Since their launch in 2017, AMD's Ryzen products have turned the desktop processor market upside down. The new Ryzen CPUs have proven to offer excellent price/performance ratios, and they've been highly competitive against Intel's Core processors. But how well does the new architecture powering AMD's Ryzen resurgence translate to the bottom of the product stack? The AMD Athlon 200GE ($55), the least powerful "Zen" processor produced to date, aims to knock Intel's Celeron out of the game—and it just might succeed. Its performance trails that of another dual-core, four-thread budget chip, Intel's Pentium Gold G5600, but it costs barely half as much, making the Athlon 200GE a great option for very value-minded buyers and builders.
Putting the Athlon in Position
The Athlon 200GE utilizes AMD's "Zen" microarchitecture, which premiered with the Ryzens in early 2017. It has two CPU cores with support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology, which allows each core to process two threads simultaneously. The cores are conservatively clocked at 3.2GHz and lack boost technology, which means that 3.2GHz is all you get.
The Athlon 200GE is also one of the few desktop processors on which AMD locks down the cores, which will prevent you from overclocking it by raising its CPU multiplier. Packed in along with the cores is 4MB of L3 cache, which is small versus Ryzen but stacks up well against Intel's "Coffee Lake" Celeron processors, which have just half as much L3 cache.
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The Athlon 200GE also comes equipped with AMD's Radeon Vega 3 integrated graphics, featuring 192 shaders, 12 TMUs, 4 ROPs, and 1,000MHz clock speed. We didn't expect much from this low-end graphics solution. Unlike the iGPUs inside AMD's Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5, the Athlon's is intended as a simple solution for basic graphics workloads such as rendering web pages. That doesn't mean you can't play some casual games on it, but don't expect it to run anything recent at a steady clip. Spoiler: Even with that caveat, it surprised us a bit in our integrated-graphics testing; more on that in a bit.
Packaged with the Athlon 200GE is AMD's least impressive stock cooler. It can keep the Athlon 200GE from overheating, and it's adequate considering that overclocking this Athlon is not in the cards. But it's a mere wisp compared to the company's robust and more attractive Wraith Stealth, Wraith Spire, Wraith Max, and Wraith Prism thermal solutions. It's made for utility and low cost, not looks.
Test Setup
Before looking at the benchmarks, I should note that during our tests the AMD processors have a slight, but justifiable, advantage over the Intel CPUs in our testing process. As many high-end Intel motherboards lack video ports, and a typical Celeron or Pentium buyer isn't going to use a Z370 or Z390 mainboard with such a budget chip, we had to look down-stream for a proper testbed to use for testing our budget processors on Intel's LGA 1151 socket. We ultimately settled on Asrock's DeskMini 310 bare-bones mini-PC to run our Intel LGA 1151 budget CPU tests. The motherboard in that system, though, supported RAM only up to 2,600MHz.
As a result, the Intel Celeron and Pentium CPUs graphed below were benchmarked with DDR4 memory clocked at 2,600MHz, while the AMD processors were tested using an AM4 B350 board with DDR4 DRAM clocked at 3,000MHz. (The B350-based motherboard was the Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3.) That should give AMD a slight advantage in some tests, notably the graphics and 7-Zip benchmarks. Both systems' memory was configured in dual-channel mode using two 8GB RAM sticks for a total of 16GB.
Here's a breakout of several of the CPUs we're comparing against the Athlon 200GE in our performance charts, for a sense of their vital stats.
In the actual performance graphs below, we also include a couple of older-gen Core i3 and i5 CPUs for perspective, as well as a current-gen Ryzen 5, but these chips are a tier above the Athlon, Pentium, and Celeron offerings here.
The Athlon 200GE's primary competitor is Intel's Celeron chips. The prices are similar between the 200GE and the Celeron graphed below.Both of these processors feature two 3.2GHz CPU cores, but the Athlon has a few notable advantages including twice the L3 cache (4MB) and simultaneous multithreading support (letting it process four threads at once). Let's see how that shakes out in testing.
CPU Benchmarks
Cinebench and Handbrake
Starting with Cinebench, we see the AMD Athlon 200GE gain a strong lead against the competing Intel Celeron G4920 on the all-cores-engaged trial—not surprising considering the Celeron's smaller L3 cache and lack of Hyper-Threading support. The Athlon wasn't able to catch the Pentium Gold G5600, though, in single-core or all-cores testing.
The Athlon performed well in our Handbrake video-editing exercise, with a very noticeable lead over the Celeron G4920. It also edged the Pentium Gold G5600, though the performance difference was too narrow to indicate a real advantage.
Blender and iTunes
Testing with Blender 2.77a showed the Athlon 200GE continuing to hold a healthy lead over the Celeron, but trailing the Pentium Gold.
The Athlon finished last in our venerable, single-threaded iTunes test. This benchmark tends to favor Intel processors and the application of a high-clocked single core, as shown by the dual-core Pentium and last-gen Core i3 handily beating the quad-core AMD chips. Even the Celeron benefited from this.
POV-Ray and 7-Zip
The POV-Ray ray-tracing benchmark doesn't hold a strong bias for either architecture, which makes its results more revealing about the relative performance difference between processors. The outcome was mixed, however, with the Athlon 200GE beating the Celeron G4920 by a bunch with all cores engaged, but notably behind with just one core engaged. As most workloads today are multithreaded, however, I'd give a slight edge to the Athlon.
The 7-Zip file compression utility is known to benefit from faster RAM, so all the AMD processors gained an advantage over their Intel rivals. Still, the Athlon's lead over the Celeron was too large to be caused by the difference in memory alone.
It even surpassed the Intel Core i3-7350K, though that result would likely be reversed if the Core i3 were tested with the same RAM.
GPU Benchmarks
Both AMD and Intel have long histories when it comes to integrated graphics, but it's unquestioned that AMD currently has the upper hand. The company's high-end graphics cards are Nvidia's only real competition, and the same technology, much scaled down, easily tops Intel's less robust integrated graphics silicon when put inside AMD's processors. Considering its Radeon Vega 3 architecture, it's little surprise that the Athlon 200GE outperforms its Intel competition.
To be fair, Intel's Pentium Gold G5600 turned in respectable results in these graphics tests, staying within a few frames per second of the Athlon despite its slightly slower RAM. It even managed to sneak past the Athlon when playing Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1080p resolution (though this was moot; neither chip presented an even close-to-playable frame rate). The Athlon is clearly the faster solution, however, with a small lead in most tests and a rather large one in Rainbow Six: Siege. The 3DMark Night Raid results also help to reflect the performance disparity between the Athlon and its Intel rivals.
A Budget No-Brainer
AMD announced the Athlon 200GE at $55, but due to the laws of supply and demand, it was $59.66 on Amazon at this writing. Even so, the Athlon is a first-class choice for any PC builder with a thin wallet. It trailed the Pentium Gold G5600 in most tests, but that processor costs significantly more. (Intel lists it at $75 to $82, but it was anywhere from $95 to $102 as I wrote this.)
Compared to the Celeron G4920, the Athlon 200GE is both faster and a few dollars less expensive. It's certainly no speed demon, but if you just need a computer for casual web browsing and maybe some older games, the Athlon is an admirable solution, and the AM4 platform has no shortage of budget boards to get you started.
If you're building a PC on a very, very tight budget, AMD's Athlon 200GE is a cost-effective, good-value choice among cheap desktop CPUs.
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