AMD looks set to remain budget CPU king in Ryzen 3 3100 vs Intel Core i3-10100 leaked benchmarks

(Image credit: AMD)

Intel’s Core i3-10100 and AMD’s Ryzen 3 3100 have been compared head-to-head in leaked benchmarks, and it looks like the red team could be about to win the battle of the budget CPUs when these incoming models are released shortly.

This comparison was highlighted by @TUM_APISAK, a prolific hardware leaker on Twitter, and it makes for interesting reading to say the least.

These Intel and AMD chips come pretty close to each other in terms of performance in 3DMark, as you might expect given that the relative specs are pretty similar (both are quad-core, 8-thread CPUs, with the same base clock of 3.6GHz – albeit Intel does a bit more on the boost front hitting 4.1GHz all-core compared to 3.9GHz for the Ryzen 3 3100 – although the latter does reportedly have the potential to overclock really well).

Fire Strike results were in the 16,000 range for both processors (albeit with one slower run for the Core i3-10100, apparently due to the ASRock motherboard’s Base Frequency Boost technology). And in Timespy, the overall benchmark scores came back clustered around the 7,000 mark, so it was very much a case of level-pegging.

Of course, there are a whole heap of caveats here, principally that a couple of sets of 3DMark runs – and leaked benchmarks at that – don’t a conclusion make. We really need to see a full range of tests, and frame-rates drawn from various different games, before we can really get a better picture of how both of these CPUs shape up comparatively.

Value proposition

That said, this leak theoretically gives us a good idea of how things stand, and as mentioned, we already know that spec-wise, these chips are similar in terms of their core specifications – although obviously there are major differences in terms of AMD’s and Intel’s respective architectures.

Bearing in mind the limited extent of the rough conclusion we can draw at this point, given that the two processors do seem to be very much in the same performance ballpark, this does point to pricing being the key difference in this particular budget CPU showdown.

And we know that the Ryzen 3 3100 is going to come in cheaper, priced at $99 (around £80, AU$155), compared to the Core i3-10100, which might be the cheapest chip in Intel’s new Comet Lake range, but comes in at $122 (around £99, AU$190) – and that’s Intel’s announced pricing for manufacturers, so it’s likely to be slightly higher for consumers.

That’s still very competitive for a quad-core processor with those kind of specs, but the fact is that AMD’s chip could be 20% or so cheaper, and for PC gaming rigs where money is truly tight, this is an indication that the Ryzen 3 3100 might just reign as king (particularly if the leak showing it can be overclocked to 4.6GHz turns out to be on the money).

AMD’s Ryzen 3 3100 is expected to emerge in May, along with the 3300X, with the on-sale date previously being pegged as May 21 by AMD, so we only have a couple of weeks to wait now. We still don’t know exactly when Intel’s Comet Lake CPUs will officially be available to buy, although the hope is they might just pitch up this month as well.

Via PCGamesN

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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