Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware box today we're talking budget hardware as ambien ounces the Athlon 200 GE but before you make a fist-sized hole in your desk or whatever it is you happen to have in front of you relax this isn't another bulldozer abomination that's found its way to the a m4 platform know what we have here is an Athlon brenards n+ process with Radeon Vega graphics so I guess it's an APU I don't think AMD is using the term APU anymore which is annoying because I think we oughta matically called any AMD CPU with integrated graphics an APU but anyway if you recall we receive the first Zen based APIs back in February of this year with the rice and 320 200 G and Rison 520 400 G and those are priced at a hundred u.s. and 170 dollars u.s. respectively these CPUs packed Vega graphics the 2200 G featured the Vega 8 GPU with 8 graphics compute units enabled and the 2400 G had Vega 11 with surprise-surprise 11 graphics compute units both offered entry level type discrete graphics performance so for CPU and GPU with a configurable TDP of 45 to 65 watts the performance was pretty impressive still while a bargain at $100 u.s. the 2200 G was still out of range for some more as crazy as it might sound a bit excessive plenty of people still interested in say Intel Celeron and Pentium processors priced between $40 and $100 u.s. not that long ago we checked out the pentium g 5400 and at the time it cost $52 us today it's a bit worse value at more like $70 u.s. though assuming the $52 u.s. price Steve's conclusion regarding the G 5400 went something like this if you're not interested in 3d performance and you just want a PC for general usage then the Pentium G 5400 is tough to be that said if you plan to tackle heavy tasks like rendering and coding and so on then the extra investment is well worth it if the 2200 she was often up to 40% faster still the 2200 she clearly couldn't cater to everyone and at some point AMD would need to create a Zen base to sub a hundred or us process and today we have that processor the Athlon 200 GE but why Athlon you might ask well Ambu like Intel doesn't want to risk tarnishing their premium product lines with budget low performance products so Intel preserves the core name for their higher-end parts and goes with Pentium and Celeron for the ultra affordable models ambi is doing the same by making their ultra affordable Zen processors part of the Athlon family today just a single Athlon model will be announced and it packs in mere two cores and for threats thanks to SMT being enabled it runs at a frequency of just 3.2 gigahertz and this relatively low frequency allows army to achieve the 35 watt TDP rating that's great no but what really sucks e is the fact that this is a locked CPU yep I'm sorry to say but for whatever reason Andy has gone a bit full intel on us here initially I was pretty excited about this new budget processor but the second I found out the CPU cores were locked I felt a bit crushed and most of the excitement was gone you can still overclock the ddr4 memory to help maximize the GPU performance but still no CPU core overclocking speaking of the integrated GPU it packs just three graphics compute units which is very light when compared to the risin AP use down 63% from the 2200 G so I'm not expecting much that said AMD are claiming some pretty decent 720p gaming numbers 65 FPS in dota 2 71 fps and csgo 67 FPS in rocket League and roughly 60 fps in overwatch so I'm keen to check it out later this month now you might be thinking a dual-core get the hell out of here AMD but a dual-core Rison processor with SMT support will be more than capable of delivering smooth performance in a number of popular titles such as those just mentioned also we probably shouldn't overlook the fact that it comes in an MSRP of just $55 us so throw it on a $50 a320 board and you've got yourself a pretty great budget combo I should also note that it's compatible with the full range of a m4 motherboard so in addition to the a320 boards you can also use it with b3 or 50 X 370 P 450 and X 470 boards and Andy says no BIOS update is required for any of these boards in terms of general computing performance dee has shown it delivering pentium g 4560 like performance those underwear the G 4560 is a 2017 release based on the 14 nanometer Kaiba Lake architecture it also packs 2 cores with Smt technology for 4 threads and a base frequency of 3.5 gigahertz I'm not sure why AMD didn't compare it to a modern equivalent that you can actually buy the pentium g 5400 for example is the same processor at the g 45 60 it just comes clocked 6 percent higher which is probably why md chose the g 45 60 as the 200 GE can match that chip had the 200 g been an unlocked part it would have I guess single-handedly smokes the entire Intel Celeron and Pentium range as it stands now it probably only makes sense if you want to take advantage of the integrated GPU if you plan on getting a discrete GPU of any kind the Pentium processors from Intel likely offer a little more bang for your buck I will say that unlike the horrid time for bulldozer APU series which made about as much sense as the cabling x-series is a CPU placeholder the AMD 200 GE does make for an excellent place all day if you happen across a decent be 350 board for a good price you can throw the 200 GE on it and enjoy some casual gaming now and then later once funds allow you to upgrade to a more serious rising 5 all rise the 7 CPU you can do so with ease today AMD are just announcing the Athlon 200 G normally these budget chips get pushed out quietly but for whatever reason AMD is making a bit of noise 12 days ahead of the actual release Steve is definitely keen to try and provide a review on the 18th of September and see how well the Tour de GE stacks up against the IntelliJ 5400 had only offered this as an unlocked part I would have been super excited but as it stands I'm worried I'll end up being a little bit disappointing I mean it's never gonna be bad at just $55 you Wes but a $55 unlocked for threaded Zen + CP you would have conquered every sub $100 Intel CPU with ease and I guess what could have been anyway that's going to do it for this one if you did enjoy the video make sure you hit the like button subscribe for more content and particularly the Athlon 200 GE review when we get around to that and if you appreciate the work we do consider supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next one