Ryzen 3 3250U: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The AMD Ryzen 3 3250U is a budget Picasso dual-core from 2020, and seven catalog laptops carry it — inexpensive consumer and small-business machines. Measured on the processor side, it does not meet the recommended CPU requirement for any of the 69 games the catalog tracks, though it clears the minimum bar for a number of lighter titles. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings, and which laptops carry it.

Where the Ryzen 3 3250U sits in 2026

A catalog score of 23.7 places the chip 429th of 741 scored laptop CPUs — the lower half of the table. The neighborhood is mostly Intel ultrabook silicon from the mid-2010s: the Core i5-2450P (24), Core i5-5200U (23.9) and Core i7-7600U (23.8) sit just above, while the Core i5-4300U (23.6), Core i3-7020U (23.6) and Core i7-7500U (23.4) sit just below. Slotting between 5th- and 7th-generation Intel U-series parts is a fair snapshot: competitive single-thread speed for its price, but only two cores against the quad-cores that dominate today's mid-range.

What the chip brings

Picasso gives the 3250U two cores and four threads on a 14 nm process: a 2.6 GHz base clock, up to 3.5 GHz on boost, and a 15 W ultrabook-class envelope. The integrated GPU is the Radeon RX Vega 3 — modest, but capable of everyday display duties and very light gaming. Public benchmark records show a Geekbench single-core score of 753 and a multi-core score of 1,463 — roughly half the multi-core throughput of the 2013 quad-core i7s, which is the cost of the two-core design.

Games: CPU-side readiness

As a processor, the chip does not reach the recommended CPU tier for any of the 69 cataloged games. It does clear the minimum tier for about two dozen of them — Minecraft, League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, Sims 4, Diablo 4, Doom Eternal, God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn among them — while 47 titles, including Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, ask for more processor than this. These verdicts are CPU-only — actual playability depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and these machines pair the chip with integrated-class graphics.

Laptops that carry it

The seven-model roster is 2020–2021 entry-level hardware. Lenovo's IdeaPad 3 appears twice ($373 and $339), Dell contributes the Vostro 3515 ($235), Vostro 15 3515 ($403) and Inspiron 15 3505 ($339), and HP adds the Pavilion 14-dk1025wm ($279) and 255 G8 Notebook ($399). The laptops around it typically show a median office comfort score of 75 and energy efficiency of 74 — the 15 W chip keeps them cool and quiet — while the gaming index sits at 32 and the performance index at 43.7, honest numbers for the class.

Bottom line

The Ryzen 3 3250U is a textbook light-duty budget chip in 2026: well suited to browsing, office work and streaming in a $235–$400 laptop, with genuinely good efficiency for the price. It is not a gaming processor — zero recommended-tier results in the catalog say so — though older or lighter titles at minimum settings are within reach. Buyers wanting a cheap, quiet daily machine get fair value here; anyone with heavier workloads should step up the ranking.