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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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...