Without a doubt, the two top processors at this moment for assemble an economic gaming PC are the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and the Intel Core i3-10100f. Two options that we can find at a very good price thanks to the Black Friday.
The PC processors have been in a certain stuck phase for a long time in terms of the power needed and thanks to this we have very interesting products at really tight prices. These two processors are perfectly valid for the daily work and especially for Gaming if we are going to adjust in 1080p or 2K resolutions, only in 4K resolutions in certain titles we are going to have a bottleneck that affects us critically.
AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Without a doubt, one of the stars in today’s economic gaming sector is the AMD Ryzen 3 3100, a processor manufactured in 7nm FinFET with four cores and eight threads with speed between 3.6 and 3.9 GHz unlocked for overclocking and does not have integrated GPUs. It has PCIe 4.0 support, supports DDR4 3200 MHz memory, a consumption of 65W TPD, includes a silent and efficient Wraith Stealth fan that is normally sufficient for it.
Intel Core i3-10100F
As direct competition we have the Intel Core i3-10100F a processor manufactured in 14nm of four cores and eight threads with speed between 3.6 and 4.3 GHz, it does not have integrated GPU. It has only PCIe 3.0 support and supports DDR4 2666 MHz RAM. It has a consumption of 65W TPD and a basic fan is included that is not as good as the AMD one.
Comparison
In terms of performance, the Intel Core i3-10100F is superior but only by 3% and in certain scenarios, especially in power per core, in general it is not a relevant difference to choose one or the other. In terms of modern hardware support the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 outperforms Intel with the option of PCIe 4.0 and RAM up to 3200 MHz. On the other hand the AMD fan is correct and the one from Intel directly we will have to change it.
We must also take into account the cost of the motherboard, in the case of AMD we have to go to one with B450 controller, but if we want to upgrade in the future to a Ryzen 5000 is better to opt for a B550. On the other hand with Intel we can have LGA 1200 motherboards perhaps a little cheaper but with an uncertain future.
Prices and availability
- AMD Ryzen 3 3100 can be found on sale at Amazon, Newegg or BestBuy only for $119 (€102)
- Intel Core i3-10100F is available in stores like Amazon, Newegg or BestBuy only for $128 (€90)
