Built To Budget

Intel and AMD have both upped their game in regard to budget CPUs with integrated graphics—which should you pick?

 

We set out with one goal in mind: To game comfortably at 1080p without much fuss. When we first started looking at these two processors, our immediate questions revolved around how capable they were in game. After all, AMD’s top-end Raven Ridge APU touted an impressive 11 Vega compute units, and although that pales in comparison to Team Red’s flagships, Vega 56 and 64, it’s still substantially more clout than we’re used to from integrated graphics.

Unsurprisingly, the Ryzen 3 2200G came out on top. Impressively so, and especially in games such as Overwatch and Fortnite. So that’s it? Cut and dry? AMD wins? Not quite. Intel still has a solid grip on those productivity reins. Thanks to its mature architecture, and ironically poorer integrated GPU performance, not only does the Core i3-8100 impressively clean up in almost all of our computational and system benchmarks, but it also has a far smaller footprint when it comes to power draw.