AMD Ryzen 3 4100 and Ryzen 5 4500 Review: The Budget CPU Showdown

AMD Ryzen 3 4100 and Ryzen 5 4500 Power Consumption and Efficiency

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The Intel Alder Lake chips still suck more power than AMD's Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 series chips, but pairing the Intel 7 process with the hybrid architecture brings big improvements, particularly in threaded work. However, Intel's decision to dial up the power limits as it pushes for performance supremacy results in higher peak power consumption and less efficiency. 

The quad-core Ryzen 3 4100 draws a stunningly-low amount of power during the heavy HandBrake and y-cruncher power measurements, but that results in the slowest performance of our test pool. However, that also results in superior overall efficiency, as we can see in the renders-per-day-per-watt metrics. 

Meanwhile, the six-core Ryzen 5 4500 unsurprisingly pulls more peak power than the quad-core Ryzen 3 4100, but its faster performance results in better efficiency profile than the Core i3-12100 in some scenarios. 

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Here we take a slightly different look at power consumption by calculating the cumulative energy required to perform x264 and x265 HandBrake workloads, respectively. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart. 

These workloads are comprised of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the time required to finish the job (bottom axis), thus generating a really useful power chart. 

Remember that faster compute times, and lower task energy requirements, are ideal. That means processors that fall the closest to the bottom left corner of the chart are best. 

Test Setup

We tested with Windows 11 on an X570 motherboard to maintain a comparable test environment with the rest of the processors in the test pool. Of course, you wouldn't pair this chip with this class of motherboard, but even lower-end 300-series motherboards should provide enough juice for full operation. We also tested with secure boot, virtualization support, and fTPM/PTT active to reflect a properly configured Windows 11 install. We have a breakdown of the test system configurations at the end of the article.

Our overclocks were rather straightforward — we enabled the auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) feature with 'advanced motherboard' settings and adjusted the scalar setting to 10X. Additionally, as outlined in the table below, we matched our memory overclocks with a 1:1 FCLK/memory clock ratio to keep latency low, which games love. We tested the Ryzen 5 4500 and Ryzen 3 4100 in two different configurations each:

• Ryzen 5 4500: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, PBO Disabled, DDR4-3200
• Ryzen 5 4500 PBO: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, PBO Enabled, Scalar 10X, DDR4-3800, FCLK 1900 MHz (1:1 Ratio)
• Ryzen 3 4100: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, PBO Disabled, DDR4-3200
• Ryzen 3 4100 PBO: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, PBO Enabled, Scalar 10X, DDR4-3800, FCLK 1900 MHz (1:1 Ratio)

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