The budget-friendly AMD Ryzen 3 3100 has been overclocked to almost 6GHz, just shy of the record held by its much more expensive Ryzen 9 3950X sibling.
Renowned overclocker TSAIK has managed to overclock the $99 (about £79, AU$150) Ryzen 3 3100 to an impressive 5.92GHz using liquid nitrogen cooling (LN2), as reported by TechPowerUp. The processor is due to hit shelves on June 16.
The quad-core chip was supplied with 1.45 Volts of power, hence the over-the-top cooling, and was tested on an MSI X570 Tomahawk motherboard, paired with 8GB RAM that was underclocked to 1,600 MHz.
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This monumental overclock ranks as the second-highest overclock record for a Zen 2 processor, falling just a few Mhz shy of the record held by the Ryzen 9 3950X. This top-of-line CPU was overclocked to 6.041 GHz, also by TSAIK, on an MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE motherboard.
AMD’s latest budget CPU is certainly shaping up to be an excellent choice for those looking to build a gaming PC on a budget. As we said in our review, though it fails to topple Intel when in single-core performance, the 7nm processor came within close distance of the $198 (£229, AU$439) Intel Core i5-9600K when it comes to multi-thread performance.
The Ryzen 3 3100 – which features a 3.6GHz base clock and 3.9GHz boost clock - scored around 2,315 points in Cinebench R20 and 4,910 in GeekBench 5, just only 8% and 16% slower, respectively, than Intel’s more expensive i5-9600K.
The budget-friendly CPU also features 16MB of L3 cache, a 65W TDP, and the same architectural bells and whistles as other Zen 2 processors, including PCIe 4.0 support when paired with an X570 or upcoming B550 motherboard.
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