AMD announced a pair of new Ryzen 3 processors a couple of weeks back, designed to drive its Zen 2 microarchitecture down into even more affordable price points. These new processors, the Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X, are the latest entry-level, quad-core processors in the Ryzen family. Over and above disabling a few cores and tweaking clocks, however, AMD’s got a couple of additional tricks up its sleeve with these new CPUs – more on that in just a bit.

In addition to the processors, AMD also announced the new, lower-priced B550 chipset is coming to an array of affordable Socket AM4 motherboards. Like the flagship X570 that launched alongside higher-end Ryzen 3000 series processors, the B550 incorporates some high-speed USB ports and IO, but it is scaled back considerably, it interfaces with the processors over PCIe Gen 3 links and its general purpose PCIe lanes are Gen 3 as well.