Marrying Vega and Zen: The AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review
by Ian Cutress on February 12, 2018 9:00 AM ESTPower Consumption
For our power consumption metrics, we use a Prime 95 blend on fixed threads to generate a strong load, and then poll the internal power registers that determine power state calculations to get the power consumption. Each processor is different in how it reports its power, which depends on the level of control the processor has: some of the more advanced CPUs, such as Ryzen, will provide per-core power numbers, while the latest Intel CPUs only give a figure for the CPUs as a whole but also include DRAM controller and uncore power consumption.
An interesting element to the power consumption on the Ryzen APUs, due to the unified power delivery subsystem in play feeding the CPU and the integrated graphics, is that the power registers only report half the power consumption when probed (e.g. when 14W, shows 7W). As of yet, we are unsure if this has a knock-on effect on how the processor adjusts its turbo modes in response to power consumption. Nonetheless, a simple scaling factor gives the following results.
Total Package: The Whole Processor
For this data, we take the values of the processor as a whole, which includes all the interconnect, memory controllers, PCIe root complexes, etc. The system is still only loading the CPU cores with minimal effect on the rest of the system, however depending on how the power is managed, some of the sub-systems still remain enabled.
At full load, the difference between the Ryzen 5 and the other Ryzen CPUs shows that the 2400G is using more of its upper margin, compared to the 1400 which is rated at the same power (note TDP is only determined at the base frequency), but the extra frequency of the 2400G means that there is extra power draw overall. Part of this is due to the Infinity Fabric, which we will see below. But what these tests also underline is that in a quad-core configuration, the Intel CPUs are still very power efficient.
Cores Only: Pure Work
For the processors that split out the data, we can look at the power consumption of the cores on their own, without any of the sub-systems, like uncore, mesh, or infinity fabric. This usually paints a different picture to the package power.
For the core only power, the Ryzen 5 2400G uses less power than the Core i3-8350K, despite the situation being reversed when considering the whole package. This means that Infinity Fabric takes a lot of power here, and the ring bus solution that Intel uses benefits from being simpler, and Intel can push more power to its individual cores.
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nevcairiel - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
Some more realistic gaming settings might be nice. Noone is going to play on settings that result in ~20 fps, and the GPU/CPU scaling can tilt quite a bit if you reduce the settings.I can see why you might not like it, because it takes the focus away from the GPU a bit and makes comparisons against a dGPU harder (unless you run it on the exact same hardware, which might mean you have to re-run it every time), but this is a combined product, so testing both against other iGPU products would be useful info.
atatassault - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
20 FPS is playable. I have a 2 in 1 with a Skylake i3-6100u, and 20 FPS is what it gets in Skyrim. Any notion of things being "unplayable" under 30/60 FPS is like an audiohile saying songs are unlistenable on speakers less than $10,000.lmcd - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
Any notion of things being "unplayable" under 30/60 FPS is like an audiophile saying songs are unlistenable on speakers less than $100.Fixed it for you (FIFY).
nevcairiel - Thursday, February 15, 2018 - link
I rather reduce settings a bit to go up in FPS then look at 20 fps average. There often is many things one can turn off without a huge visual impact to achieve much better performance.29a - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
What a useless review. I came here to see if this thing can do some low end gaming and you didn't even test on 720p.Gideon - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
Yes sorry, I didn't mean to nitpick. Just being a web developer myself dealing mosrly with frontend code, I just wanted to mention that Speedometer is actually considered to be fairly representative by both Mozilla and Google (and true enough the frameworks they use are actual frontend JS frameworks rendering TodoMVC) If you are already aware of that then that's excellent.richardginn - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
An article looking at how memory speed affects FPS on the 2400G and 2200G is s must.I say you can 1080P game with this although it looks like for a bunch of games you will be on low settings
stanleyipkiss - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Check out Hardware Unboxed's review on YouTube. They did just that.beginner99 - Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - link
Yeah this review should have used medium or low settings, something that is actually playable on the CPUs tested. 25 fps might work for Civ6 but not a shooter.iter - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Not too shabby, 2-3x the igpu perf of intel and comparable cpu perf in the same price range. And it will likely pull ahead even further in the upcoming weeks as faster memory becomes supported.