Gadgetory

today's video has been sponsored by Corsair and their impressive new hydro series h100 I Pro all-in-one liquid cooler armed with a 240 millimeter radiator and a pair of ML series magnetic levitation bearing fans it runs cool and quiet we've been using the slightly larger 280 millimeter versions for many months now in our test systems and I found them to work very well with the latest AMD and Intel processors so check the link in the video description to learn more welcome back to our unbox today we are taking a look at the new ofon 200 GE AMD's most affordable zen based processor yet Tim covered the specs in detail about a week ago now so rather than dig into all that again I'll just provide a link to that video if you're interested to find out anything that wasn't mentioned in this video and that said I will go over all the important stuff again stuff like the core count for example and that's kind of a big one though Rison is typically known for packing many many cores and we still have seen some quad core variants such as the horizon 3 1200 and more recently the 2200 g the Athlon 200 GE though well that's a dual-core but before you shriek louder than the coil whine of a cheap graphics card consider the price this is a $55 u.s. processor and again it is a Zen based processor you also get SMT enabled so although it is a dual core it does support for threads so it's kind of like a traditional core i3 then and like traditional core i3 it's also locked yep AMD is now locking desktop processors Tim did discuss this and gave our opinion on the subject in the news story last week and before the end of this video I'm going to touch on this again discuss it a bit further and also discuss some interesting feedback we got from some of the viewers anyway here's a quick speedrun the two cores are clocked at 3.2 gigahertz there's five megabytes of cache in total the integrator radio and GPU packs just three compute units and the TDP rating has been set at just 35 watts AMD is claiming pentium g 45 60 light performance which by today's standards isn't great it has to be said but also not bad for just fifty-five dollars and the fact that it's on the am4 platform certainly doesn't hurt either AMD also claims that the integrated GPU isn't nearly as useless as it sounds on paper despite packing over 60% of fewer compute units when compared to the 2200 g that said the Athlon energy is perfect for students casual gamers using a family pc for browsing the interwebs firing off emails and doing homework whatever that last one is so anyway it's a dirt cheap Zen CPU that can take advantage of existing am4 motherboards you can either buy a dirt cheap and frankly direct quality a320 motherboard and build the ultimate brand new budget banger or you can stick it in a slightly more expensive but world's better be 350 or be 450 motherboard and after saving a dollar a day for a year upgrade to the Rison 720 700 X and in the process upgrade from a casual gamer to a full-time basement dweller since I am a neck deep in GeForce r-tx testing right now and that content will be on the channel tomorrow I didn't have too much time to spend on this one that's it I think I have done enough testing so yeah hopefully it's okay before we move on to the testing I should just quickly touch on the name as it is quite different to the rise and we've seen Plast and everything for the last year or so despite the Athlon name though what we have here is quite familiar it's a Raven Ridge apu basically the 2400 G with two cores lopped off oh and almost a quarter of the integrated GPU but it does come in at a third of the price so all that being the case we are already familiar with the technology and architecture ok so let's get on with the testing now AMD did suggest in their slides that you could overclock the memory with this part turns out that was a mistake and you cut which explains why I'm a gigabyte a B 350 and gaming Wi-Fi board I was stuck at ddr4 2666 so that means the Athlon to energy will be tested with ddr4 2666 as that is the maximum memory frequency supported the 2200 g and 2500 g worked fine with ddr4 3,200 memory so that is what I tested them with for comparison we have a heap of budget CPUs from AMD and Intel there's also some integrated GPU testing a for comparison I've thrown in some older discrete graphics cards as well and we have some power and temperature results as well as a simulated overclock to see what we're missing out on so without wasting any more time let's get into it using ddr4 2666 memory which is what we are forced to use with the Athlon 200 GE we see a memory bandwidth of roughly 29 gigabytes per second which is comparable to the core i3 8100 when compared to Xen based processors using ddr4 2933 memory we see that the balance has been reduced by about 15 percent and this larger than expected margin is down to the lower core clock speed moving on a cinnamon char 15 and we find a very dual core with SMT like score of 360 points this made the Turner G around 6% slower than the Pentium G 4560 and 13% slower we're looking at single core performance and similar margins were seen when compared to the Pentium G 5400 so as expected this $55 process I won't be blowing any socks off but it is considerably better than any of the budget bulldozer offerings on the a m4 platform such as the $110 us a 12 900 that we reviewed last year next up we have the corona benchmark and here that 200 G was 10% sold in the pentium g 4560 a massive 31 percent faster than the a12 900 it was also a 32 percent slower than the Rison 320 200 G so that a great result overall but given the price not a bad result either now these results are important particularly if you run any workloads that take advantage of AVX instructions as these instruction set isn't supported by the pentium g 45 60 or g 5400 as a result the 200 g was 24 percent faster than g 45 60 in this test giving the Athlon chip a massive advantage in AVX workloads moving on a 7-zip and we find that for compression work the Athlon 200 G isn't going to be spinning our archives at an impressive rate as here it was 6% slower than the Pentium G 45 60 it was 12% faster than the slow a 12 900 so that's something then when it comes to decompression performance the to energy is comparable to the core i3 70 100 and Rison 3 1200 thanks to its SMT support next up we have some excel results and here the Athlon 2 energy was almost 20% slower for the pentium g 45 60 that was 33% faster than the a12 900 so as expected not a beast in Excel but for most users it will be capable enough the 200 GE also comes in just behind the pentium g 45 60 and PC mark 10 office modern benchmark which is a little disappointing we would have liked to see some improvement over the early 2017 budget CPU King in this test but that wasn't to be as for power consumption well the Athlon to energy really is in a league of its own seeing total system consumption peak at just 52 watts the rise in 322 energy test system using the same power supply consumes 75% more power while the G 45 60 consumed 44 percent more power of course the comparison with the a12 900 is just absolutely ridiculous the bulldozer based CPU push total system consumption three times higher then when gaming the Athlon 200g consumed a similar level of power to that of the pentium g 4560 but as you're about to see destroyed it when comparing integrated GPU performance so here we're comparing a number of processors with integrated GPUs as well as some older discrete graphics cards that you can buy in our second hand for pretty much pocket change please note all the script graphics cards have been tested on the core i3 8100 using 16 gigabytes of ddr4 2500 memory then for comparison the Rison 320 200 G and risin 5 2400 G have been paired with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 3200 memory and then the Athlon 200 G with 8 gigabytes of ddr4 2666 as you can see the 200 G was good for an average of just 32 FPS at 720p use in the medium quality settings and disappointingly this made at 27% slower than the a12 900 and although the Athlon part does feature a new and GPU architecture it has far fewer cores available so we're going to find some mixed performance when compared to the a12 900 still what's important here for AMD is that the turnigy smoke to the core i3 8100 and pentium g 4560 in stark contrast to what we're seeing when testing with Fortnight the 200g crushes the a12 900 in front to the game was even playable at 720p using the lowest quality settings so that's something it certainly wasn't using the core i3 8100 or Pentium G 4560 testing with Counter Strike global Offensive sees the turnigy slip back behind the aid 12900 though it was 41% faster than the G 4560 then we see the two energy crushing the G 45 60 and the 8100 in dota 2 using the highest quality settings at 720p and I imagine using low quality settings that will allow you to push the frame rates up over 60 FPS performance in overwatch was also decent using the medium quality preset and here the turnigy offered a little over 30% more performance than the 812 982 percent more than the g 45 60 as is often the case with entry-level solutions we find that when testing with pub G it's really a no-go and that's certainly the case with the 200 GE here we're only seeing core i3 8100 live performance which is very disappointing but then it is pub G so who's surprised rocket League is very playable at 720p use in the highest quality settings so gaming at 1080p with reduced quality will be possible the Turner GU managed to edge out the a12 900 and crushed the G 45 60 finally we have Rainbow six siege and here the - energy comes in well behind the a12 900 at least for the average framerate still we do see playable performance and this wasn't the case with the pentium of g 4560 before wrapping up the testing i wanted to investigate what might have been using the 2400 G and the Wraith stealth I disabled two cores and unlocked the two remaining cause with SMT enabled at 3.9 yoghurts basically this gives us an unlocked 200 GE but with a better integrated GPU but we're not testing that so it doesn't really matter so what we have here is a 22% CPU overclock from 3.2 gigahertz to 3.9 gigahertz this boosted the single core performance by exactly 22 percent in Cinebench r15 while we see the multi-threaded score increased by 18 percent that's certainly nothing to sneeze at and it means if unlocked the Turner GE would have absolutely destroyed Intel sub $100 CPU range being the Pentium G 45 60 while costing much less so that is a shame but before we do well on that let's wrap things up with some temperature testing just a quick note on temperatures I didn't get too into it here because I don't actually have the official Box cooler so these aren't official results because I got an early sample it was an OEM tray CPU and not a retail version with the Box cooler so for testing I tried out the Wraith stealth and found an idle temperature of 29 degrees and a load temp of just 49 degrees also through on the passive Arctic Alpine a m4 heat sink which is designed to handle up to 47 what AMD processes completely passively with no fan given the - energy is a 35 watt processor I thought this would be the perfect time to test this cooler out with zero airflow and I mean absolutely zero airflow apart from whatever air movement we had in the room I saw an idle temp of 34 degrees with a load temp of 74 degrees not bad again given that there was no direct airflow okay so in a nutshell AMD's new Athlon at 200g is okay it's not great just okay certainly doesn't redefine the entry-level desktop CPU space like the pentium g 45 60 did back in early 2017 for example and that's a shame because it very easily could have still if it does indeed come in at the suggested $55 u.s. price then it will be the go-to budget CP on my opinion so I suppose in that sense mission accomplished for AMD and the pentium g 5400 is meant to cost $64 us and many months ago now it was available at that price but with intel's current production issues and that price has swelled to over $70 u.s. out of any places cost more than $80 so in light of intel's recent problems that appears AMD has really done enough with the turnigy again that is assuming that it comes in at the suggested or retail price at best the G 5400 on an h3 10 motherboard will set you back $130 us meanwhile the 200 G on an a320 board that we typically recommend a 320 board so I suppose it is a locked processor but anyway I won't get into that at the moment that combo 200 g plus a 320 board you're looking at about 105 dollars so not a massive saving there but we are talking about entry-level hardware so I suppose every dollar does count for the most part the Pentium G 5400 is slightly faster for office and general usage but when it comes to casual gaming the to energy is significantly better also if your workload takes advantage of a VX then the Athlon chip is much faster so as I said the Athlon at 200 GE is a better value choice overall but it's a lot closer or the battle is much closer than it really needs to be especially for tech savvy budget builders had AMD not locked the 200 GE and giving you guys the ability to boost performance by 15 or 20 percent then it really would be a no-brainer after all Intel has been caught with their pants down quite literally actually at least that was the story regarding their former CEO which is quite funny when you think about it like that but seriously AMD needs to kick Intel while they're down and I'm not an AMD fanboy rooting for AMD to destroy and tell any nonsense like that it's just that AMD are coming from so bloody far back they can't afford to pull punches like this and they've missed a golden opportunity to completely annihilate Intel at the low end and make the a m4 platform without question at the only choice for budget shoppers that said as I alluded to earlier they have a bit of luck on their side on this one because Intel are currently facing those supply issues and that is pushing prices up of all SCP use including entry-level parts and that makes the 200 GE a lot more appealing than Pentium @g 5400 now yeah previous video the one done by Tim where we kind of slammed AMD for the decision to lock the Athlon 200 GE and this was an opinion that both Tim and myself shared I have to admit I was a bit gobsmacked by the response of quite a few viewers it's almost like you can't criticize AMD for anything these days and it's not going to result in anything good for any of us admittedly a lot of the negative comments were from viewers who didn't seem to quite understand what we really meant they claimed things like AMD was locking the to energy to limit power consumption and make it more efficient also make it cheaper to produce hide the fact that it probably can't overclock very well AMD doesn't want to risk cannibalizing the 2200 G that was one we heard quite a bit even though we said that wouldn't be a thing and overclocking motherboards are too expensive and there was a few other things but stuff along those lines in my opinion and I suppose Tim's opinion we feel all those points are wrong or just don't really make any sense at all our locking the 200 GE has no impact on power consumption at all unlocked the results would be exactly the same so that is to say out of the box anyway before you overclock and then your power consumption will go up costs AMD nothing to unlock the CPU so not sure where that one comes from locked unlocked it doesn't change anything about the production of the CPU as for being poor overclockers there's really no way the 200 GE so some people were suggesting that it's the base clock is at just 3.2 gigahertz because it really can't handle much more than that because it's a really low end crap CPU that's Bend and while there could be some truth in that that's not a particularly great bit of silicon there's no way that 3.2 gigahertz is the sort of cutoff for the majority of the chips I'd say you go quite a bit higher than that chances are most will probably do up around 3.8 maybe 3.8 seems like a good spot that most of them would probably do and that is a nineteen percent frequency bump even at 3.6 you're looking at double-digit gains so also where does overclocking meant to be guaranteed yeah bit of a weed one that I don't understand the logic behind that argument it would almost do my opinion make the 200 GE kind of a bit more a bit more exciting a bit of a it was always cool in the old days when you'd get a chip that just overclocked like crazy but a lot of them didn't that was that was kind of the whole exciting part of our clocking I kind of missed that these days where they all sort of yeah you add the multiplier but does that and so anyway I don't know how you could complain about even it was only 200 Hertz I don't know how you could complain about a free 200 overclock it's better than being locked in my opinion so yeah you should really only be upset with having no chance to tract any extra performance which is the situation we face with the 200 GE as for cannibalizing the horizon 320 200g well again Tim said that that wouldn't happen in the previous video but that seemed to be a common they came up a lot but as we just saw in these simulated overclocking benchmarks that was just never gonna happen thanks to its 4 physical cores the 2000 G was still 30% faster than the overclocked at 200 G simulation and of course you still can overclock the 2200 G as that is an unlocked processor and you can squeeze a bit more performance out of it and it's probably worth noting the Rison 3 processor is also vastly superior in terms of integrated graphics performance so I suppose the real question is why has aimed a locked the Athlon 200 GE well I actually asked Amy this directly and asked them to get back with an official response and by the time I got around to film this video I hadn't got an official response if I have I'll put that as a pin comment down below not that I was really expecting them to admit the real reason because in my opinion the real reason is that they plan to somewhat follow in intel's footsteps by heavily segmenting the market so later this year you'll see an Athlon to 20 g and an Athlon to 40 g released at slightly higher price points with a small bump in frequency you had the 200 G been an unlocked part then there would be absolutely no reason to buy these upcoming processors as you were just overclock to match their spec so it seems aimed he was worried about cannibalizing some of their products it was just price that they are yet to release and I feel like this is a bit of a slap in the face for budget builders has aimed at primarily targeting businesses it seems with this new CPU and businesses won't be overclocking so if the 240 GE for example is better in terms of value or whatever then businesses would just buy that they won't simply buy the 200 G to save a couple of bucks and then overclock it it's just not going to happen but that's something many of you will certainly do and now you don't have the ability to do that so yeah it'll be shame and just quickly to wrap that up a lot of people hug you'd that another reason why they locked that CPU is because they are primarily targeting businesses and OMS and whatever and therefore it makes sense to have locked it because they don't overclock again I don't really understand the logic because it costs them nothing to lock it and businesses aren't going to have a clock so they're not going to cannibalize the 220 and the 240 GE and all they're doing is upsetting guys that are tech savvy and do their research and want to overclock and spend ten dollars more to be 350 board so again I don't really get the thinking behind that so yeah this is why I was a bit gobsmacked over the response from quite a few viewers viewers who I have to imagine our tech enthusiasts I kind of get that there is no shortage of AMD fanboys not trying to upset anyone it just that seems to be the case and they do defend the red team at every turn but you're not really doing anyone any favors don't look out for AMD look out for you guys the consumers and I get it I've read a little comments no Intel sucks they lock all their processes they've heavily segmented the market and they bleed you for every last dollar yeah it's all true for the whole hey so why are you willing to give AMD a pass when they attempt to do the same thing I'm not saying AMD you're going full-blown intel on us but if we allow them to take this step and then the next step or the next step and yes so some of rationalize this by saying oh it's only the Athlon 200g who's gonna overclock that anyway well without a tree it'll be 2019 before you know it aimed he may have climbed to the top and will be looking around thinking not too much has changed here at that point we'll be bitching and moaning about AMD locking all their most premium CPUs using toothpaste to transfer heat away from the dyes locking down almost every single one of their chipsets and whatever else it is that we've been bitching and moaning about Intel for the past decade also while I'm in this rare ranting mood probably due to the complete lack of sleep over the past few days due to those r-tx cards let's talk about the a12 9800 an old friend of mine to think some people tried to defend that abomination when we called it out for the garbage it is sure the Athlon 200g has arrived a year later but even back when I reviewed the a12 900 for the first time this time last year mind you it was just a horrible purchase five months later we got the I use the proper ap use for the airport platform and for the same price that 2200 G absolutely decimated the a12 900 I didn't really make much of a deal or bring it up then I just thought out whatever we'll just move on with that but yeah the 200 GE thing with the overclocking kind of stirred me up so here I am on my rant but anyway yeah a year later the turnigy is coming at half the price and delivering usually better or at least similar performance to the a12 900 at a fraction of the power consumption and heat output that being the case I feel like the to energy is a quality placeholder if that's what you wanted to use it for but anything bulldozer based not so much anyway wrapping this up as I said the Athlon turnigy is a decent CPU and at the suggested price will be our new go-to ultra entry-level option that said if you can throw $50 more at your CPU purchase the risin 322 energy is a significantly better product so keep that in mind and with that I'm going to end this one sorry about that conclusion I know it felt like it was just never going to end but it is ending now I promise you enjoy the video please be sure to hit the like button for us subscribe for more content and if you appreciate the work we do here at Harbor unbox then maybe consider supporting us on patreon we do a monthly live stream - monthly live streams now we have a discord chat where Tim and I are quite active and we have a growing community there that's a lot of fun and yeah check us out on patreon I guess that's what I'm trying to say thanks for watching I'm your host Steve see you next time