AMD is making its current-generation desktop processors, and some of their supporting technology, a little more affordable. The chipmaker has introduced two new Ryzen 3 chips, the 3.6GHz 3100 and 3.8GHz 3300X, that will be available in May for $99 and $120 respectively. They’re both four-core chips, but they could be significantly more powerful than past models in some tasks — they’re the first Ryzen 3 CPUs with simultaneous multithreading, letting them handle up to eight threads at once.
There’s good news even if you aren’t building a PC on a budget. AMD is trotting out a B550 chipset that promises mainstream motherboards with PCI Express 4.0. You won’t have to buy a pricier X570 board or a custom-integrated PC to take advantage of that doubled bandwidth for your next video card or solid-state drive. Unfortunately, you’ll have to be patient. The first motherboards from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and others won’t arrive until June 16th. If you can be patient, though, you might get to build a low-cost desktop that’s still reasonably future-proof.
