Built to Budget
Intel and AMD have both upped their game in regard to budget CPUs with integrated graphics—which should you pick?
WE SET OUT with one goal in mind: To game comfortably at 1080p without much fuss. When we first started looking at these two processors, our immediate questions revolved around how capable they were in game. After all, AMD’s top-end Raven Ridge APU touted an impressive 11 Vega compute units, and although that pales in comparison to Team Red’s flagships, Vega 56 and 64, it’s still substantially more clout than we’re used to from integrated graphics.
Unsurprisingly, the Ryzen 3 2200G came out on top. Impressively so, and especially in games such as Overwatch and Fortnite. So that’s it? Cut and dry? AMD wins? Not quite. Intel still has a solid grip on those productivity reins. Thanks to its mature architecture, and ironically poorer integrated GPU performance, not only does the Core i3-8100 impressively clean up in almost all of our computational and system benchmarks, but it also has a far smaller footprint when it comes to power draw.
Is that Intel’s only saving grace? Kind of—it’s a bit of a hollow victory. After all, it’s far easier to discern the difference between 20 and 40fps in game than it is noticing whether your Word document opens 0.4 seconds faster on one platform than the other. And that’s the crux of all this. Sure, if you must have definitively the best processor out of the two, and it’s purely for office or day-to-day work, Intel’s likely your best bet. But like comparing a PCIe SSD to an SSD, as opposed to comparing an SSD to an HDD, the difference is far less obvious at this level. Ryzen still performs all of your day-to-day tasks with minimal fuss, yet it has that additional Vega grunt to pull your system into light gaming and encoding tasks. It’s worth noting that an optimized gaming engine does make a big difference. Even the Intel machine turned out semireasonable frame rates in Overwatch if allowed to pick optimal settings. It may not look particularly good, but sometimes you want smoothness over visual fidelity. The fact that we were able to play competitively on the AMD machine in Overwatch and Fortnite shouldn’t be understated, though, and the Ryzen 3 2200G is a genuine option if you want to play popular games on the cheap. You’ll need to pop into the BIOS and set aside 2GB for your GPU to hit these frame rates, but that’s easy enough.
One test that we suspected would be an easy win for Intel was the number of frames dropped when playing back 4K content. But in practice, AMD produced the smoother playback, although only just. Again, you’d
be hard pushed to spot the difference between the two, and in fairness, you’d suspect they were both silky smooth. A drop rate of 0.52 percent for Intel versus 0.46 percent for AMD isn’t noticeable either way. Try the test yourself at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mkg gXE5e2yk. Select “2160p60” from the quality cog, right-click the video, and select “Stats for nerds.”
There’s one more thing our plucky blue under-runner has to its advantage, and that comes down to its base architecture, and the number of PCIe lanes each chip supports. If you’re looking to throw a solid mid-range GPU into one of our builds a month or five down the line, the Intel Core i3-8100 packs a full complement of 16 PCIe lanes set aside for dedicated graphics. Swap over to Ryzen, and you’re met with half that. With 16 lanes, the likelihood of hitting any bottlenecks with a single GPU at 1080p is relatively slim, but cut that number in half, and there’s the potential that you may well run into performance issues.
On the flip side, Ryzen has the platform advantage. AMD is intending to stick with the AM4 socket for the foreseeable future, at least until we go down to 7nm. This means that in a year or two, you could throw out that old Ryzen 3 2200G and replace it with a Ryzen 5 3600X, or maybe go for a newer APU with more Vega cores. Intel, on the other hand, has a long history of switching platforms and sockets, so that Core i3-8100 build you’ve put together is essentially endof-life the moment you turn it on.
Conclusion time: Which system should you build? Well, that depends. If you’re not interested in ever playing games, the Intel machine has a bit more raw power for everyday tasks, so that’s your best choice. If you like to dabble in a little gaming, but don’t want to drop serious cash on a graphics card right now, the AMD build is the way to go. It’s surprisingly capable. However, if you’re more of a gamer than that, this is where it gets tricky—the reduced number of PCIe lanes on the Ryzen 3 2200G ultimately does make a difference to the performance the system can deliver, while Intel’s integrated GPU is essentially pointless. Which means that neither system is quite right for you. In other words, serious gamers are going to need to spend more cash from the start.