Last year I covered the launch of the 3rd generation Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 parts, and like the rest of the PC hardware world I was incredibly impressed. Heck, something that performs like a 8700K in gaming for $199? sign me up. Well, AMD is trying to take this even further down the line with the 3300X and 3100, two quad-core, eight-threaded parts that are $120 and $99 respectively.

Generally, the Ryzen 3 parts have been the black sheep of the Ryzen product-family, with the value proposition being the six-core Ryzen 5 parts, and the high performance Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 parts sitting in the enthusiast space. A part of this reason is how the core complexes are handled and how weak those parts were. Typically, the CPUs are split between two core complexes (CCXs) that contain 4 cores, and on Zen 2 parts, a second die.