The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100 CPU Review: A Budget Gaming Bonanza
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 7, 2020 9:00 AM ESTCPU 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.
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Ian Cutress - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Unfortunately, we never got any of those. I'm recently stretched six ways from Sunday. Pulled an all-nighter just to even get to this point in the review process. As much as people would love me just to bench CPUs all day every day, even in lockdown I've got these CPUs, EPYC, Motherboards, Xeons, laptops to test, as well as news coverage and all the behind the scenes stuff no-one ever sees. Writing isn't a quick process, either.destorofall - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Surely Ian you can just use the AI wirter now :)Lord of the Bored - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
The AI Writer read the comments and now just fanboy-flames.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Appreciate the reply! I think the fact that you never got those current-gen i3s and i5s is not on you, but on Intel. If they want their stuff reviewed, they know they need to send some samples. Unless, of course, they're afraid of the test results. Which they might just be.Namisecond - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
I just noticed in the "AMD 500 SERIES CHIPSET PROCESSOR SUPPORT" chart; 4000 series/Zen2 based desktop APUs are not represented. An oversight? or is AMD trying to say something?qwertymac93 - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
There's got to be something strange going on with the 7700k system. In several benchmarks the 6700k outperforms the 7700k, even though the only difference between them is the 7700k is clocked higher. Under no circumstances should the 6700k outperform the 7700k.Were the Skylake and Kaby lake systems tested with different motherboards or with different BIOS revisions? Its possible some security patch was active on one system but not on another.
EdgeOfDetroit - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
You should have benched it against a Xeon E-2174G. At least that's the most modern 4C8T CPU Intel sells right now. But I look forward to seeing how it does against the i3-i3-10320 to see if Intel still has the IPC-clockspeed crown or not.schujj07 - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
The performance of the i3-10320 will be very similar to the 7700k. The i3 has clock speeds of 3.8/4.6 and the 7700k is 4.2/4.5. That means that on single threaded the 10320 will be slightly faster but in heavily threaded work loads the 7700k will probably be faster due to the higher base clock. This is know because both CPUs are on the Sky Lake architecture and will have the same IPC. Therefore we can infer what the 10320 will do based on what we see the 7700k doing in this review.Sushisamurai - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
I think it'd be nice to see generational to generational improvements on intel vs AMD's side of things, you guys use to do that everytime a new generation came out. It'd be nice to see how far my 4th gen Intel chip has gone vs a new gen now.Maxiking - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Again your garbage reviews. Apparently all the cpus on the world are bottlenecking 1080 gtx @ 1080p except 3300x.Do you even think when checking the results. This thing happens constantly, especially when you test low end garbage amd cpus.