3R 3100 - What are your thoughts?
3R 3100 - What are your thoughts?
As some of you may have been annoyed with by now, I'm doing some budget upgrades to my PC. My new board shows up tomorrow and I will be just shy of being able to afford a 3600, but I did find a used 3100 - photos of pins, it looks great, the Wraith cooler is included and clearly has never been used. Now obviously, there is 2 missing cores, 4 missing threads and a lower core clock, but let's talk about necessity, do I really NEED to go for what seems to be everyone's favorite 3rd gen mid range? I know it's great, yeah. 1. I run a GTX 1050 Ti. If you need to ask me why this won't be changing any time soon, I'll let you know as soon as I'm done crying. 2. I game, but I don't have the capacity to game at 144Hz or above 1080p, nor will I for quite some time. The whole point of my CPU upgrade is that while my current build will "run" anything, as soon as it becomes a CPU intensive scenario I may as well be playing on a flip by page book. (See also: I wanna play Warzone with my friends.) Are there any important caveats to the 3100 I'm missing here? It seems to be by all accounts a great CPU at the price. Or as we say in the car community, a great horsepower per dollar bargain.
3100 should cover most titles now. The only concern is Cyberpunk, but you’ll likely need to cap at around 30 fps with a 1050 Ti. If you can’t afford the 3600, the 3100 remains a big step up from an FX 6300—physics scores are roughly double in this generation. However, as this console line progresses, all PS4 and Xbox models use similar 8C/16T processors, similar to a Ryzen 7 3700X. Some demanding games like Red Dead Redemption 2 or AC Odyssey push even more powerful 4C/8T CPUs. I’ve used a 4C/8T Xeon E3-1231v3 (essentially a Haswell i7-4770) and it barely met RDR2’s 60 fps needs with minor tweaks. A 3100 is about 27% faster in Firestrike physics, giving it more headroom for longer at that frame rate. If you manage to find one at a reasonable price, it’s a solid choice for smooth gaming now and should hold up well for a couple more years. A noticeable leap over the FX 6300.
They say only fools rush in, but I'm running low on money soon. If I truly needed to, I could invest every penny I have into just a CPU this weekend. My setup is an old Raidmax case from my ex-girlfriend, and I'm using a 128GB SATA 6 drive. I've got NVMe support now, so I'm planning to use that. I was considering using what I have right away on a Lian Li, and when the time comes, I'd switch to an NVMe drive instead of spending all my budget on the CPU (though that would definitely work).
It's an intense selling argument to run Red Dead 2 at 60 FPS. I experienced the full campaign at 22 FPS—it was a rewarding experience, and it's the game I really enjoy.
NVMe is quite similar to SATA. I’ve booted from a Crucial M4 128GB and tested NVMe, but the performance feels almost identical to using an SATA drive. For better speed, consider upgrading to a more powerful CPU rather than switching to a faster boot device, because the difference between a 3600 and a 3100 won’t be as noticeable.