Today, we have an interesting product to review. AMD’s Athlon 3000G. You’re basically looking at two Zen cores with SMT running at a base clock of 3.5GHz. It packs 5MB of L3 cache and a Vega 3 GPU running at 1.1GHz. The best part about this APU is that it’s unlocked and costs just $50 (In India, Rs. 3,890 + GST). While the default memory config is just DDR4-2666, we’ll be testing it with a dual-channel 3200MT/s kit to maximize the iGPU performance.
We’ll be comparing the Athlon 3000G against the Intel Pentium G5400 which costs $10-15 more than the former. The applications tested include rendering benchmarks, namely Blender, Cinebench, and Corona. For testing the integrated graphics performance, Fortnite and Rocket League tests were used.
Content Creation and Productivity
Well, that’s a sight you don’t see every day. An Intel chip beating the AMD competition in Cinebench. The single-threaded performance of the Pentium G5400 is a step ahead of the 3000G. The multi-threaded scores are a more closer affair with a delta of just ten points between the two chips.
Blender is the first benchmark that sees the Athlon take the lead from the Pentium G5400, beating it by a marginal score.
7-zip continues the trend with the Athlon 3000G beating the Pentium G5400 by a hair’s margin.
Integrated Graphics Gaming Tests
In the gaming tests, the Athlon 3000G really shines. While the G5400 wasn’t able to run the above games, like at all, the 3000G was able to yield nearly an average of 60 FPS in Fortnite at 1080p and a lofty 174 FPS in Rocket League.
Conclusion
This is a more level playground. Both the Pentium G5400 and the Athlon 3000G are capable sub-$100 chips, with the former, have a slightly superior single-threaded performance and the latter boasting significantly better graphics capabilities. There’s also the price to consider. AMD’s 3000G is $15 cheaper and the accompanying A320 motherboard is also dirt cheap. Intel’s G5400 is slightly pricier and the same is true for the rest of the system. Overall, I’d say that te Athlon 3000G is an excellent option for a makeshift or office system if you’re on a strict budget and can’t afford to get a discrete graphics card.
