Ryzen 3 3200G vs. Core i3-9100 vs. Athlon 3000G
This month, we’re turning our heads to accelerated processing units. AMD is killing it at the moment on the integrated graphics front, although Intel’s APUs—such as the Core i39100—are still top-notch products. If you’re looking for a processor to power a budget build, there are plenty of options on the market right now. The Intel versus AMD debate may rage until the end of time, but AMD has given its budget Ryzen 3 3200G APU an extra competitor in the frighteningly cheap Athlon 3000G. Can this affordable underdog take home the crown?
ROUND 1
Value
This is tough. In terms of baseline pricing, the Athlon 3000G should win this round; it’s $50, for crying out loud. There’s no buying integrated graphics processors with that kind of money, other than the old Celeron and Pentium APUs from Intel that aren’t supported on current-gen mobos. The 3000G does sit beneath AMD’s other APUs in terms of processing power and features, though. The Intel Core i3-9100 offers a maximum of 16 PCIe lanes and 50 percent more cache memory, while the Ryzen 3 3200G has the fastest memory support: 2,933MHz as opposed to the 9100’s 2,400MHz and the 3000G’s 2,667MHz.
All three come with an air cooler unit, although Intel’s included coolers aren’t that impressive. The AMD chips come with the excellent Wraith coolers, which are a good addition to improve the value. The i3-9100 is the most expensive chip by far, costing $165 at the time of writing; more than triple the price of the Athlon 3000G. Meanwhile, the 3200G costs an even $100, which is a perfectly reasonable amount to spend on an APU, but at double the price, it doesn’t double the baseline performance of the Athlon, so we’re giving the win here to the 3000G.
Winner: Athlon 3000G
ROUND 2
Performance
Shockingly, the super-budget Athlon doesn’t win this round. Granted, it’s the only chip here with multithreading, bringing its thread count to four; tied with the other two, despite only having two cores. It can’t quite match the higher frequencies and superior integrated graphics of the other two. The i3-9100 does well—in CPU-bound tests it outpaces the Ryzen 3 3200G by a small margin (less than 10 percent). However, the 3200G’s integrated graphics are better suited to low-end gaming than the i3-9100. It’s a case of Radeon Vega 8 against Intel UHD 630, and AMD has a slight edge when rendering graphics in real time.
Neither chip is going to perform outstandingly without a discrete GPU, but the 3200G can carry most games in 720p and even some at 1080p. In our recent budget build, we saw the 3200G play RiseoftheTombRaider at 1080p ultra, with a frame rate almost triple that of the i3-9100. There’s no contest in terms of graphical power; the Intel chip is a bit older than the Ryzen, too, utilizing the same integrated graphics as the older i3-8100. So, we lean toward AMD, but once desktop models of Intel CPUs featuring the Iris Plus graphics arrive, our tune may change.
Winner: Ryzen 3 3200G
ROUND 3
Efficiency
APUs tend to have broadly comparable power consumption, with the graphics demanding a bit more juice than conventional CPUs. The Ryzen 3 3200G and Core i3-9100 are both rated for a TDP of 65W, the same as more powerful chips without integrated graphics, such as the Ryzen 5 3600. But Intel and AMD calculate TDP differently, so without getting too deep into the math, the Ryzen chip likely uses slightly less power. The Athlon 3000G, however, has a far lower default TDP of 35W.
Looking at clock speeds, the Ryzen and Core both exceed the Athlon, but when comparing base clocks against TDP, the 3000G comes out on top. Core processors still use less power than many other components (such as GPUs), and overclocking means that power consumption in APUs is potentially variable. None of these chips have brilliant overclocking potential anyway, so the winner here is the 3000G. Its Vega 3 graphics can give Intel’s UHD 630 a run for its money, and utilizing SMT means it packs the same number of threads as the other chips without overburdening your power consumption. If you’re looking to build a low-power system, this is one of the best APUs around.
Winner: Athlon 3000G
ROUND 4 Overclocking
AMD’s been having a hard time with overclocking. The Zen 2 Ryzen CPUs (3600 and up) have had serious issues with overclocking headroom, rarely able to hit their advertised boost clocks across multiple cores. The 3200G uses the 12nm Zen+ architecture, which is a bit more stable, but still isn’t able to hit any particularly dizzying heights. The Athlon 3000G comes unlocked, using the even older 14nm Zen architecture, and is capable of boosting its 3.5GHz base clock up to 3.9GHz. That might not sound like much, but it’s the same increase as the 3200G’s theoretical base to boost clock.
Intel has the edge here, though, with the reliable Coffee Lake architecture capable of handling an overclock of up to 600MHz more than its base clock of 3.6GHz. It can do this easily in single cores, or a little less reliably across all cores. It still comfortably outperforms the other two in manual overclocking. With auto overclocking, the waters are muddied. AMD’s Ryzen Master software gives the 3200G a slight edge, and does tend to improve performance by a reasonable amount. Overall, though, we’d have to give it to the Intel chip; the potential headroom for overclocking is simply greater.
Winner: Core i3-9100
ROUND 5 Flexibility
All three chips can form a solid foundation for an upgradable custom system, and all are relatively new (the oldest, the Core i9-9100, is less than a year old). Longevity is to be expected from CPUs in this day and age, and each chip here presents that. Quadcore (or quad-thread, in the case of the 3000G) is enough to handle any ordinary work on a regular basis, and there’s the potential to upgrade to a discrete GPU for more graphical oomf. But which of these chips best supports future upgrades and expansions?
The i3-9100 might not be the obvious answer; it has the slowest memory support, and its higher price makes it look more like a budget upgrade piece than an upgradable baseline. But it has more cache memory, a higher boost clock, and most importantly, it has more available PCI Express lanes, thanks to Intel graphics connecting differently. This leaves more support for upgrades; expansion cards, SSDs, whatever else you might want to add to a evolving build. There are a lot of factors at play here. If the AMD chips had support for PCIe 4.0—currently an AMD-exclusive feature of Zen 2—we might have changed our minds, but as it stands, we’re giving the win to Intel.
Winner: Core i3-9100