AMD Ryzen 3 4300U vs Intel Core i7-4930MX

AMD Ryzen 3 4300U

The AMD Ryzen 3 4300U is a processor for thin and light laptops based on the Renoir family. The 4300U integrates four cores based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture (quad core CPU). They are clocked at 2.7 (guaranteed base clock) to 3.7 GHz (Turbo) without SMT / Hyperthreading support (4 threads). The chip is manufactured on the modern 7 nm TSMC process and partly thanks to it AMD advertises a 2x improved performance per Watt for the Renoir chips. Compared to the faster Ryzen 5 4000 CPUs (e.g., Ryzen 5 4600U), the Ryzen 3 only offers 4 cores and lower Turbo clock speeds.

In addition to the four CPU cores, the APU also has the Radeon RX Vega 5 integrated graphics card with 5 CUs and up to 1400 MHz. The dual channel memory controller supports DDR4-3200 and energy efficient LPDDR4-4266 RAM. Furthermore, 4 MB of Level 3 cache can be found on the chip. See our hub page on the Renoir Processors for more information.

Performance

The average 4300U in our database matches the Core i5-1035G4 and the Core i5-11300H, both quad-core chips, in multi-thread performance. Technically a lower mid-range CPU, this Ryzen is light years ahead of Intel Pentiums and AMD Athlons that so many sub-US$500 laptops ship with.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of our system is.

Power consumption

The Ryzen 3 series chip has a default TDP (also known as the long-term power limit) of 15 W, a value that laptop manufacturers are free to change to anything between 10 W and 25 W with performance and clock speeds changing accordingly as a result. By going for the lowest value, it is possible to build passively cooled tablets, laptops, mini-PCs around this APU.

The 7 nm TSMC process the Ryzen 3 4300U is manufactured on makes for average, as of mid 2023, energy efficiency.

Intel Core i7-4930MX

The Intel Core i7-4930MX is a high-end quad-core processor for laptops and successor of the i7-3940XM. It is based on the Haswell architecture and was launched in Q2/2013. Due to Hyperthreading, the four cores can handle up to eight threads in parallel leading to better utilization of the CPU. Each core offers a base speed of 3.0 GHz but can dynamically increase clock rates with Turbo Boost up to 3.7 GHz (for 4 active cores), 3.8 GHz (for 2 active cores) and 3.9 GHz (for 1 active core). Furthermore, the Extreme CPUs offer an unlocked multiplicator for easy overclocking.

Haswell is the successor to the Ivy Bridge architecture with improvements on both GPU and CPU performance. The CPUs are produced in 22nm and offer an optimized branch prediction as well as additional execution ports. Furthermore, new features like AVX2 and FMA should increase the performance in future applications.

Due to these changes, the performance per clock has been improved by about 10 percent compared to Ivy Bridge. Therefore, the 4930MX is almost 10 % faster than the former i7-3940XM.

The integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 offers 20 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at 400 MHz up to 1350 MHz with Turbo Boost, making it about 30 % faster than the HD 4000.

The i7-4930MX is rated at a TDP of 57 W including graphics card, memory controller and VRMs.  Therefore, the CPU is only suited for laptops 17-inches or greater.