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.
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Irata - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Did some checking and in the US, I found the G5400 on sale for $129.99 at Newegg. The Athlon GE 200 was $ 59.99.The Intel CPU (LGA 1151 300 series) that had the same price was the Celeron G4920 - it's a 2C2T CPU (G5400: 2C/4T), has half the L3 cache of the G5400 and runs at 3.2 vs. 3.7 Ghz.
In Germany, I checked Mindfactory and the Pentium Gold G5400 was available for a more reasonable € 86.37. For around the same price you can get a Ryzen 3 2200G - if you want an iGPU - or if you don?t, you can get a Ryzen 3 1200 for € 10 less.
So from an actual retail price performance perspective, things look quite different - don't you guys check the store links that are embedded in the article ?
One last thing - which sane person would combine either the Athlon GE or the Pentium Gold with a GTX 1080 ?
PeachNCream - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
"One last thing - which sane person would combine either the Athlon GE or the Pentium Gold with a GTX 1080?"No one, but for other Anandtech benchmarks carried out over the course of this year on upcoming CPUs that will also use a 1080, this will mean the results will be comparable and the GPU will not act as a bottleneck at sub-4k resolutions.
Irata - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
But the article clearly says that "In gaming with a discrete graphics card, for example, if you've invested in something like the GTX 1080, the Intel Pentium will push more frames and higher minimums in practically every test at every resolution."I am not saying this is not correct - the G5400 runs @ 3.7 Ghz vs. the Athlon's 3.2 Ghz - but again even mentioning something like this... if you go for either of the two APU, it is because you want / need to spend the minimum money available, so it's definitely not GTX 1080 territory. I could see them mentioning something in the RX 1030 Ti / 1050 / RTX 560 range but even then there are better alternatives.
sing_electric - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
I don't think that anyone would realistically pair a $55 CPU with a GPU that's worth 10x that (except in oddball cases- like a base that you plan on upgrading), but that they didn't want any of the benchmarks to be GPU-limited. If they used say, a GTX 1030/50 or RX 550/60, some of the benchmarks might have been GPU-limited and would make the AMD and Intel parts look similar in ways they're not.A good, but separate idea is to do builds that hit various price points using combinations of AMD and Intel CPUs with/without dGPUs to see where you win. At today's prices, ~$250 is enough for a cheap-ish enclosure/psu ($70), 8GB DDR4 ($55), 256GB SSD ($60) and mobo ($60), so for $300 you'd be comparing these 2 processors with IGP, but for $400+ things get interesting (since you could compare say, the Ryzen 3 and 5 APUs vs. this chip with a dGPU), and $500+ things get a lot more interesting. For $600+, you're in a place where you have a lot of flexibility with creating a system that works for your use case (including more storage, RAM, etc.)
Irata - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Very good suggestion actually - the builds at different price points including all needed hardware.As for the GPU benchmarks - on one hand I do understand that they don't want a GPU bottleneck, but realistically if buyers in this range do not go for GPU that cost more than 150-200 and they do get identical results, then this is what matters to the buyer.
That said, I still think that the Pentium Gold would make for good budget gaming PC paired with something like a GTX 1050 Ti *if* it were available at MSRP - would definitely prefer it to the Athlon GE at that price point.
Funny thing is Ian says "y. The two chips in today’s analysis, the Intel Pentium Gold G5400 and the AMD Athlon 200GE, cost around $60 apiece, which I forked out for personally as I was never expecting to be sampled."
The question is: When and where ? The Intel CPU shortage has been going on for a few months now, so if he got it right after release, it may have been worth checking prices before writing the article.
If there is a store that has them in stock for this price, it would be helpful to say which one it is.
But it's not and it hasn't been so I quite fail to see the point of this article. You either get a much better CPU / APU from AMD for the same price or a much worse (lower clocked 2C/2T Celeron) Intel based CPU
silverblue - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
It would make sense to benchmark on a GTX 1030 (GDDR5) or RX 550 in addition to the 1080 to show what you could expect with more likely hardware, in addition to highlighting the Pentium's superior IPC out of the box.We would definitely appreciate that overclocked test suite, that's for certain. I know people will say that the Athlon isn't supposed to be overclocked, but given that a handful of motherboard manufacturers are now offering this - MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte to name three - I feel that it could be a viable alternative if you really need cheap and cheerful.
ikjadoon - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
This article is about a year-late on MSRP pricing, unfortunately:https://camelcamelcamel.com/Intel-Pentium-Desktop-...
That 14nm supply shortage: by the time prices go back down, Sunny Cove will be out, so where does article fit?
As hardware gets EOL'd, it raises in price, so these things will be priced even worse.
sing_electric - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
The way I read that is that Intel has gotten very good at 14nm yields, and no longer has (m)any processors with enough issues that they have to sell them as a G5400, and can instead sell them as faster, higher end parts.ikjadoon - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
You missed the key issue. "...instead sell them as faster, higher-end, and *more expensive* parts." They might make more money selling "working chips with disabled features" at $65 than "working chips with all features" at $120.Unless Intel is selling a product reliably at $55 to $85, then it's lost sales. These Pentiums are the default in the $250 to $500 office PC space.
sing_electric - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
When there's not a shortage, sure, you sell good chips with disabled features, since you'd rather sell a Core i3 than have an i5 unsold, and you'd rather sell a Pentium than have an i3 stuck in channel, but *right now* Intel's capacity-constrained: They can't make enough higher-end parts to meet demand, so it seems like they're really trying to sell every chip as the highest-end version of whatever it is (they're even selling chips with disabled IGP at the high end, presumably because the IGP is faulty).