AMD Ryzen 3 3250U Review

The Ryzen 3 3250U is one of AMD's entry-level-low-power Laptop processors. It was released in 2020 with 2 cores and 4 threads. With base clock at 2.6GHz, max speed at 3.5GHz, and a 15W power rating. The Ryzen 3 3250U is based on the Picasso 14nm family and is part of the Ryzen 3 series.

Ryzen 3 3250U is also the successor of AMD's last gen Ryzen 3 2200U processor that was based on the Zen and 14nm process and was released in 2018.

AMD's Zen series has landed, upping the ante with Intel in its high-stakes game for desktop PC market dominance with a well-rounded lineup of new chips that push mainstream platforms to higher core counts and more raw compute than we've ever seen. As a result, Intel's commanding presence in the enthusiast space is threatened in a way we haven't seen in over a decade.

We covered the deep dive details of the Zen chip design in our AMD Ryzen 3 3300U and Ryzen 3 3200U review, so head there for more information on the Ryzen 3 3250U's architecture, which is identical to the Ryzen 3 3200U.

As we've seen, gaming remains an advantage for Intel, so if squeezing out every last frame is all you care about, Intel's processors are a good choice. Much of that performance advantage will be less noticeable when gaming at higher resolutions, or if you pair the processors with a lesser graphics card.

Value seekers who aren't afraid to press the Precision Boost Overdrive button and have sufficient cooling should look to the Ryzen 3 3200U for roughly equivalent performance to the Ryzen 3 3250U, particularly if gaming factors heavily into the buying decision. That could save you money, reinforcing our decision to give the Ryzen 3 3200U an Editor's Choice award.

The AMD Ryzen 3 3250U is another impressive release from AMD and its 5 Generation of Ryzen 3 chips. With it, you’re getting 2-cores and 4-threads, with a boost clock of 3.5GHz. It may not be the strongest contender ever made on paper, but when you see and feel the actual performance gains it offers, you’re certainly getting a lot of bang for your $282.73 buck.

AMD has been having some trouble as of late which has made it even harder to compete with the incoming wave of Core i3 processors. That has forced the chip maker to be a little more creative and make do with their current product lines. Today we have the AMD Ryzen 3 3250U on hand, which in itself isn’t anything new. It’s basically a refreshed Ryzen 3 2200U with a clock speed boost. We say basically because it’s not a straight refresh however, there’s another change.

One of the nice things about the AMD Ryzen 3 3250U processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the AMD Ryzen 3 3250U up for $282.73 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The AMD Ryzen 3 3250U retail boxed processor comes with the traditional ‘pancake’ CPU cooler. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done on this processor which is rated at 15W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

With Ryzen 3, AMD continues to innovate on its new architecture and 14nm process. Like Ryzen 3, AMD has engineered Ryzen 3 to operate on a AM4 chipset with all the modern amenities of computing. This includes support for DDR4 RAM, the fastest NVMe SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 ports.

The Ryzen 3 3250U clocks up to 3.5Ghz just as it promises on the box, and with AMD’s software you can take one of the cores all the way up to 3.6GHz. However, don’t expect to get much beyond that without seriously upgrading your cooling solution and manually tweaking voltages behind the operating system level.

Although the 15W-rated cooler doesn't feature a copper base or the LEDs found on AMD's higher-end thermal solutions, it does handle Ryzen 3's heat output deftly enough to facilitate XFR-triggered frequencies. This gives you an extra 200 MHz. We were even able to overclock the Ryzen 3 3250U to 3.7 GHz within a reasonable temperature range. The fan also blows down onto the motherboard, which provide additional cooling around the socket. If you need more bling, AMD recently announced that it now offers the LED-equipped cooler separately.