The $60 CPU Question: AMD Athlon 200GE or Intel Pentium Gold G5400? A Review
by Ian Cutress on January 14, 2019 8:00 AM ESTGaming: Shadow of the Tomb Raider (DX12)
The latest instalment of the Tomb Raider franchise does less rising and lurks more in the shadows with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. As expected this action-adventure follows Lara Croft which is the main protagonist of the franchise as she muscles through the Mesoamerican and South American regions looking to stop a Mayan apocalyptic she herself unleashed. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the direct sequel to the previous Rise of the Tomb Raider and was developed by Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics and was published by Square Enix which hit shelves across multiple platforms in September 2018. This title effectively closes the Lara Croft Origins story and has received critical acclaims upon its release.
The integrated Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark is similar to that of the previous game Rise of the Tomb Raider, which we have used in our previous benchmarking suite. The newer Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses DirectX 11 and 12, with this particular title being touted as having one of the best implementations of DirectX 12 of any game released so far.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | Action | Sep 2018 |
DX12 | 720p Low |
1080p Medium |
1440p High |
4K Highest |
|
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
 |
| 95th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
 |
The comparison between the two CPUs is consistent through to our our medium settings: the G5400 has a comfortable win.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
95 Comments
View All Comments
shabby - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Lol this chip hasn't been $60 for half a year, what was AT thinking writing this article? The intel bias is strong here.yannigr2 - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
I stopped reading this article when I saw that the Pentium price is NOT based on the ACTUAL price of the processor in the market, but just some marketing/wishful thinking that Intel posts on it's site.Pity. I was expecting more from Anandtech.
mobutu - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
"In gaming with a discrete graphics card, for example, if you've invested in something like the GTX 1080..."so we're talking about the absolute cheapest of the cheap build but all of the sudden "you invested in a GTX 1080" ?
megaLOL wtf is this
sing_electric - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Yeah, that sentence is weird (though I guess, if you have $400 now, you can get a working system with a very solid PSU and the rest of the specs listed here, and if you have money later, plop in a dGPU you actually want, and after that, get the CPU you actually want), but the reason to use a GTX 1080 in the test is that you can be more or less guaranteed that none of the scores you saw were GPU-bound, so you're getting an idea of CPU performance. Otherwise, whatever GPU they chose (1030? 1050? RX 550/560?) would sometimes be the bottleneck, meaning the charts wouldn't tell you anything comparing the two CPUs.drexnx - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
I think the obvious conclusion from this article is skip both and buy the R3 2200Gshabby - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
That cpu is still cheaper than the g5400 which costs $130 even at Newegg. Where did Ian get the price of the g5400? It makes this article worthless.sing_electric - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Right, I think these processors are aimed more at OEMs trying to hit a price point. The cheapest I can do a reasonable system build around these is $305, in which case, the extra cash to go for the R3 seems like a no-brainer.Even if its an upgrade vs. a new build, you're looking at ~$180 minimum ($60 for the CPU, $60 for the motherboard, since there is basically no way you already AM4/LGA1151 system and look at this as an "upgrade," and that means you probably need new RAM since chances are you're coming from DDR3), in which case, why not spend the extra $30-40 for a significant step up in processor (and, in the case of AMD, one that officially supports overclocking).
piasabird - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
I would have thrown in the Intel i3 8100 quad core which is selling for $118 on Newegg. It is close to the same price as the i3 7100. If you purchase it at a Micro Center you might get $30 off on a motherboard combo.drzzz - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
WTF Ian? As of this post the Intel is 183$ follow the link in the article and the AMD is 60$. This is not a even close to comparing 60$ parts. Seriously how did this get by the editors?shabby - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
The editors were intel...