Black and Red

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY

THE CONCEPT

WITH AMD’S RYZEN 3300X FINALLY LANDING on our shores, we just knew we had to throw it into a full-on system build to get the most out of it, and its accompanying new chipset, B550. It’s not every day that AMD launches a brand-new budget chipset quite like this series, and certainly not with such fanfare, so we decided to put together a little budget(ish) build to see exactly what we could get out of this fledgling quad-core, eight-thread processor.

So yes, at its heart we have the Ryzen 3 3300X processor. Compared to today’s many-threaded monsters littering the consumer ecosphere, a quad-core processor certainly does look small-fry in comparison, especially as we’ve already had the 3200G from AMD as well. However, there’s some significant differences between the 3300X and its iGPU cousins that are well worth mentioning. First and foremost, it is in fact based on the Zen 2 7nm architecture, unlike the iGPU variants that are secretly 2nd-gen Ryzen in disguise on 12nm. Additionally, it features the full complement of 24 PCIe lanes (16 for graphics, four for the DMI, and four for a direct M.2 SSD interconnect), unlike the iGPUs, which only have half the number of graphics lanes. Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, it also comes with support for PCIe