THE CONCEPT

WITH AMD’S RYZEN 3300X FINALLY LANDING on our shores, we just knew we had to throw it into a full-on system build to get the most out of it, and its accompanying new chipset, B550. It’s not every day that AMD launches a brand-new budget chipset quite like this series, and certainly not with such fanfare, so we decided to put together a little budget(ish) build to see exactly what we could get out of this fledgling quad-core, eightthread processor.

So yes, at its heart we have the Ryzen 3 3300X X processor. Compared to today’s many-threaded d monsters littering the consumer ecosphere, a quad-core processor certainly does look smalllfry in comparison, especially as we’ve already y had the 3200G from AMD as well. However, r, there’s some significant differences between n the 3300X and its iGPU cousins that are well ll worth mentioning. First and foremost, it is in fact ct based on the Zen 2 7nm architecture, unlike the e iGPU variants that are secretly 2nd-gen Ryzen n in disguise on 12nm. Additionally, it features the e full complement of 24 PCIe lanes (16 for graphics, s, four for the DMI, and four for a direct M.2 SSD D interconnect), unlike the iGPUs, which only have e half the number of graphics lanes. Thirdly, and d perhaps more importantly, it also comes with h support for PCIe 4.0 straight out of the gate. The e only downside? No integrated graphics of course. e. Oh and then there’s the price—$127. Yup, Go back k three years, and to get something similar you’d d be paying near three times the cost.

So the question is: Is this the new affordability king of the gaming ecosystem? Time to find out.