemented into the full game upgrading the games visuals with key elements such as improved water, flora, shadows, lighting as well as other objects such as buildings. The World of Tanks enCore demo app not only offers up insight into the impending game engine changes, but allows users to check system performance to see if the new engine run optimally on their system.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

 

*We are currently in the middle of revisiting our CPU gaming benchmarks, but the new suite was not ready in time for this review. We plan to add in some new games (Borderland 3, Gears Tactics) and also upgrade our gaming GPU to a RTX 2080 Ti.

Gaming: Final Fantasy XV

Upon arriving to PC earlier this, Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition was given a graphical overhaul as it was ported over from console, fruits of their successful partnership with NVIDIA, with hardly any hint of the troubles during Final Fantasy XV's original production and development.

In preparation for the launch, Square Enix opted to release a standalone benchmark that they have since updated. Using the Final Fantasy XV standalone benchmark gives us a lengthy standardized sequence to record, although it should be noted that its heavy use of NVIDIA technology means that the Maximum setting has problems - it renders items off screen. To get around this, we use the standard preset which does not have these issues.

Square Enix has patched the benchmark with custom graphics settings and bugfixes to be much more accurate in profiling in-game performance and graphical options. For our testing, we run the standard benchmark with a FRAPs overlay, taking a 6 minute recording of the test.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

 

*We are currently in the middle of revisiting our CPU gaming benchmarks, but the new suite was not ready in time for this review. We plan to add in some new games (Borderland 3, Gears Tactics) and also upgrade our gaming GPU to a RTX 2080 Ti.

Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)

Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.

As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.

Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.

For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.

Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

 

*We are currently in the middle of revisiting our CPU gaming benchmarks, but the new suite was not ready in time for this review. We plan to add in some new games (Borderland 3, Gears Tactics) and also upgrade our gaming GPU to a RTX 2080 Ti.

Gaming: Strange Brigade (DX12, Vulkan)

Strange Brigade is based in 1903’s Egypt and follows a story which is very similar to that of the Mummy film franchise. This particular third-person shooter is developed by Rebellion Developments which is more widely known for games such as the Sniper Elite and Alien vs Predator series. The game follows the hunt for Seteki the Witch Queen who has arose once again and the only ‘troop’ who can ultimately stop her. Gameplay is cooperative centric with a wide variety of different levels and many puzzles which need solving by the British colonial Secret Service agents sent to put an end to her reign of barbaric and brutality.

The game supports both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs and houses its own built-in benchmark which offers various options up for customization including textures, anti-aliasing, reflections, draw distance and even allows users to enable or disable motion blur, ambient occlusion and tessellation among others. AMD has boasted previously that Strange Brigade is part of its Vulkan API implementation offering scalability for AMD multi-graphics card configurations.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

 

*We are currently in the middle of revisiting our CPU gaming benchmarks, but the new suite was not ready in time for this review. We plan to add in some new games (Borderland 3, Gears Tactics) and also upgrade our gaming GPU to a RTX 2080 Ti.

Gaming: Far Cry 5

The latest title in Ubisoft's Far Cry series lands us right into the unwelcoming arms of an armed militant cult in Montana, one of the many middles-of-nowhere in the United States. With a charismatic and enigmatic adversary, gorgeous landscapes of the northwestern American flavor, and lots of violence, it is classic Far Cry fare. Graphically intensive in an open-world environment, the game mixes in action and exploration.

Far Cry 5 does support Vega-centric features with Rapid Packed Math and Shader Intrinsics. Far Cry 5 also supports HDR (HDR10, scRGB, and FreeSync 2). We use the in-game benchmark for our data, and report the average/minimum frame rates.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

 

The Battering Ram of Time

A wouldn’t say a lot, but at least some discussion has been permeating through the airwaves since the Ryzen 3000 desktop launch as to what AMD was going to do in its sub-$200 space. Not having a latest generation product in a very active part of the market was missing from the portfolio, but initially AMD was happy for its previous generation CPUs and APUs to fill that role.

There were two schools of thought. The first is that AMD would launch lower core count CPUs, despite having a supposedly high yielding chiplet design that was going straight into its highest margin server product portfolio. Building a low core count chiplet design also incurs the added cost of bringing a chiplet and an IO die together in packaging, further decreasing margins. It seemed unlikely at the time.

The second school of thought would be that AMD would populate this part of the market with desktop versions of the Ryzen 4000 mobile APUs. These monolithic parts had integrated graphics, and would very likely easily scale from 45 W to 65 W for the desktop. Like previous APUs there would only be 8 PCIe lanes for external graphics, but for this generation also only PCIe 3.0 due to how the mobile APUs were powered.

Personally I assumed the second one, and that AMD would ignore the CPUs and go straight in for the APUs. I was perhaps unprepared for the apparent success of AMD’s mobile chips in the laptop space. We’ve reviewed the ASUS Zephyrus G14, a true flagship AMD notebook, and the Acer Swift 3, offering mind-bending performance and quality for the price. AMD is promoting 100+ design wins on Ryzen Mobile in 2020, global pandemic permitting, and the OEMs are jumping on the bandwagon it seems.

As we’ve shown in the review, this means that we get some CPUs. The Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 are odd elements to the Ryzen family, especially the 3100 with its awkward CCX and core configuration, but both parts offer a lot of performance for their pricing. At $120 and $99 respectively, using AMD’s latest Zen 2 microarchitecture and the power efficient 7nm TSMC process, AMD is defining a new baseline in budget performance.

This is personified in very much in comparing the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X to Intel’s flagship consumer processor from 2017.

Three years and four months ago at CES, Intel launched to great fanfare its Kaby Lake processor family, with the Core i7-7700K sitting atop of the stack. This quad core Skylake-based chip offered frequency bumps from the previous gen, and better gaming performance in a 91 W package. Its 4.2 GHz base frequency, 4.5 GHz turbo frequency, DDR4-2400 memory support and 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes were the talk of the down. All this could be yours for $350.

Then push forward a short time to today, and the Ryzen 3 3300X. This is also a quad core processor, built with Zen 2 cores at a lower frequency: only 3.8 GHz base and 4.3 GHz turbo. There’s faster memory in DDR4-3200, more and faster 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and is rated only at 65 W. For almost one third of the price, at $120.

Cue the roundup results.

Benchmark Comparison Ryzen 3 3300X vs i7-7700K at 100%
AnandTech	Ryzen 3 3100	Ryzen 3 3300X	Core i7-7700K
Web	121%	138%	100%
System	99%	112%	100%
Encoding	105%	115%	100%
Rendering	98%	111%	100%
Synthetics	103%	110%	100%
Dwarf Fortress	86%	95%	100%
Legacy	96%	105%	100%
Gaming	99%	105%	100%

I’m pretty sure prices of used Kaby Lake CPUs are about to crash. They’re going to have to fall a long, long way though.

It's at this time I should point out that Intel obviously has newer quad cores on offer. The 9th Generation Core i3 parts are quad core with no hyperthreading, but still running a variant of the Skylake microarchitecture, albeit at a higher frequency. The Core i3-9100 for example is a 4C/4T part with a base of 3.6 GHz and turbo of 4.2 GHz, and a TDP of 65W, for $120. It still only has PCIe 3.0 and DDR4-2400 however, so it would likely perform worse than the i7-7700K. Even with this, Intel's ability to provide enough stock of these low-end parts, depending on your location, is questionable as previously mentioned. Case in point: the comapny never even made it as far as sampling any of the 9th Generation i3 parts for review.

Intel has announced the 10th Generation Comet Lake processors, coming later this month, and the Core i3 parts there will offer hyperthreading. The Core i3-10100 is a 4C/8T part with a 3.6 GHz base and a 4.3 GHz turbo, with a 65 W TDP for $120. It still only has PCIe 3.0, but supports DDR4-2666, compared to AMD supporting PCIe 4.0 and DDR4-3200. When these are available at retail, we should put it up against the 3300X to see who wins.

All that being said, AMD still has two issues to sort out with the new Ryzen 3 parts. The idle power seems high at 18 W, and B550 motherboards need to exist to make these Ryzen 3 processors more attractive for system builds. The latter should come around soon, and we’ll have additional coverage there.

At the end of the day, if you are the sort of person that enjoys waiting a couple of years to get games 95% off on Steam, the 3300X is your processor. Those AAA titles are calling.