3400AMDRyzen33100AMDRyzen33200GAMDRyzen5G

The 3100 is a good budget option that offers more consistent speed than Intel Old architecture results in the lowest speeds in the Labs, so it’s a poor choice despite its price A solid choice if you have modest 3D acceleration needs, but it’s not a great

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PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com

The Ryzen 3 3100 is the cheaper of AMD’s two new low-end CPUs, and this £100 part is the cheapest desktop chip to use the Zen 2 architecture. Despite the price, it has four multithreaded cores, 16MB of cache and the 7nm manufacturing process – a formidable spec compared to AMD’s Zen+ APUs and the Core i3-9100.

The only thing missing here is the “X” suffix, which means that this part has more modest turbo abilities than the Ryzen 3 3300X. The 3100’s base and boost speeds of 3.1GHz and 3.9GHz are significantly slower than AMD’s other Ryzen 3 CPU – and they’re beaten on paper by Intel too.

Yet, in benchmarks, there’s a surprising amount of punch here. The 3100’s overall benchmark score of 173 easily beats both AMD APUs and the Intel Core i3 chip, and it’s only 15 points behind the 3300X.

The 3100 beat the Intel chip in Cinebench and Geekbench’s multicore tests, and was faster in other multicore benchmarks. It was unsurprisingly slower in single-core benchmarks, but the gaps here were tiny.

This cheap AMD chip outpaced Intel in the 3DMark test, but the Core i3-9100 was much quicker in most gaming benchmarks. Intel’s chip was more frugal and cooler too.

We’d only advise switching to Core i3 if you’re building a gaming PC. If so, buy the i3-9100F, which eschews integrated graphics and drops the price to £72.

The 3100 offers better speed than Intel’s chip in most applications, and it’s cheaper – so it’s the better option for tight budgets.

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PRICE £71 (£85 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk

The 3200G is cheap, which is why it has four cores without multithreading and modest base and boost speeds of 3.6GHz and 4GHz. It includes AMD Radeon graphics, but the Vega 8 graphics chip only has 512 cores and a clock speed of 1,250MHz. That’s 192 cores and 150MHz short of the Vega inside the Ryzen 5 3400G.

Nor is this the 3200G’s only competition. On the Intel side, it squares up against the Core i3-9100, which costs £140 with its integrated UHD Graphics 630 core – this has 192 cores and a slower clock speed. It’s also challenged by AMD’s £100 Ryzen 3 3100.

Check the graphs from p92 and you’ll see a gulf between the 3200G and 3100, and that’s because the 3200G uses AMD’s old Zen+ architecture rather than Zen 2. It still uses the AM4 socket but doesn’t support PCIe 4, but its use of Zen+ most crucially meant the 3200G was the poorest chip in single- and multicore tests – its overall result of 107 in our benchmarks paled in comparison to the 173 scored by the Ryzen 3 3100. Even the Core i3-9100 scored 122.

The 3200G was sluggish when used with a discrete GPU, and its integrated core was underwhelming: its 3DMark Time Spy result of 635 was around half as quick as the 3400G’s Vega 11 core, although it was still faster than Intel’s integrated GPU.

The 3200G is only suitable for low-end gaming and computing, but it’s bested in all areas. The 3400G is faster, the Ryzen 3 3100 is a better all-rounder and the Core i3-9100 is superior for gaming with a discrete GPU.

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PRICE £114 (£137 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk

The AMD Ryzen 5 3400G may have the same branding as chips such as the Ryzen 5 3600X, but this £137 part relies on the older Zen+ architecture and has no PCIe 4 support.

The 3400G has four multithreaded cores, and it’s clocked to 3.7GHz and 4.2GHz. Its Radeon RX Vega 11 integrated graphics core has the best specification of any of the integrated GPUs here – its 704 cores and 1,400MHz clock speed easily outstrip the 3200G’s Vega 8 core and the UHD Graphics 630 chip inside Intel’s parts.

Its 3DMark Time Spy score of 1,251 is twice as quick as the 3200G and three times as fast as Intel’s offering. That’s a considerable difference, meaning the

3400G has enough pace for casual gaming and less-demanding esports titles.

The 3400G’s processing portion offers moderate computing performance, but its overall PC Pro benchmark score of 148 is still 40 points behind the Ryzen 3 3300X and 32 worse than the i5-9400F – although the 3400G does close the gap to Intel in single-threaded benchmarks. The Ryzen 3 3100 is quicker, too.

The 3400G is a good all-rounder if you need processing and graphics from one chip – its lower price, better GPU and similar single-threaded speed make it better than the i5-9400F. However, both the Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X are cheaper and faster, so if you have the space (and budget) you’d be better off pairing either of those with a discrete GPU.