AMD Ryzen 3 3300X – when cheaper Matisse is not enough

The duel of Ryzen 3 3100 and Intel Core i3-10100 processors showed that AMD can beat Intel in most tests at a lower price. However, the R3 3100 is not the only new model introduced by the manufacturer. The 3300X is more powerful, with higher clock speed and, coincidentally, it also sells for the same price as the Ci3-10100. In addition to significantly higher clock speed, it also has different CCD composition.

Basic specs

Ryzen 3 3300X was released at the same time as the 3100 and represents the top model in Ryzen 3 series. Paper parameters show up to 400 MHz higher clock speed and a higher price which is at the level of Intel Core i3-10100. However, if the difference was only the clock speed, the 3300X would probably not be bought by anyone, as it would be enough to slightly overclock the 3100.

However, the difference between the processors is also below the surface, and this is quite significant. It results from different configurations of chiplets in the CCD. While the 3100 has two active CCXs with two cores, a 2 + 2 configuration, the 3300X uses only one full-featured CCX with 4 cores and thus a 4 + 0 configuration. Thanks to the fact that all 4 cores are also 16 MB L3 cache in one CCX, the 3300X offers better core-to-core latency and therefore theoretically also higher performance. It will be interesting to see how much these changes will be reflected in our tests.

Testing methodology

We tested the processors at home, not in a laboratory environment. Nevertheless, the effort was made for the most accurate results. These are therefore the average of the measured values from repeated tests. We tried to eliminate factors that would affect performance in addition to the processor itself and the motherboard. We used the same components in both cases. The idea of all tests was to use base settings and turning on XMP, no other adjustments were made. This is how most users will actually function.