$55\ AMD ATHLON 200GE
AMD’s legendary Athlon CPU first arrived in 1999. Built from the ground up to take advantage of a copper interconnect, it was the first AMD part capable of hitting that 180nm sweet spot at 1GHz. Fast-forward almost 20 years, and we’re witness to AMD’s revival of the brand, in a very different package.
In short, the 200GE is a two-core, four-thread Ryzen processor with integrated graphics, featuring three Vega cores (the Ryzen 3 2200G has eight for $100, and the Ryzen 5 2400G has 11 at $160), and support for all of AMD’s latest chipsets. It comes with DDR4 support at 2,666MT/s, a super-low TDP of 35W, and even a cooler (annoyingly, ours was an engineering sample). The big selling point, however, is the price; $55 makes it ideal for any home theater PC, light office machine, or super-budget esports (or MOBA) gaming rig.