AMD Athlon 200GE
The budget chip you’ve been waiting for? That depends…
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM says that AMD is the budget darling, while Intel has you covered at the high end. Conventional wisdom is out of step with reality. Because, right now, if you want serious performance, AMD’s Threadripper should be at the top of your list, while anyone on a supertight budget is better served by Intel’s Pentium chips and the likes of the Core i3-8100. AMD doesn’t want to leave any market segment to Intel, though, so has revived the Athlon brand for this, its most affordable Zen chip to date.
Before we delve into the details, it’s worth mentioning the price. In theory, this is a $55 CPU, but in truth, you’ll do well to actually find it for that, because it’s one of those chips that tends to sell out. By way of example, the cheapest we could find it for on Newegg was $67, which is still a great price, if not quite the ridiculous bargain that it should be. Note that this paltry sum also includes a CPU cooler, and in our testing, it is indeed every bit as “whisper quiet” as AMD claims. So, either way, you get a lot of hardware for your money.
Apart from a rather unimpressivelooking, yet still capable, CPU cooler, what does your small chunk of cash get you? This is a dual-core, quad-thread processor, with a 3.2GHz base clock, and Radeon Vega 3 integrated graphics. It uses the same AM4 socket as the bigger Ryzen chips, has a low, low TDP of just 35W, and supports dual-channel DDR4 memory. The integrated graphics aren’t going to have you playing the latest games at maximum settings, but with sufficient tweaking, you should get some classics and efficient modern titles running at passable frame rates.
We’ve actually already featured the Athlon 200GE in MaximumPC, as a few issues ago, we used it as the basis of our $285 “Build It” challenge. At the time, we were blown away by its obvious value, but as that machine didn’t boast a discrete graphics card, it wasn’t the whole story in terms of true CPU performance. Now it’s in our test bench, we can compare it with the field, and see where it excels and where it pulls up a bit short.
ON THE TABLE
A quick look at the benchmark table below reveals that it performs pretty much where we’d expect it in most CPU tests. Where it does falter is when it’s paired up with a decent graphics card, in the form of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, and this is because the integrated graphics butcher the PCIe connectivity down to just 8x. The 3DMark score is significantly lower than non-APU chips, and the gaming performance is also off the pace. If you’re looking to get into gaming on the cheap, this is essentially a false economy, and you’d be better off going for a Ryzen or Core i3.
On the plus side, this is a low-power chip, and even under load, it doesn’t draw much from the wall. It also offers great value for money—even at $67, it boasts better bang for your buck than most chips. If you’re looking for a small system that is going to make the most of the integrated graphics, for a media center, or a discreet server, then there’s a lot to like here. Gamers, serious users, and anyone looking for an affordable base system for bigger and better things are going to be ultimately disappointed, unless you factor in a CPU upgrade as part of it—it does use the standard AM4 socket, after all.