Budget powerhouse

A day has yet to pass when someone doesn’t ask me what hardware they should include in their brand new gaming PC build. Of course, the most common component that is asked about is the GPU or the graphics card. However, today we are going to be discussing what we have grown up calling the “brain of the computer”, the CPU, rather one specific lineup of CPUs, the Ryzen 3.

I have been testing these two budget powerhouses over the last few weeks and I must say that what these two entry-level processors offer for the price has left me absolutely flabbergasted.

The thing is, the Ryzen 3 has had a rather innocuous release and seems to have flown under the radar for many a consumer. The reason I say that is because I am most often asked the question, “i3 or the Pentium?” Well, so far I have been suggesting people to go for the i3. However, after spending some time with the Ryzen 3, it’s got to be Team Red for the entry-level builds. One of the most interesting features that AMD has managed to achieve on the Ryzen 3 is give the consumer four physical cores on the processor in the sub Rs 10,000 budget category. This means that these processors not only compete Intel’s i3s, but flat out beat them in most multi-threaded applications. The only place where Intel had the upper hand was in single-threaded applications.

I am aware that most readers are interested in just the gaming numbers, and alas, most games still rely on high single core performance, which is why Intel still comes out on top for most games, except for games like Ghost Recon Wildlands and Battlefield One. However, the thing to keep in mind is that Ryzen 3 comes unlocked out of the box, which means you can overclock these chips and in my testing, overclocking reduced the gap between Intel and AMD to less than 2 per cent in gaming performance. Throw in the added benefit of being able to  actually perform CPU multi-threaded tasks better on the Ryzen, along with the low price point on offer for fully overclock-able CPUs, I feel it’s perfect.