The $60 CPU Question: AMD Athlon 200GE or Intel Pentium Gold G5400? A Review
by Ian Cutress on January 14, 2019 8:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Legacy Tests
We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3DPM v1: Naïve Code Variant of 3DPM v2.1
The first legacy test in the suite is the first version of our 3DPM benchmark. This is the ultimate naïve version of the code, as if it was written by scientist with no knowledge of how computer hardware, compilers, or optimization works (which in fact, it was at the start). This represents a large body of scientific simulation out in the wild, where getting the answer is more important than it being fast (getting a result in 4 days is acceptable if it’s correct, rather than sending someone away for a year to learn to code and getting the result in 5 minutes).
In this version, the only real optimization was in the compiler flags (-O2, -fp:fast), compiling it in release mode, and enabling OpenMP in the main compute loops. The loops were not configured for function size, and one of the key slowdowns is false sharing in the cache. It also has long dependency chains based on the random number generation, which leads to relatively poor performance on specific compute microarchitectures.
3DPM v1 can be downloaded with our 3DPM v2 code here: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)
x264 HD 3.0: Older Transcode Test
This transcoding test is super old, and was used by Anand back in the day of Pentium 4 and Athlon II processors. Here a standardized 720p video is transcoded with a two-pass conversion, with the benchmark showing the frames-per-second of each pass. This benchmark is single-threaded, and between some micro-architectures we seem to actually hit an instructions-per-clock wall.
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Irata - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Curious - which Retailer ?Valantar - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
The difference in Norway is slightly larger, with 599NOK for the 200GE vs. 729 for the G5400 - but it's not in stock anywhere, so prices may be fictitious (or there's no supply at all). 200GE supply seems plentiful.andrewaggb - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
I liked the article. I was interested in the 200GE's performance for some headless budget builds and now I know where it sits.I wouldn't use either of these chips on even a budget gaming build. Get a 2200g or i3 8100+ for gaming.
darb - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
On page 3, is "Uses might ask why we are not running Windows 10 x64 RS4, the latest major update" supposed to be "Users might ask why..."?Stuka87 - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
Under gaming with the World of Tanks results, it says GTX1080, but then also has an IGP column, and the IGP column is higher than everything else? Also, Encore engine was released last year, and WoT has been using it since April. So it is no longer "unreleased".GreenReaper - Thursday, January 17, 2019 - link
I think the idea is that it is "IGP"-level *settings*, run on the video card. It's a tad confusing, I agree.just4U - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
I always find it fun to compare budget processors to yesteryear's high end to see where you land up.. It almost looks like this is in the range of a low end 4000 series i5 and a bit better than it's i3 variants. Hmm.. 2 cores though ugh. I'd probably want at least 4.GreenReaper - Thursday, January 17, 2019 - link
It's worth if you can possibly afford it. About the only other situation I see it making sense *not* to is if power or cooling is a major consideration (especially if hyperthreading works for you). My server is just fine on two cores, and that reduces its power and cooling requirements, which have a 35W limit.Death666Angel - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
I sent you a tweet about the lables in the GTX1080 section and then realised I misread it. Deleted the tweet. Oh well. Good conclusion overall, very fair. Aligns perfectly with what I would do.Unfortunately, here (Germany) as well, the Intel CPUs are way overpriced. For a G5400 I can get a Ryzen 3 2200G. So it all kinda falls apart because of the weird CPU shortage.
Manch - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Would this be good for a NAS?