The $60 CPU Question: AMD Athlon 200GE or Intel Pentium Gold G5400? A Review
by Ian Cutress on January 14, 2019 8:00 AM ESTOverclocking the Athlon 200GE
In recent weeks, motherboard manufacturers have been releasing BIOS firmware that enables overcooking on the Athlon 200GE. It appears that this has come through an oversight in one of the base AMD firmware revisions that motherboard vendors are now incorporating into their firmware bundles. This is obviously not what AMD expected; the Athlon is the solitary consumer desktop chip on AMD's AM4 platform that is not overclockable. Since MSI first starting going public with new firmware revisions, others have followed suit, including ASRock and GIGABYTE. There is no word if this change will be permanent: AMD might patch it in future revisions it sends out to the motherboard vendors, or those vendors will continue to patch around it. As it stands, however, a good number motherboards can now offer this functionality.
The question does arise if there is even a point to overclocking these chips. They are very cheap, they usually go into cheap motherboards that might not even allow overclocking, and they are usually paired with cheaper coolers. The extra money spent on either an overclocking enabled motherboard or even spending $20 on a cooler might as well be put into upgrading the CPU to a Ryzen 3 2200G, with four cores and better integrated graphics, which comes with a better stock cooler and stomps all over Intel's Pentium line, and is also overclockable without special firmware. The standard response to 'why overclock' is 'because we can', which if you've lived in that part of the industry is more than enough justification.
Given that our resident motherboard editor, Gavin, has been on a crusade through 2018 looking at the scaling performance of the AMD APUs, I asked if he could do a few overclocking tests for us.
Overclocking the 200GE
Enabling our MSI motherboard with the latest overclocking BIOS was no different to any other BIOS flash, and with it, the multiplier options opened up for the chip. Even though AMD's chips can go in quarter multiplier steps, we could only push this processor in full multiplier jumps of 100 MHz, but with a little bit of voltage using our usual overclocking methodology, we managed to get 3.9 GHz without any trouble.
To be fair, we are using a good cooler here, but to be honest, the thermals were not much of a problem. Our practical limit was the voltage frequency response of the chip at the end of the day, and our 3.9 GHz matches what other people have seen. The base frequency is locked, so there is little room for fine adjustments on that front.
At each stage of the overclock, we ran our Blender test. The gains went up almost linearly, leading to a 20% performance throughput increase from the stock frequency to the best frequency.
Thoughts
A 21 percent performance increase across the range of benchmarks would put the 200GE either on par with Intel on most tests or even further ahead on the tests it already wins. This now changes our conclusion somewhat, as explained on the next page.
If you want to see a full suite test at the overclocked speed, leave a comment below and we'll set something up in January.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
95 Comments
View All Comments
Ratman6161 - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
One issue is though that at my favored place to buy CPU's (microcenter.com) The 2200G isn't $40 more, its only $30 more. The 200GE is $49.99 and the 2200G is $79.99. Add to that you can get a B450 motherboard for $59.99. So for just $30 more for the total system price and the fact that the 2200G/B450 combo guarantees overclocking capability, I couldn't really see going with either of the CPU's in this review.eastcoast_pete - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Fully agree, and, at those prices (2200G at $ 79.99, plus mobo for $59.99), it's even more a closed and shut case. Neither the Athlon nor the Pentium come anywhere near the 2200G, especially if the iGPU is "it", which is likely for a budget system. The only scenario I can see for a builder to chose the Athlon or the Pentium is if they a. are on sale, and b. if it's for one's parents or grandparents, and all they want to do is browse the web and some occasional light office work. But, even there, if one can swing the extra $30, why not get the much more capable 2200G? With the added ability to play some games, maybe you'll visit more often (:GreenReaper - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
I was thinking this throughout - "wow, this review is a great advertisement for the 2200G!"Personally I'd like to wait for a chip with AV1 support, Navi and PCIe 4.0, but it seems likely that you'll be able to upgrade to all of that at a later date if you pick your motherboard right.
DominionSeraph - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Can you put the venerable i5 2500 in the new Bench? With used systems available for $90 it's the price/performance champion.jordanclock - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
On the Overclocking page:"In recent weeks, motherboard manufacturers have been releasing BIOS firmware that enables overcooking on the Athlon 200GE."
I know OCing can increase temperatures, but calling it overcooking might be a little strong.
mczak - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Ian,I think you might want to rephrase every paragraph which has "AVX" in it. From your wording it sounds like you're surprised the pentium doesn't benefit much from the use of AVX, whereas the truth is it doesn't support AVX at all, hence even if you use avx-optimized binaries it's still going to use an sse-only path.
This is of course a reversal of the other Core chips vs. Ryzen - intel typically benefits quite a bit more from AVX code, since it actually has simd units which are physically 256bit wide, whereas Ryzen only has simd units which are 128bit wide.
GreenReaper - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
I agree, I was a little confused when I saw talk of AVX for the Pentium - don't get me wrong, SSE optimizations can provide great benefits (compare 'openssl speed -evp' to 'openssl speed' on a Celeron), and probably they are used by the "optimized" path but it's not going to give the same results.As you say, "supports" is debatable on Ryzen. But even if a CPU didn't really support it on a hardware level at all (which is not the case), its use might result in improvements due to the ability to provide a microcode equivalent than is faster than the SSE-based alternatives.
silverblue - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
It's not really debatable in my eyes - it may be half-speed, but there's no AVX offset - as far as I can tell - to worry about. When Zen 2 pops up, perhaps it'll have to behave more like Intel's implementation.eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Agree. After all, in the Intel universe, the absence of AVX is a key differentiator between the Pentium and the core i3; if you want hardware-supported AVX extensions, you have to fork over the extra $$$ and get at least the entry-level core chip.kkilobyte - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
I'd like to know where one would find the G5400 at 60$, or even at the same price as the 200GE.I don't seem to be able to find the G5400 in Europe for less than 75€. On the other hand, I can get a 2000GE at 55-60€.
For example, Materiel.net - one of the most popular online shops in France and Belgium, has the cheapest Intel i3, the G4900, at 67.95€, while the 200GE is 57.95€. And the G5400? They list it as 'out of stock', at more than 100€ (!)
If both where at the same price, indeed, the Intel CPU would be more interesting. But if it's either unavailable or 20-50% more than the price given in the article, what's the point?