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AMD Athlon 200GE

AMD Athlon 220GE

AMD Athlon 240GE

Overclocking and Test Setup

Overclocking

Overclocking AMD's Athlon processors is simple, largely because there aren't many configurable options. Our motherboards don't support BCLK adjustments with these CPUs installed, leaving the ratio multiplier as our only knob for tuning clock rate. We're also unable to boost memory performance above the stock DDR4-2666, though we did adjust timings to 14-14-14-34.

Integrated graphics overclocking isn't an option either. Try as we might, the Vega 3 engine remains locked at 1 GHz.

As we've seen from many of AMD's chips, the Athlon series tends to have an overclocking frequency ceiling imposed by the limits of GlobalFoundries' 14nm process. Even with prodigious amounts of voltage, we weren't able to break through the 3.9 GHz barrier with any Athlon model. However, we were able to achieve a rock-solid 3.9 GHz on all three processors using the stock thermal solution, and overclocked performance results for all of them landed within the run-to-run variance we expect in our benchmark suite.

To avoid unnecessary clutter in our charts, we're presenting the results of the Athlon 240GE at 3.9 GHz. Expect similar performance from the other two models after tuning.

From the default 3.5 GHz, we achieved a stable 3.9 GHz in an AVX-optimized stress test using a 1.4V Vcore and 1.15V SoC voltage setting. Temperatures with the stock cooler never exceeded 78°C at 3.9 GHz. For the sake of comparison, running the same test with a Corsair H115i on top of our Athlon 200GE yielded a 45°C reading. Power consumption for the overclocked CPU+SoC topped out at 51W.

We paired our Pentium Gold processors with a Z370-based motherboard, which does support faster memory. Sticking with Intel's official specification, we used our modules at 2400 MT/s to represent the data rates available from B- and H-series platforms.

Comparison Processors

Intel Core i3-8100

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Intel Pentium Gold G5600

Test Systems

Test System & Configuration
Hardware	AMD Socket AM4 (400-Series)AMD Athlon 200GE, Ryzen 3 1300X, Ryzen 3 2200GMSI X470 Gaming M7 AC2x 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-2677, DDR4-3200Intel LGA 1151 (Z370)Pentium Gold G5600, Pentium Gold G5400, Core i3-8100, Gold G4620, Pentium Gold G4560, Core i3-7100MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC2x 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-2400All EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FE 1TB Samsung PM863 Corsair AX1600i 1600W Power Supply Windows 10 Creators Update Version 1703 - All Spectre and Meltdown mitigations
Cooling	Corsair H115i

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AMD Athlon 200GE

AMD Athlon 220GE

AMD Athlon 240GE

iGPU - 3DMark and Civilization VI

3DMark

3DMark features a variety of tests that apply varying intensities to measure graphics performance. But while the results scale predictably, they aren't a measure of real-world gaming performance. With that said, the benchmark's DX11 and DX12 components do measure a CPU's ability to issue draw calls, sometimes on the order of millions per second. As such, these tests indicate a host processor's ability to push discrete graphics cards beyond the limitations of integrated graphics engines.

The Athlons trail Intel's processors during the DX12 tests. But remember they are also less expensive than the competition, which is currently selling at a premium or altogether unavailable due to Intel's ongoing shortage of 14nm chips.

The DX11 test paints a more encouraging picture, with the overclocked Athlon 240GE pulling off an upset against the G5600 and G5400. We encountered the same 3.9 GHz ceiling with all three Athlon processors. Given their identical on-die resources, you can expect similar performance from the lesser models after tuning.

Civilization VI Graphics Test

It's clear that the Ryzen 3 2200G is in a class of its own thanks to eight CUs cranking away at 1,100 MHz. But we can also see that the Athlon processors are far more powerful than the Pentiums.

Differences between the three Athlon models are slight at stock settings, despite the 100 to 300 MHz clock rate delta separating them.

We see a much sharper decline in performance from the Pentium G5600 to G5400. That's attributable to their different integrated graphics units. The G5600 includes Intel's UHD Graphics 630 with 24 execution units in a GT2 configuration, while the G5400 comes with the UHD Graphics 610 engine with 12 EUs in a GT1 arrangement.

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AMD Athlon 200GE

AMD Athlon 220GE

AMD Athlon 240GE

iGPU - Dota 2

Dota 2

Dota 2 was one of the first games to receive a patch with Zen-specific optimizations, which provided a big host processing speed-up. But it's AMD's on-die Vega graphics engine that helps performance most. The 220GE and 200GE essentially tie during our benchmark sequence.

Again, we see the massive gap separating Intel's G5600 and G5400. Although the $64 Pentium G5400 grapples with AMD's $65 Athlon 220GE when it comes to pricing, it's clear that the 220GE is a much faster choice for gaming.

The Core i3-8100 gives us a lackluster performance at its $117 price point. Intel seems to want gamers to pair it up with a entry-level add-in card, though. Instead, you could opt for a $99 Ryzen 3 2200G that is competitive in most applications and offers far superior gaming performance with its Vega graphics engine.

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AMD Athlon 200GE

AMD Athlon 220GE

AMD Athlon 240GE

iGPU - Far Cry Primal and Grand Theft Auto V

Far Cry Primal

The Ryzen 3 2200G impresses in this benchmark, while the Pentiums struggle under this AAA title's weight.

Dialing back the settings provides playable frame rates from AMD's Athlon processors, and a lack of uplift from overclocking tells us that we've run into a graphics-imposed bottleneck with the Vega 3 graphics. In comparison, though, Intel's processors deliver a laggy, stuttery experience.

Dropping down to 1280 x 720 puts the UHD Graphics 630-equipped Intel models in the playable range. But once again, the UHD graphics 610 on Pentium G5400 lags behind considerably. Meanwhile, the Athlons serve up a decent gaming experience.

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AMD Athlon 200GE

AMD Athlon 220GE

AMD Athlon 240GE

Office and Productivity

Adobe Creative Cloud

Even though this suite has a few parallelized workloads, its final score is heavily influenced by the lightly-threaded tasks common in most desktop applications.

Intel's Pentium line-up offers superior per-core performance for these types of tasks, as we'll see in many of our other lightly-threaded benchmarks.

Web Browser

The Kraken suite evaluates JavaScript performance using audio, imaging, and cryptography workloads. Like most browser-based benchmarks, single-threaded performance reigns supreme.

After tuning, our Athlon 240GE catches up to Intel's Core i3-8100 in Kraken. But the Athlon family trails during the WebXPRT and MotionMark tests. At stock settings, the Athlon 200GE lands in last place across all three benchmarks. However, we can see that the 200 MHz delta between it and the 220GE might merit a $10 premium if you aren't interested in overclocking.

Productivity

The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem. Single-core performance plays a significant part in determining responsiveness, and again Intel asserts its dominance in this class of workload. We do see a commiserate step up in performance from the more expensive Athlon processors. But overclocking provides nearly identical performance from all three models.

Our video conferencing suite measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage. After overclocking, the 240GE is surprisingly competitive against Intel's Pentium line-up.

The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized. The Athlon 220GE and 240GE step out ahead of Intel's Pentium processors, notching a nice increase in performance relative to the low-end Athlon 200GE.

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AMD Athlon 200GE

AMD Athlon 220GE

AMD Athlon 240GE

Rendering, Encoding and Compression

Rendering

Low-end chips obviously aren't ideal for rendering workloads. But aside from a notably poor showing in the Corona test, AMD's Athlons are competitive with Intel's Pentium processors in multi-threaded benchmarks, especially after overclocking.

It takes overclocking to make the Athlon do battle with those same Pentiums during the single-threaded Cinebench and POV-Ray test. However, it's clear that Intel retains its lead in single-threaded benchmarks.

Encoding & Compression

True to what we've seen from other Zen-based processors, the Athlons are more competitive in decompression workloads, mixing it up with the Pentium models, than the compression test.

y-cruncher, a single- and multi-threaded program that computes pi, is a great tool for measuring the effect of AVX instructions. Pentium processors are deliberately handicapped by Intel, rendering them unable to accelerate AVX instruction processing. As a result, the Athlon processors handily outperform the Pentium models in both threaded and single-core tests.

The HandBrake x265 test is heavily optimized for AVX instructions, while the H.264 benchmark uses a lighter distribution. The Athlon processors aren't as competitive in the real-world AVX-heavy tests as they are in the synthetic y-cruncher tests, highlighting that other factors, such as memory and cache latency, can play a bigger role in real-world applications.

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AMD Athlon 200GE

AMD Athlon 220GE

AMD Athlon 240GE

Conclusion

Intel's ongoing processor shortage has opened a unique window of opportunity for AMD in the gaming market's entry-level space, giving it a tangible advantage in both pricing and availability. But the Athlon line-up will remain competitive, even after Intel corrects its supply issues.

The Zen cores in these low-end CPUs confer many of the same positive performance characteristics seen in higher-end Ryzen CPUs. But it's the pairing of Vega 3 engine that really benefit gamers without the money to spend on add-in graphics cards. While these graphics cores do have strict limitations, meaning you'll have to keep your expectations in check, they facilitate playable frame rates in several titles at lower resolutions and quality settings. The Pentiums struggle under those same workloads. The Athlons also provide solid 4K video playback performance.

AMD doesn't officially support overclocking with its Athlons. However, nearly every motherboard vendor now provides firmware that unlocks easy overclocking. You're simply prevented from tuning the memory or graphics subsystems. At least the company equips all three Athlon models with the same graphics cores, meaning they have similar resources dedicated to rendering and a 1 GHz clock rate. In other words, the relatively small frequency bumps on the host processing side are the only feature differentiating one Athlon from another. Overclocking blurs that, making the lowest-end model more attractive for its lower price tag.

As we've seen from other AMD CPUs, all of our Athlons topped out at the same frequency. For these 14nm chips, that high water mark is 3.9 GHz. Consequently, they offer the same performance after we get done tuning them. There's little reason, then, to spend an extra $20 on the Athlon 240GE when you can buy the $55 Athlon 200GE and get the same speed from it after a few simply firmware adjustments. Best of all, you can get those results out of AMD's stock thermal solution.

AMD's Athlon wins the gaming competition hands-down if you're leaning on integrated graphics exclusively. But Intel's Pentium line-up is still attractive for non-gaming tasks or if you plan to pair the chips with low-end graphics cards. In those situations, Intel's single-threaded performance yields snappier performance in applications. Meanwhile, those CPUs can push discrete graphics cards harder than the Athlon processors. It's notable that the Athlon processors also accelerate AVX instruction processing, while Intel's Pentium CPUs lack this capability.

In either case, AMD's Athlon still serves up more than acceptable desktop performance at a lower price point than the Pentiums. Budget-oriented enthusiasts get more performance per dollar as a result.

Intel is firing back with faster Pentiums that reach up to 4.0 GHz. Without significant improvements to its graphics architecture, though, we don't expect the competitive landscape to change much. The company is also tackling its pricing and availability issues by offering Pentiums with disabled on-die graphics. Those models are more meant for OEM systems that come with add-in graphics cards, though.

Overall, AMD wins the low-end processor market with its Athlon series, and overclocking sweetens the deal.

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AMD Launches Athlon 220GE and 240GE CPUs With Radeon Vega Graphics

palcorn@outlook.com (Paul Alcorn) — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 16:48:02 +0000

AMD's Athlon 240GE and 220GE CPUs are now available for purchase with an MSRP of $75 and $65, respectively. These 35W processors come bearing the Zen microarchitecture paired with an integrated Radeon Vega graphics engine, much like the Athlon 200GE we reviewed earlier this month. That model gained more popularity recently as new motherboard firmwares now allow the supposedly locked processor to receive the overclocking treatment.

	Athlon 240GE	Athlon 220GE	Athlon 200GE	Pentium Gold G5600	Pentium Gold G5400	Ryzen 3 2200G	Ryzen 5 2400G
TDP	35W	35W	35W	54W	54W	65W	65W
Architecture	Zen	Zen	Zen	Coffee Lake	Coffee Lake	Zen	Zen
Process	14nm	14nm	14nm	14nm++	14nm++	14nm	14nm
Cores / Threads	2 / 4	2 / 4	2 / 4	2 / 4	2 / 4	4 / 4	4 / 8
Frequency Base / Boost	3.5 GHz / -	3.4 GHz / -	3.2 / -	3.9 / -	3.7 / -	3.5 / 3.7	3.6 / 3.9
Memory Speed	DDR4-2667	DDR4-2677	DDR4-2677	DDR4-2400	DDR4-2400	DDR4-2933	DDR4-2933
Memory Controller	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel
Cache (L3)	4MB	4MB	4MB	4MB	4MB	4MB	4MB
Integrated Graphics	Radeon Vega 3 (3CU)	Radeon Vega 3 (3CU)	Radeon Vega 3 (3CU)	UHD Graphics 630	UHD Graphics 610	Radeon Vega 8 (8CU)	Radeon Vega 11 (11 CU)
Unlocked Multiplier	No	No	Yes, but unsupported	No	No	Yes	Yes
MSRP	$75	$65	$55	$86	$64	$99	$160

Like the Athlon 200GE, these dual-core, four-thread processors come with a static base frequency and no Precision Boost, but the two new models have higher clock frequencies that should improve performance in single-threaded applications. The Radeon Vega-based graphics engine is composed of three Compute Units (CUs) that serve up a modest 192 Stream processors.

AMD's release of the Athlon 200GE earlier this year marked the company's first Zen-based processor to tackle the sub-$100 processor market. That's an important step for AMD because Intel typically dominates this high-volume segment of the market with its Pentium processors. The new Athlon models represent a step up the pricing chain that plugs the big pricing gap between AMD's $100 Ryzen 3 2200G and the now-low-end Athlon 200GE.

Like all mainstream Ryzen processors, these chips drop into AM4 motherboards, with the value-centric A320 chipset being the obvious pairing. Recently, motherboard firmware updates from MSI and Gigabyte made it possible to overclock the Athlon 200GE, and it is possible that those same benefits will apply to the new models, as well. According to AMD, however, these new models are locked processors.

The new Athlons aren't performance-oriented processors. Instead, AMD says they're ideal for basic computing tasks like Web browsing, word processing and low-end gaming. The idea here is that you don't need to pair the Athlon 200GE with a discrete graphics card. Its three Vega CUs, with 64 Stream processors each, come together in a very entry-level GPU that is still capable of playable frame rates at 720p in eSports games.

AMD Athlon 200GE Review: Zen and Vega Get Cheap

palcorn@outlook.com (Paul Alcorn) — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 21:30:00 +0000

Return of the Athlon

AMD is breathing life back into an almost 20-year-old brand with the Athlon 200GE processor armed with Radeon Vega 3 graphics. Unlike the company's mainstream Ryzen chips, its $55 dual-core, four-thread Athlon 200GE addresses the sub-$100 market, where Intel's Pentium and Celeron brands previously reigned uncontested.

The Athlon 200GE is built using the same Zen architecture found in AMD's popular Ryzen processors, providing a much-needed performance upgrade over the lackluster Bristol Ridge line-up. Given its low price, we shouldn't have been surprised that AMD locked the 200GE's multiplier, preventing easy overclocking. But its efforts proved superficial: recently, several motherboard manufacturers released BIOS updates that unlocked the 200GE's fixed ratio. All of the sudden, this ultra-affordable chip became a little more interesting to enthusiasts shopping for a bargain.

Officially, AMD maintains that the 200GE is a locked processor and points us to motherboard manufacturers for answers on any policy changes. In other words, for now, overclocking the Athlon 200GE is game-on. Better still, the 35W chip's stock thermal solution is perfectly ample for a bit of extracurricular tuning. Where we might not have been interested in the 200GE previously, the CPU is a far more impressive value with overclocking as an option.

AMD Athlon 200GE

The Athlon 200GE drops into motherboards with a Socket AM4 interface. It comes with two SMT-enabled execution cores, allowing the chip to operate on four threads concurrently. The Radeon Vega-based graphics engine is composed of three Compute Units (CUs), serving up a modest 192 Stream processors.

Out of the box, the Athlon 200GE's host processing cores operate at a fixed 3.2 GHz, with no boost. The graphics component has a 1 GHz clock rate.

	Athlon 200GE	Pentium Gold G5600	Pentium Gold G5400	Ryzen 3 1300X	Ryzen 3 2200G	Ryzen 5 2400G
TDP	35W	54W	54W	65W	65W	65W
Architecture	Zen	Coffee Lake	Coffee Lake	Zen	Zen	Zen
Process	14nm	14nm++	14nm++	14nm	14nm	14nm
Cores / Threads	2 / 4	2 / 4	2 / 4	4 /4	4 / 4	4 / 8
Frequency Base / Boost	3.2 / -	3.9 / -	3.7 / -	3.5 / 3.7	3.5 / 3.7	3.6 / 3.9
Memory Speed	DDR4-2667	DDR4-2400	DDR4-2400	DDR4-2667	DDR4-2933	DDR4-2933
Memory Controller	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel
Cache (L3)	4MB	4MB	4MB	8MB	4MB	4MB
Integrated Graphics	Radeon Vega 3 (3 CU)	UHD Graphics 630	UHD Graphics 610	No	Radeon Vega 8 (8 CU)	Radeon Vega 11 (11 CU)
Unlocked Multiplier	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
MSRP	$55	$86	$64	$124	$99	$160

Recently, motherboard firmware updates from MSI and Gigabyte made it possible to overclock the Athlon 200GE. These are the only updates available built on AMD's underlying AGESA 1.0.0.6 code. AGESA, or AMD Generic Encapsulated System Architecture, is a bootstrap protocol that initializes processor cores, memory, and the Infinity Fabric. Currently, we assume that the unlocked multiplier is a result of the new AGESA code, though we don't have confirmation. We'll have to wait for updates from other manufacturers for more evidence.

Remember that AMD's warranty doesn't cover overclocking-related damage on any of its processors. We're sure that limitation is even more strictly enforced on a CPU like the Athlon 200GE, since it's officially a multiplier-locked CPU.

The Athlon 200GE is a natural fit for entry-level Socket AM4 motherboards with the A320 chipset. These sell for as little as $50, and they offer the flexibility to upgrade to a faster Ryzen CPU in the future. You also get the benefit of USB 3.1 Gen 2 and NVMe support (though features vary by board).

This new Athlon processor like features the same underlying design as AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G and 2400G processors, albeit with a pared-down feature set that allows the company to offload Raven Ridge dies that suffered defects during the manufacturing process. Similar to the aforementioned Ryzen 3s, the Athlon 200GE comes with 4MB of L3 cache. It also accelerates the AVX instruction set, unlike Intel's Pentium and Celeron CPUs.

AMD originally told us that beefier Athlon 220GE and 240GE processors would land in Q4 2018 to help fill in the space between its $55 Athlon 200GE and $100 Ryzen 3 2200G. But seeing as though the company isn't saying anything about those CPUs' specifications, we have our doubts whether it'll make the end of 2018.

Naturally, the new Athlons aren't performance-oriented processors. Instead, AMD says they're ideal for basic computing tasks like Web browsing, word processing, and low-end gaming. The idea here is that you don't need to pair the Athlon 200GE with a discrete graphics card. Its three Vega CUs, with 64 Stream processors each, come together in a very entry-level GPU. The Ryzen 3 2200G's eight CUs are far more capable. But AMD claims its Athlon 200GE is still capable of playable frame rates at 720p in eSports games. The experience it enables is helped along by FreeSync support, so long as you own a compatible monitor.

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Overclocking and Test Setup

Test Notes

We paired our Athlon 200GE sample with MSI's X470 Gaming M7 AC motherboard to maintain a consistent test environment for our AMD processors. Because this is a 35W CPU, we don't expect motherboard power delivery to affect our benchmark results.

Our review focuses on CPU performance specifically, so we tested all of the contenders with a GeForce GTX 1080 FE to alleviate graphics-imposed bottlenecks. When it comes to the performance of AMD's Vega 3 configuration, we don't expect much. Even at low resolutions and ultra-low detail settings, performance won't be great.

Overclocking

Overclocking the Athlon 200GE is simple, if only because there aren't many options for making adjustments. Our MSI motherboards don't support BCLK adjustments with the 200GE installed, leaving the ratio multiplier as our only knob for tuning the chip's frequency. We also weren't able to boost memory performance above the stock DDR4-2666, though we did adjust timings to 14-14-14-34.

Integrated graphics overclocking isn't an option either. The Vega 3 engine consequently remains at its stock 1 GHz (though that isn't material to today's review, since we're testing with a powerful add-in card).

From the default 3.2 GHz, we achieved a stable 3.9 GHz in an AVX-optimzed stress test using 1.39V Vcore and 1.1V SoC voltage settings. Temperatures with the stock cooler never exceeded 76°C at 3.9 GHz. For the sake of comparison, running the same test with a Corsair H115i on top of our Athlon 200GE yielded a 46°C reading. Power consumption for the overclocked CPU+SoC topped out at 51W.

Comparison Processors

AMD Ryzen 3 1300X

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Intel Core i3-8100

Test Systems

Test System & Configuration
Hardware	AMD Socket AM4 (400-Series)AMD Athlon 200GE, Ryzen 3 1300X, Ryzen 3 2200GMSI X470 Gaming M7 AC2x 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-2677, DDR4-3200Intel LGA 1151 (Z370)Pentium Gold G5600, Pentium Gold G5400, Core i3-8100, Gold G4620, Pentium Gold G4560, Core i3-7100MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC2x 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-2400All EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FE 1TB Samsung PM863 SilverStone ST1500-TI, 1500W Windows 10 Creators Update Version 1703 - All Spectre and Meltdown mitigations
Cooling	Corsair H115i

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VRMark, 3DMark and AotS: Escalation

VRMark, 3DMark

We aren't big fans of using synthetic benchmarks to measure performance, but 3DMark's DX11 and DX12 CPU tests provide useful insight into the amount of horsepower available to game engines.

The Athlon 200GE fails to impress at stock settings. But remember that it's also cheaper than the Intel competition (which is currently selling at a premium or altogether unavailable due Intel's ongoing shortage of 14nm chips).

Overclocking improves the Athlon's score in VRMark by 12.6%.

The DX12 test scales well with additional threads, but also responds well to higher clock rates. But even overclocked, AMD's Athlon 200GE struggles to match the previous-generation Pentium G4560. It fares better during the DX11 benchmark, where it claws its way in front of the Pentium G5600 after tuning.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is a computationally intensive title that scales well with thread count.

Unsurprisingly, the Athlon 200GE struggles with Ashes of the Singularity at stock settings. In this case, overclocking doesn't do much to improve its fate. To be fair, Intel's Pentiums also yield an uninspiring experience. Clearly, this demanding title needs a higher-end CPU for playable performance.

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Civilization VI Graphics and AI, Dawn of War III

Civilization VI AI Test

Civilization VI's AI test measures CPU performance in a turn-based strategy game and tends to favor per-core performance.

The Athlon trails due to its lower per-core performance, but pulls even with the Pentium G4560 after tuning.

Civilization VI Graphics Test

Overclocking gives the Athlon 200GE a 13.9% performance boost in this title.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III

The Athlon 200GE trails its competition by a significant margin. We also noticed stuttering during the benchmark, which manifests in our charts as poor frame rate percentiles, regardless of whether the Athlon is overclocked or not.

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Far Cry 5 and Hitman

Far Cry 5

The Athlon facilitates an average of 61.7 FPS at stock settings, which jumps 12% to 69.2 FPS after overclocking. That's acceptable performance in Far Cry 5, though it does lag behind Intel's Pentium chips.

Even more important is the fact that a Core i3-8100-based system allows our GeForce GTX 1080 to average more than 100 FPS. A low-end CPU like the Athlon bottlenecks higher-end graphics cards in a serious way, even at a fairly tame 1920x1080 resolution.

Hitman

Hitman scales well with core/thread count. Nevertheless, AMD's Athlon 200GE lags behind its dual-core competition. The quad-core Ryzen 3 2200G hints that a couple of additional execution cores would have been better for the Athlon's performance than simultaneous multi-threading.

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Shadow Of War and Project CARS 2

Middle-earth: Shadow Of War

At a high-enough resolution, most games are limited by graphics processing. But because we've already seen the Athlon 200GE handicapping our GeForce GTX 1080 at 1920 x 1080, it's no surprise that the dual-core chip is notably slower than its competition in a benchmark that's normally graphics-bound. Still, an average of 70+ FPS is pretty good for a $55 chip.

Project CARS 2

Although Project CARS 2 is purportedly optimized for threading, clock rates have the greatest effect on this title's frame rates.

Again, the Athlon shows up at the bottom of our test pool.

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Office and Productivity

Adobe Creative Cloud

Even though this suite has a few parallelized workloads, its final score is heavily influenced by the lightly-threaded tasks common in most desktop applications.

The delta between AMD's Athlon 200GE and Ryzen 3 2200G isn't surprising. While both CPUs employ the same underlying architecture, the 2200G includes two more physical cores. Consequently, even though we hit 3.9 GHz with both models, our overclocked Athlon can't keep up.

Web Browser

The Krakken suite evaluates JavaScript performance using audio, imaging, and cryptography workloads. Like most browser-based benchmarks, single-threaded performance reigns supreme.

After tuning, our Athlon 200GE sample catches up to AMD's Ryzen 3 CPUs in Kraken, but struggles to keep up during the WebXPRT and MotionMark tests. At stock settings, the Athlon 200GE lands in last place across all three benchmarks.

Productivity

The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem. Single-core performance plays a significant part in determining responsiveness, which leaves the Athlon 200GE at the bottom of our chart. Fortunately, it's also the least-expensive CPU in our test pool, preserving AMD's value proposition.

Our video conferencing suite measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage. After overclocking, the 200GE is surprisingly competitive against Intel's Pentium line-up.

The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized. Although the 200GE starts off slow at its stock 3.2 GHz, overclocking helps propel the chip beyond Intel's Core i3-7100.

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Rendering, Encoding, and Compression

Rendering

Low-end chips obviously aren't ideal for rendering workloads. But aside from a notably poor showing in the Corona test, AMD's Athlon 200GE hangs with Intel's Pentium processors in multi-threaded benchmarks, especially after overclocking. It takes tuning to make the Athlon competitive with those same Pentiums during the single-threaded Cinebench and POV-Ray tests.

Encoding & Compression

True to what we've seen from other Zen-based processors, the Athlon 200GE is much more agile in our decompression benchmark than it is through the compression workload.

The HandBrake x265 test is heavily optimized for AVX instructions, while the H.264 benchmark uses a lighter distribution. As a result, the Athlon 200GE beats Intel's G4560, the slowest previous-gen Pentium in our test group. After a bit of overclocking, the Athlon shows up alongside pricier Pentium processors.

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Conclusion

AMD and Intel both limit the capabilities of their cheapest CPUs to prevent enthusiasts on a budget from dipping down to low-end models and tweaking them to achieve higher performance. Features get deliberately disabled, cache gets shaved off, and clock rates are purposely lowered. It's also common to see ratio multipliers locked, especially by Intel. AMD is typically more accommodating of overclockers: up until now, all of its Zen-based processors were unlocked.

This made the Athlon 200GE's static 3.2 GHz clock rate somewhat surprising. At that frequency, AMD doesn't fare particularly well against Intel's faster Pentium chips. Really, AMD needs overclocking to compete. MSI and Gigabyte (so far) are doing the company a favor here by developing firmware updates that reverse AMD's lock, enabling frequencies approaching 4 GHz.

The Athlon's position is strengthened by Intel's inability to ship sufficient quantities of 14nm processors, causing shortages of Pentium CPUs that drive prices higher than they should be. Some of the Athlon 200GE's competition simply isn't available to purchase. If you're a budget-oriented builder shopping for something under $100 and the Pentiums aren't in stock, your decision becomes much easier to make.

It's only a bummer that, after overclocking, the Athlon 200GE is still slower than the Pentium family across our gaming suite. Then again, the Athlon is priced more like a Celeron than a Pentium, so you still end up with acceptable performance from an entry-level CPU. Matched up to a similarly low-end add-in card like AMD's Radeon RX 550 or Nvidia's GeForce GT 1030, the big deltas between host processors we saw aren't as apparent.

Where the Athlon 200GE shines is threaded workloads like Blender, HandBrake, and archive decompression. Those results also bode well for multi-tasking, which isn't a part of our benchmark suite, but does correspond to juggling multiple threads simultaneously. Even on a mainstream office machine, multi-tasking is common. Moreover, it's notable that the Athlon 200GE accelerates AVX instruction processing. Intel's Pentium CPUs lack this capability.

Overclocking the Athlon 200GE is simple, but we would like to see more options exposed to enthusiasts. Let us tune the Vega 3 engine's clock rate, for example, and open up higher memory data rates. Given the few knobs we had available, we squeezed an extra 9% out of the Athlon across our gaming suite using the thermal solution AMD includes as part of its package.

The Athlon 200GE is ~$10 cheaper than Intel's Pentium G5400, which is largely unavailable due to Intel's ongoing shortage of 14nm chips. The higher-end Pentium G5600 sells for ~$105, which is $20 above MSRP. Although those seem like small premiums, they're actually pretty significant as a percentage of what these low-end CPUs cost.

Despite its value win, we'd rather see you snag a $100 Ryzen 3 2200G (our current Best Entry Level Pick) than the Athlon 200GE. It's simply a better processor, giving you two more CPU cores, 320 additional Stream processors, and the ability to overclock memory and graphics. The Athlon 200GE is a good chip at its price point, even at stock settings. But you're forced to accept too many trade-offs. While unofficial overclocking helps improve the Athlon's position, it isn't a cure-all.

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Intel Pentium Gold G5600 And G5400 Review: Four Threads Under $100

palcorn@outlook.com (Paul Alcorn) — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 13:00:00 +0000

Cheap Chips

Building a capable PC for less than $500 is challenging, especially as memory prices soar. Fortunately, a competitive CPU market means it's possible to get lots of processing power without breaking the bank.

Fast, affordable Ryzen models from AMD forced Intel to improve its dual-core Pentium chips with Hyper-Threading Technology and larger L3 caches. As a result, today's Pentiums look a lot like yesterday's Core i3s. That makes them a big win for budget-oriented builders, particularly when they're paired up with Intel's H370, H310, and B360 chipsets.

Intel's victory isn't assured, though. AMD has a fearsome competitor in its overclockable Raven Ridge-based Ryzen 3 2200G, which sells for $100 and sports four execution cores plus the impressive Radeon Vega integrated graphics engine. It's quick enough for low-resolution gaming, potentially saving lots of money on a discrete GPU.

The UHD Graphics 630 solution built-into Intel's Pentium Gold G5600 can't even come close to AMD's Radeon Vega, and the G5400's UHD Graphics 610 is even slower. So, we matched the host processors up to an add-in graphics card for a more direct comparison in our benchmark suite. In the end, we found that Ryzen 3 2200G tells a better value story than the Pentium Gold G5600, while the Pentium Gold G5400 is simply unmatched at its $64 price point.

Intel Pentium Gold G5600

Intel Pentium Gold G5400

Pentium Gold G5600 and G5400

Last year, Intel announced it was rebranding the Pentium family. Pentium Gold comprised the higher-performance socketed models based on the Kaby Lake architecture (and now Coffee Lake), while Pentium Silver CPUs were power-optimized and BGA-attached, leveraging Intel's Goldmont Plus design.

	Pentium Gold G5600	Pentium Gold G5400
Socket	LGA 1151	LGA 1151
TDP	54W	54W
Architecture	Coffee Lake	Coffee Lake
Process	14nm++	14nm++
Cores / Threads	2 / 4	2 / 4
Frequency Base / Boost	3.9 / -	3.7 / -
Memory Speed	DDR4-2400	DDR4-2400
Memory Controller	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel
Cache (L3)	4MB	4MB
Integrated Graphics	UHD Graphics 630	UHD Graphics 610
PCIe Lanes	x16	x16
Unlocked Multiplier	No	No
MSRP	$86	$64

Intel also added Hyper-Threading Technology to its Kaby Lake-based Pentiums in an effort to stave off the then-impending Ryzen onslaught. That practice continues with today's Coffee Lake-based models, allowing the dual-core Pentium Gold G5600 and G5400 CPUs to operate on four threads concurrently.

Of course, Coffee Lake is manufactured using an optimized 14nm++ process. That, plus a 3W-higher thermal design power, is responsible for the 200 MHz speed-up available across the Pentium Gold family. Intel also bumped L3 cache capacity up to 4MB, a 33% increase compared to Kaby Lake-based Pentiums. The dual-channel DDR4 memory controller is still limited to 2400 MT/s, so peak bandwidth does not change. And whereas AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G only gives you eight lanes of PCIe 3.0 for discrete graphics upgrades, both Pentium chips offer a full 16-lane link.

Pentium Gold CPUs don't get all of Intel's special sauce, though. Similar to the Core i3 models, Pentiums lack Turbo Boost functionality altogether. Under load, you get one static frequency, regardless of how many cores are active. Intel also locks its ratio multipliers, preventing overclockers from coaxing extra performance from the chips. Pentium processors don't support the AVX/AVX2 instructions that accelerate certain productivity workloads, either. As a result, AMD's AVX-enabled Ryzen 3 2200G enjoys a performance advantage in several optimized applications, as you'll see in our benchmarks. Finally, Optane memory isn't an option in Pentium-based PCs.

	Pentium Gold G5600	Pentium Gold G5400	Pentium G4620	Pentium G4560	Ryzen 3 1300X	Ryzen 3 2200G	Core i3-8100
TDP	54W	54W	51W	51W	65W	65W	65W
Architecture	Coffee Lake	Coffee Lake	Kaby Lake	Kaby Lake	Zen	Zen	Coffee Lake
Process	14nm++	14nm++	14nm+	14nm+	14nm	14nm	14nm++
Cores / Threads	2 / 4	2 / 4	2 / 4	2 / 4	4 /4	4 / 4	4 / 4
Frequency Base / Boost	3.9 / -	3.7 / -	3.7 / -	3.5 / -	3.5 / 3.7	3.5 / 3.7	3.6 / -
Memory Speed	DDR4-2400	DDR4-2400	DDR4-2400	DDR4-2400	DDR4-2667	DDR4-2667	DDR4-2400
Memory Controller	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel	Dual-Channel
Cache (L3)	4MB	4MB	3MB	3MB	8MB	4MB	6MB
Integrated Graphics	UHD Graphics 630	UHD Graphics 610	HD Graphics 630	HD Graphics 610	No	Radeon Vega 8	UHD Graphics 630
Unlocked Multiplier	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
MSRP	$86	$64	$86	$64	$124	$99	$117

Intel's Pentium Gold G5600 includes on-die UHD Graphics 630, while the G5400 utilizes UHD Graphics 610. The former is composed of 24 execution units in what is referred to as a GT2 configuration, while the latter consists of 12 EUs in a GT1 setup. A 350 MHz base graphics frequency boosts up to 1.1 GHz on the Pentium Gold G5600 and 1.05 GHz on the G5400.

UHD Graphics 630/610 supports a wide range of codecs and provides hardware acceleration for most media consumption tasks. It's also equipped with plenty of connectivity options, including native support for DisplayPort 1.2a and HDMI 1.4. But the UHD Graphics engine isn't really suitable for gaming, even at low resolutions and relaxed quality settings. Plan on adding a discrete graphics card if you plan to build a gaming PC around Intel's Pentium Gold.

Fortunately, you should have some room left in your budget for an upgrade. The G5400 model sells for a mere $64, placing it well under AMD's low-end Ryzen options. We don't expect it to face any real competition at that price point. Meanwhile, the Pentium Gold G5600 should be available at $86. But as we saw with Intel's previous-gen G4620, street pricing is much higher. You'll currently find it around $95, placing it close to AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G. Consequently, the Pentium grapples with an overclockable competitor armed with four physical cores and impressive Radeon Vega integrated graphics.

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Test Setup

Test Notes

Comparison Processors

AMD Ryzen 3 1300X

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Intel Core i3-8100

Test Systems

Test System & Configuration
Hardware	AMD Socket AM4 (400-Series)AMD Ryzen 3 1300X, Ryzen 3 2200GMSI X470 Gaming M7 AC2x 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-3200 @ DDR4-2933, DDR4-3466Intel LGA 1151 (Z370)Pentium Gold G5600, Pentium Gold G5400, Core i3-8100MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC2x 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-3200 @ DDR4-2400Intel LGA 1151 (Z270)Intel Pentium Gold G4620, Pentium Gold G4560, Core i3-7100MSI Z270 Gaming M7 2x 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-3200 @ 2400All EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FE 1TB Samsung PM863 SilverStone ST1500-TI, 1500W Windows 10 Creators Update Version 1703 - All Spectre and Meltdown mitigations
Cooling	Corsair H115i

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Intel Pentium Gold G5600

Intel Pentium Gold G5400

VRMark, 3DMark & AotS: Escalation

VRMark & 3DMark

We aren't big fans of using synthetic benchmarks to measure game performance because the differences in their results often aren't representative of real games. But 3DMark's DX11 and DX12 CPU tests provide useful insight into the amount of horsepower available to modern engines.

The DX11 and DX12 tests found Intel's newest Pentium Gold models serving up nice gains over last generation's Pentiums. But Ryzen 3 2200G performed even better in stock trim, and overclocking only widened its advantage. Unfortunately for Intel, Pentiums cannot be tuned.

UL's VRMark test lets you gauge your system's suitability for use with the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, even if you don't currently own an HMD. While every sample in our pool delivered a passing score (above 109 FPS), AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G again slipped past its Pentium competition.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

Ashes of the Singularity is a heavily-threaded game that runs best on CPUs with lots of cores. Ryzen 3 2200G technically led the pack of comparably-priced processors thanks to its four physical cores. However, Intel's quad-threaded Pentium Gold G5600 basically scored a tie with very similar performance. The G5600 even outperformed Intel's Core i3-7100, emphasizing the company's dramatic changes this generation.

The Pentium Gold family was no match for AMD's overclocked Ryzen 3 2200G, though. Perhaps surprisingly, the tuned Ryzen chip matched Intel's Core i3-8100, proving it has the multi-threaded chops to push our beefy graphics card in games that respond well to parallelization.

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Intel Pentium Gold G5600

Intel Pentium Gold G5400

Civilization VI Graphics & AI, Dawn of War III

Civilization VI AI Test

Civilization VI's AI test measures CPU performance in a turn-based strategy game and tends to favor per-core performance, which is a mixture of IPC throughput and frequency.

Intel's Pentium models were bested by the stock Ryzen 3 2200G, though it's interesting that the Pentium Gold G5600 slid past last generation's Core i3-7100.

Civilization VI Graphics Test

The Core i3-8100 landed way out front. However, its $117 price tag is also way higher than any of the competing models.

At stock clock rates, the Pentium Gold G5600 led our more value-oriented test samples. Once we began overclocking, though, Ryzen 3 2200G jumped out ahead of the G5600.

As an aside, Ryzen 3 1300X features two quad-core CPU complexes tied together with AMD's Infinity Fabric. The company disables two cores in each CCX, yielding four active cores across the processor. In contrast, Ryzen 3 2200G employs one fully active CCX, so it doesn't suffer the same latency penalty that comes from communicating across the fabric. We know from past tests that this latency negatively affects gaming performance, so it was no surprise to find the 2200G beating the 1300X in certain titles at the same 3.9 GHz frequency.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III

Warhammer 40,000: DoW III's benchmark scales well with execution resources, though aggressive clock rates also provide a big benefit.

While the Pentium Gold G5600 delivered solid performance at its price point, Intel's G5400 only trailed by 2.5 FPS. That's not a bad trade-off for $30 in savings.

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Intel Pentium Gold G5600

Intel Pentium Gold G5400

Far Cry 5, GTA: V & Hitman

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 placed the Coffee Lake-based Pentiums in front of their predecessors by a significant margin, which is impressive since both generations were launched at similar price points.

The Pentium Gold G5600 and G5400 beat AMD's stock Ryzen 3 processors. However, overclocking the Ryzens propelled them into the lead.

Grand Theft Auto V

Again, the Coffee Lake-based Pentiums beat their previous-gen equivalents.

This time around, though, AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G didn't need an overclock to establish dominance. Tuning improved its position even more.

Hitman

Hitman showed Intel's Pentium CPUs landing in a familiar order. Meanwhile, the stock Ryzen 3 2200G tumbled in our rankings. It's a good thing for AMD that overclocking is so effective.

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Intel Pentium Gold G5600

Intel Pentium Gold G5400

Shadow Of War & Project CARS 2

Middle-earth: Shadow Of War

The $124 Core i3-8100 continued its dominance at the top of our chart. With that said, Middle-earth: Shadow of War doesn't scale particularly well, so there wasn't a ton of difference between our fastest and slowest CPUs.

Many of today's games are similarly constrained by graphics horsepower, which is important to remember when you're shopping for a budget-oriented chip. Just look at Ryzen 3 2200G's performance: overclocking didn't help it much at all.

Project CARS 2

Project CARS 2 is purportedly optimized for threading, and our test sequence did run better under Ryzen 3's four physical cores than the Pentium's two Hyper-Threaded cores.

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Intel Pentium Gold G5600

Intel Pentium Gold G5400

Office & Productivity

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe's Creative Cloud suite is weighted towards single-threaded performance, a strength of Intel's architectures. Nevertheless, Ryzen 3 2200G finished ahead of the Pentium Gold G5600 by a few points. Some of AMD's advantage in these tests come as a result of the Spectre and Meltdown patches that have a big impact on Intel's performance in the Adobe test suite.

Pentium Gold G5600 still carved out a sizeable lead in a few lightly-threaded applications, such as Illustrator and InDesign. But AMD's Ryzen processors excelled in the Photoshop and After Effects workloads.

Web Browser

The Coffee Lake-based Pentiums performed better in our web browser tests, which respond most readily to per-core performance.

While AMD's processors weren't as impressive at their stock settings, overclocking changed the story dramatically in Krakken and WebXPRT. Intel dominated the MotionMark tests that emphasize graphics performance (rather than JavaScript).

Productivity

The application start-up metric measures load-time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers, under warm- and cold-start conditions. The Coffee Lake-based Pentiums took an uncontested lead and easily dispatched the previous-gen Core i3-7100.

Video conferencing measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for video playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection during the workload to model real-world usage. This task responds well to extra threads, so AMD's Ryzen 3 processors had no trouble establishing a lead over the Pentiums.

The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries that use the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, so there was a big divide between the Pentium and Ryzen processors. A lack of support for AVX instructions compounded the Pentium's situation.

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Intel Pentium Gold G5600

Intel Pentium Gold G5400

Rendering, Encoding & Compression

Rendering

Although Hyper-Threading is a great addition to Intel's Pentium family, the dual-core architecture cannot compete with true quad-core designs in heavily parallelized benchmarks like Cinebench and the Corona rendering test. Axing AVX support also hurt the Pentiums in Blender, which is optimized for CPUs able to accelerate AVX2 instructions.

Of course, Intel still enjoyed an advantage over AMD in our single-threaded rendering tests due to superior per-core performance. But did you notice that the Kaby Lake-based Core i3-7100 beat the newer Core i3-8100 in many of those lightly-threaded tasks? Although Intel doubled the number of physical cores on its Coffee Lake-based Core i3s, the company had to cut Core i3-8100's clock rate by 300 MHz in the process, slowing it down in certain benchmarks.

Encoding & Compression

Our threaded compression and decompression tests pull data directly from system memory, removing storage from the equation. This force-feeds the cores with information, giving quad-core models an advantage.

The difference between AMD's AVX-capable Ryzen processors and Intel's Pentiums was clear during our HandBrake and y-cruncher tests. AVX instructions are becoming more common in productivity applications, which makes Ryzen 3 2200G a better value in those types of workloads.

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Intel Pentium Gold G5600

Intel Pentium Gold G5400

Final Analysis

Intel has a hard time adding features and functionality to its entry-level desktop CPUs without upsetting the balance of a carefully cultivated product stack. Improvements made to entry-level Pentium processors must extend upward through the Core i3, i5, and i7 families. After all, nobody is going to spend extra money on a higher-end chip unless it offers an appreciable advantage.

The Kaby Lake-era Pentiums gained Hyper-Threading support, allowing two execution cores to operate on four threads simultaneously. Intel then followed up with new Core models with additional cores, maintaining the status quo. It's only a bummer that today's Pentium processors still lack other features, such as AVX support and unlocked ratio multipliers. While those differentiators make sense in the context of Intel's portfolio, they're liabilities compared to AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G.

Intel's Pentium family was largely unharmed by first-gen Ryzen CPUs because they landed at higher price points and lacked integrated graphics. But that Ryzen 3 2200G is a different beast. It sells for less than $100, similar to the Pentium Gold G5600, and wields a Radeon Vega graphics engine that decimates Intel's UHD Graphics 630. Add in AVX instruction support and an unlocked multiplier for true enthusiast appeal.

In the chart below, we plot gaming performance with both average frame rates and a geometric mean of the 99^th percentile frame times (a good indicator of smoothness), which we then convert into a frame-per-second measurement. We didn't include platform costs because these processors drop into value-minded platforms and come with decent stock coolers. It's noteworthy that we could overclock the Ryzen 3 2200G's CPU cores with AMD's stock thermal solution. However, you should buy something better if you also plan on tuning the chip's integrated Radeon Vega graphics. Also, bear in mind that we tested with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 in order to alleviate graphics-imposed bottlenecks. Differences between our test subjects would shrink with more mainstream graphics cards installed.

In games, a $100 Ryzen 3 2200G trailed Intel's Pentium Gold G5600 just barely at its stock settings. But overclocking the Ryzen made it competitive with the $117 Core i3-8100. As such, we're doubling down on our recommendation to pair the Ryzen 3 2200G up with an add-in graphics card for gaming. And it's even more convincing across our application tests. The 2200G's four physical cores and AVX support provide superior performance in threaded workloads. The chip even fares well in many lightly-threaded tasks—and that's before we take overclocking into account.

Due to a slightly lower clock rate, the Pentium Gold G5400 can't quite match the G5600's performance. It doesn't trail by much in our gaming and application tests, though. Although the Pentium sold at a premium immediately after launch, it's now available for $64. That $30 savings is worth considering, particularly if you reinvest those funds into a faster graphics card or larger SSD. Intel's Pentium Gold G5400 looks like a great choice for builders on tight budgets, and AMD has nothing to compete against its price point. At least for now, the Pentium Gold G5400 reigns uncontested.

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AMD Details Lower-Power Ryzen 2400GE, 2200GE

Leon Chan — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 14:45:00 +0000

First leaked in the beginning of this year, the lower-power variants of AMD’s Ryzen APUs are now officially detailed on AMD’s website. The Ryzen 5 2400GE and Ryzen 3 2200GE are both 35W-TDP parts, a 30W drop from the regular 2400G’s and 2200G’s 65W TDP.

The silicon in the GE parts is identical to the regular versions but slightly downclocked. The 2400GE and the 2200GE see a 400/100MHz and 300/100MHz drop in base/boost clock, respectively. The graphics portion of the GE parts aren’t downclocked, however, and the differences are summarized in the table below.

Product	Ryzen 3 2200GE	Ryzen 3 2200G	Ryzen 5 2400GE	Ryzen 5 2400G
Core Count (Cores/Threads)	4/4	4/4	4/8	4/8
Core Clock (Base/Boost)	3.2/3.6GHz	3.5/3.7GHz	3.2/3.8GHz	3.6/3.9GHz
Graphics Core Count	8	8	11	11
Graphics Clock	1,100MHz	1,100MHz	1,250MHz	1,250MHz
TDP	35W	65W	35W	65W
Heatsink Included	No	Yes	No	Yes

AMD hasn’t made an official announcement for these GE parts yet, so we don’t know what their pricing and availability will be. The 2400G/GE and 2200G/GE parts are called 2nd-gen Ryzen parts by AMD, but they’re different from the bulk of the 2nd-gen Ryzen processors, which were just launched. Those parts are fabricated on a newer 12nm process, whereas the G/GE processors are fabricated on 1st-gen Ryzen’s 14nm process.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Tests: How Much Does Memory Impact Gaming?

palcorn@outlook.com (Paul Alcorn) — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 17:00:00 +0000

AMD's Raven Ridge processors are all about value. And they offer enough performance to power a budget-oriented gaming rig without the expense of discrete graphics, even if you're limited to playable frame rates at 720p or, in certain titles, 1080p.

How do you maximize your experience to get the most out of Raven Ridge? More so now than ever before, it's all about optimizing memory frequencies, which also speed up the Infinity Fabric. Naturally, the execution cores and compute units share available bandwidth. In an add-in card's GPU, those CUs would have their own GDDR5 or HBM. But as part of a highly-integrated SoC, two 64-bit channels of DDR4 are all they have to work with.

That leaves you with the options of buying memory capable of higher data rates or overclocking to improve performance. In either case, faster memory positively affects the bandwidth-hungry graphics cores and Infinity Fabric, so differences in frame rate between various RAM settings can be pretty big.

Given high prices on memory kits and the low-cost appeal of Raven Ridge, RAM is a big variable in this platform's value equation. It might be tempting to use a single DIMM to save money. As you'll see, though, that can cripple performance. Officially, Raven Ridge-based processors support DDR4-2966 in a dual-channel configuration with single-rank memory. While cheaper DDR4-2400 kits may seem attractive, be warned that they'll also hurt your frame rates.

Raven Ridge Memory Support	Speed
2 DIMMs - Single Rank	up to DDR4-2933
4 DIMMs - Single Rank	up to DDR4-2133
2 DIMMs - Dual Rank	up to DDR4-2667
4 DIMMs - Dual Rank	up to DDR4-1866

Stepping up to a quad-module kit has repercussions, too. Check out AMD's complex memory support matrix above, which varies based on the number of DIMMs you install and the memory's rank. While most value-seekers won't splurge on four modules, those who do take a big hit in maximum memory frequencies.

In order to determine how much RAM affects Raven Ridge's gaming performance, we reinstalled our Ryzen 5 2400G and started toying around with various frequencies, timings, and DIMM configurations. Picking the right games to test that don't bottleneck either the CPU or GPU can be a challenge, but we narrowed down our selection to two titles that scale well.

Test Methodology & System

We originally tested our Raven Ridge samples with the mini-ITX Gigabyte AB350N Gaming WiFi motherboard that AMD sent over. But it only has two DIMM slots. So, we switched over to MSI's B350 Tomahawk with four slots. Of course, we flashed the latest Raven Ridge-compatible BIOS, then dropped in four 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-3200 DIMMs for testing. G.Skill designed this single-rank memory specifically to work well with Ryzen processors. As a result, your mileage may vary with lesser kits. Dialing in 14-14-14-34 and 16-16-16-36 timings gives us CL 14 and CL 16 results across a range of different frequencies. You'll also find a couple of Intel configurations with the same CL 14 settings, which come from our Ryzen 3 2200G review.

It can often be difficult to determine if a memory kit is single- or dual-rank before you buy it, so you may have to do some research first. To make this even more challenging, some companies don't guarantee that their part number reflects the module's organization (it can change). Once the RAM is in your hands, you can use software like AIDA64 to give you a definitive answer.

Inside the BIOS, you have options for specifically dedicating memory to the graphics subsystem. AMD says this just allows for higher detail settings in some cases, though, and won't boost your frame rates. Windows already allocates up to half of the system memory to graphics dynamically, so dialing in more isn't always beneficial. In some cases, it'll even penalize application performance. Really, there's no need to mess with these settings.

Test System & Configuration
Hardware	AMD Socket AM4 AMD Ryzen 5 2400GB350 Tomahawk Gaming2x Flare X 16GB DDR4-3200AllSamsung PM863 (960GB)SilverStone ST1500-TIWindows 10 Pro 64-bit Creators Update v.1709 (10.0.16299.214)

Single-Channel Benchmarks

Civilization VI

Gaming performance with a single memory DIMM scales well. We record a 24.77% increase in average frame rates going from DDR4-1866 to DDR4-2400. Except for the jump from DDR4-2933 CL 14 to DDR4-3200, pushing higher frequencies yields diminishing returns. But there is more separation between CL 14 and CL 16 timings as those clock rates rise.

An average of 33.9 FPS at DDR4-3200 in single-channel mode isn't bad. But as you'll see below, the slowest dual-channel configuration gives us an average of 42 FPS, improving to 57.6 FPS with DDR4-3200. That means the single-channel DDR4-1866 setup is 46% slower than two channels of the same stuff.

Intel's Core i3-8100 and Pentium G4620 with a GeForce GT 1030 are presented in a separate bar chart, since they throw off the scale. As you can see, though, paired with a discrete graphics card, these processors deliver nearly the same performance with one or two memory modules installed. Just remember that both Intel processors have woefully inadequate integrated graphics engines that don't compete with Raven Ridge on their own (we recorded a mere 10.6 FPS with Intel's UHD Graphics 630 on a Core i5-8400 in dual-channel mode).

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

A paltry 19 FPS using one channel of DDR4-1866 pales next to the near-37 FPS average you'll see in dual-channel mode. Solid scaling is observed up through 29.9 FPS at DDR4-3200 with CL 14 timings, but these settings again have a much smaller influence on average frame rates.

Taking a peek down below at the dual-channel numbers, it's clear that you'll want two memory modules for a Raven Ridge-based processor. Even the slowest DDR4-1866 run in dual-channel mode is faster than DDR4-3200 in single-channel mode. The Witcher 3 is hardly playable with this platform's theoretical memory bandwidth cut in half.

Dual-Channel Benchmarks

Civilization VI

The same trends emerge in dual-channel mode, though at obviously higher frame rates. There's a 37% speed-up available going from DDR4-1866 to DDR4-3200, rewarding those who spend more on a fast kit or overclock aggressively. Once again, the CL 14 settings almost always beat CL 16 by a small margin. But you'll definitely want to optimize for memory frequency before going after timings.

Note that we were able to switch between data rates easily with two modules installed. That wasn't true for our quad-module runs. However, we couldn't hit DDR4-3400 without significantly loosening the timings, and even then our settings were unstable in preliminary stress tests.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3 is much smoother in a dual-channel configuration; we see playable frame rates as memory frequency rises. From DDR4-2400 up through DDR4-3200, expect a ~15% speed-up. Tighter timings do offer a slight advantage, but they're hardly worth pursuing compared to higher data rates.

Achieving 3200 MT/s is simple with Raven Ridge. That's in stark contrast to the difficulties we had with memory during AMD's Summit Ridge launch.

Four DIMMs

Civilization VI

Doubling up on DIMMs lowers the official ceiling to DDR4-2133 for single-rank memory and a devastating DDR4-1866 with dual-rank modules. As expected, we couldn't reach DDR4-3200 at all. More surprising was that we also had trouble with DDR4-2933. Consider our results at that setting as a reference point; they certainly weren't stable.

Aside from less frequency headroom, our results with four DIMMs are similar to those with two. There's a 14 FPS delta between the highest and lowest settings.

Our benchmarks on Intel's platforms land in the same vicinity as the single-channel charts. Clearly, doubling up on system bandwidth doesn't help much when the bottlenecked graphics subsystem already has its own GDDR5 to work with.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Again, similar results leave little to explain.

The Intel-based platforms continue to deliver roughly the same performance we observed in single- and dual-DIMM configurations.

Thoughts

Save up for a decent memory kit if you hope to unlock the best performance that Raven Ridge has to offer. As our tests show, a dual-channel kit is mandatory. Otherwise, the halved bandwidth of a single-channel configuration is devastating to gaming performance. This advice also applies to anyone shopping for a laptop with a Ryzen Mobile processor. Those will share the same scaling characteristics and may have soldered-down RAM.

Despite uncharacteristically high RAM prices, AMD's Raven Ridge-based CPUs are still value winners as far as we're concerned. Builders on a budget are likely starting in the $170 range for a capable set of two 8GB DDR4-2400 modules. Stepping up to DDR4-2933 adds another $25 to $30. The premium for a higher-end kit could obviously alter the value equation. But higher frame rates do make AMD's on-die graphics engine more viable in modern games, too. And we didn't even try our hand at overclocking.

Choosing a mid-range memory kit and then tuning it to DDR4-2933 (or thereabouts) should yield the best balance between cost and performance. Definitely give frequency the priority over timing when it comes time to tune the modules. Also, pay close attention to AMD's list of supported configurations and their corresponding frequencies.

In the end, we don't think we've hit performance ceilings in either of the games we chose to benchmark, suggesting that AMD's Radeon Vega engine could go faster with more available bandwidth. It's certainly going to be interesting to see how this architecture fares with HBM2 on Intel's Kaby Lake-G and AMD's own Ryzen Vega Mobile products later this year.

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AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

AMD Raven Ridge Gaming Performance Cheat Sheet

palcorn@outlook.com (Paul Alcorn) — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 16:05:00 +0000

AMD's Raven Ridge processors have barreled into the budget gaming market with Zen execution cores paired with the Vega graphics architecture. We've tested the processors from every angle and published a total of 27 pages chronicling our efforts. If you don't have time to sift through all of that, we've condensed all of our gaming results into this single cheat sheet. (For everything else we've written on Raven Ridge, head here.)

AMD's Vega redefines our expectations for integrated graphics, but you still need to keep our hopes in check. The Raven Ridge processors are mostly fit for playing games at entry-level detail settings using lower resolutions than you can unlock with a beefy discrete graphics card.

The flagship Ryzen 5 2400G comes packing four Zen cores with simultaneous multi-threading and 11 CUs, yielding 704 Stream processors. It's priced around $170. AMD positions that model for up to 1080p gaming with reduced graphics detail.

The Ryzen 3 2200G slots in as the extreme budget offering with four physical cores (without SMT) and eight CUs (512 Stream processors) for a mere $100. AMD positions this processor for the esports crowd interested in 720p gaming. Both models have unlocked multipliers, so overclocking is on the menu.

We tested 1080p and 720p gaming with both processors. We also tested 720p gaming with Intel's integrated graphics and AMD's Bristol Ridge, but they aren't up to snuff for most bare-minimum gaming. We paired the Intel processors with discrete graphics cards to make things more interesting, but that increases platform costs dramatically (as listed below). We also include overclocked results for the AMD processors, but be aware that you might need more expensive memory and a better cooler to match our results.

Platform Cost	Ryzen 5 2400G	Ryzen 3 2200G	Pentium G4620	Ryzen 3 1300X	Core i5-8400	Core i3-8100	Core i3-7100	AMD A10-9700
MSRP	$169	$99	$85	$129	$187	$119	$117	$99
+GPU	-	-	$89	$89	$89	$89	$89	-
Total Platform Cost	$169	$99	$174	$218	$276	$208	$206	$99

Keep pricing in mind as you peruse the test results. We have more detailed graphics performance analysis and a breakdown of our test systems in our standalone reviews, but here's the quick story.

Raven Ridge 1080p Gaming

Our 99th percentile FPS chart provides a geometric mean of the 99th percentile results, converted into an FPS measurement, of all the games in our test suite. Those figures represent smoothness and boil the story down rather nicely, although we've also provided the performance results in each game so you can see how the Raven Ridge processors fare in your favorite titles.

We found that the Ryzen 5 2400G lives up to AMD's claims that it's suitable for 1080p gaming, though your mileage may vary depending on the title. Our Ryzen 5 2400G sample also overclocked easily. With some extra time, we think we could have squeezed even more performance from it.

Speaking of overclocking, a bit of tuning even boosts the Ryzen 3 2200G into contention at 1080p, but don't expect it to happen with a wide range of AAA titles. In either case, any 1080p capability from a $99 processor is fantastic, even if it does come with the added expense of a better cooler and RAM.

Raven Ridge 720p Gaming

We also find both processors delivering impressive performance in our 720p testing, especially when we factor in pricing for the Intel systems with discrete graphics cards. One look at the Bristol Ridge A10-9700 clarifies how far AMD has come since its last generation of APUs, while Intel's UHD Graphics 630 highlights how far that company needs to go to bring its onboard graphics up to par with AMD's Raven Ridge.

Intel's Pentium lineup finds itself facing serious price-for-performance competition for the first time in years, which is great news for gamers on a tight budget. Memory performance has a big impact on gaming performance with these processors, so you'll need to choose a capable kit. Memory prices are still in the stratosphere, so be sure to plan accordingly.

You'll also need to take steps to make sure that your motherboard has the correct BIOS for the new processors. Existing motherboards need a firmware update to recognize the new models, while newer models include a "Ryzen Desktop 2000 Ready" badge that signals drop-in compatibility. You'll need another AMD processor to update the BIOS, but if you find yourself stranded, AMD has a Boot Kit solution to help out.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Both Raven Ridge models took home our Editor's Choice award. These processors make a great pairing for HTPCs and small form factor desktops. The Ryzen 3 2200G is a great solution for gaming with low-detail settings at 720p, and the Ryzen 5 2400G ups the ante to 1080p gaming at low detail settings with some AAA titles.

MORE: Everything You Need To Know About AMD's Raven Ridge

The AMD Ryzen 3 2200G Review: Vega Barrels Into Budget Gaming

palcorn@outlook.com (Paul Alcorn) — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 14:00:01 +0000

Ryzen 3 2200G: Zen And Vega On The Cheap

AMD's Raven Ridge design combines Zen-based execution cores and the Vega graphics architecture into a highly integrated die complete with DDR4 memory control, PCI Express connectivity, north bridge functionality, and fixed-function accelerators. In our AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review: Zen, Meet Vega, our expectations of integrated graphics were redefined, as Intel's UHD Graphics 630 succumbed without much of a fight. AMD's on-die graphics even did battle with certain sub-$100 discrete cards.

We do have to temper our excitement, though. These processors are mostly fit for playing games at entry-level detail settings using lower resolutions than a typical Tom's Hardware GPU review includes. Still, they boast impressive specifications. The flagship Ryzen 5 2400G earned our affections for its ability to play every game we tested at 1280x720. Some titles were even playable at higher-quality settings than we expected. Did we mention it overclocks well, too?

But we don't want to overlook the less expensive Ryzen 3 2200G, which at publication time made our list of best gaming CPUs and best CPUs for desktop applications. It includes four cores (without thread-doubling SMT technology) and eight Radeon Vega Compute Units (CUs). AMD aims this processor at an eSports crowd accepting of 720p gaming. Budget-oriented gamers will delight at its sub-$100 price point, easily in striking range of Intel's Pentium processors. Even though Pentiums now include Hyper-Threading, AMD justifies its premium with four physical cores and a much more capable graphics engine.

The Ryzen 3 2200G With Radeon Vega Graphics

Whereas the Ryzen 5 2400G comes with four SMT-enabled Zen cores and 11 Radeon Vega CUs, the Ryzen 3 2200G includes four cores without simultaneous multi-threading and eight CUs, enabling 512 Stream processors. Although Ryzen 3's resource allocation isn't far off from the flagship, it costs $70 less than Ryzen 5 2400G.

To further differentiate the two models, AMD lowers Ryzen 3's base clock rate to 3.5 GHz (though Precision Boost 2 allows frequencies as high as 3.7 GHz when headroom allows). Again, though, that's not particularly debilitating compared to Ryzen 5 2400G's 3.6 GHz base and 3.9 GHz Precision Boost frequency. Both processors also feature the same 4MB L3 cache. If you're interested in learning more about the Raven Ridge design, check out AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review: Zen, Meet Vega.

Specifications

Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G both populate standard Socket AM4 interfaces on 300-series motherboards. All existing platforms include display outputs; just be sure your board of choice has the connectors you need. Existing motherboards need a firmware update to recognize the new models, while newer models include a "Ryzen Desktop 2000 Ready" badge indicating drop-in compatibility. Unfortunately, most online retailers fail to distinguish between them, so you might need a compatible processor to upgrade your motherboard until old inventory is sold off.

If you find yourself stranded, AMD does offer a "Boot Kit Solution" it says it'll ship to those in need. We don't have any information about what that kit includes, though.

Memory Support	Speed
2 DIMMs - Single Rank	up to DDR4-2933
4 DIMMs - Single Rank	up to DDR4-2133
2 DIMMs - Dual Rank	up to DDR4-2667
4 DIMMs - Dual Rank	up to DDR4-1866

Ryzen 3 2200G, like Ryzen 5 2400G, includes unlocked ratio multipliers for overclocking. The graphics engine can naturally be tuned as well. A refined memory controller officially supports DDR4-2933 (up from DDR4-2666) for single-rank, dual-channel kits. It's purportedly more overclockable, too. Of course, memory support varies based on the type of memory and configuration you use, as outlined in the chart above. Shoot for the fastest setup possible; lower data rates hurt the bandwidth-hungry graphics engine.

Ryzen 5 2400G

Ryzen 5 1400

Ryzen 3 2200G

As we discussed in our Ryzen 5 2400G review, the new Raven Ridge processors replace AMD's previous Ryzen 5 1400 and Ryzen 3 1200 models. These new chips support PCIe 3.0 connectivity, with four lanes dedicated to the chipset and four more that accommodate PCIe-based storage. An additional eight lanes are available for attaching discrete graphics. Unfortunately, that's a step backward from the outgoing Summit Ridge-based Ryzens that gave you 16 lanes for graphics. Then again, we don't expect anyone to run a multi-GPU config on an entry-level platform.

AMD also used Indium solder between the die and heat spreader of its Summit Ridge-based Ryzen CPUs. However, the company went with non-metallic thermal interface material for Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G. AMD bundles its 65W Wraith Stealth cooler with both models, and while the aluminum-core sink was designed for 65W processors, we recommend a beefier aftermarket cooler for overclocking. We covered Raven Ridge's thermal and power characteristics earlier this week. So now, let's see how Ryzen 3 2200G stacks up next to Intel's Pentium G4620.

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Overclocking

Overclocking with AMD's Ryzen Master utility is simple. Using its various dials, the Zen cores in our Ryzen 3 readily jumped up to 3.9 GHz with a 1.3725V Vcore setting. We also adjusted the VDDCR SoC voltage, a single rail that feeds the uncore and graphics domains, to 1.25V. This allowed us to dial in an easy 1400 MHz graphics clock rate (though we've already heard of Tom's Hardware readers hitting 1475 MHz). We briefly pushed a bit higher to 1450 MHz, but that put us over AMD's recommended 1.25V SoC voltage, so we pulled back to preserve our sample for future testing.

We tested our stock configuration with the supported DDR4-2933 (single-rank, dual-DIMM), and then overclocked to DDR4-3200 with 14-14-14-34 timings.

Our test platform employs a Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4 cooler to cope with the thermal challenges presented by Raven Ridge's unique design (we measured 72°C using AIDA64's CPU/GPU stress test). In the past, we've overclocked Summit Ridge-based samples using AMD's bundled Wraith Spire heat sink and fan. But the Radeon Vega graphics engine adds a bit more thermal stress to the equation, so plan on buying a better cooler for overclocking.

We tested gaming at 1280x720 and 1920x1080. As you can see in the screenshot above, the graphics subsystem consumes 1GB of system memory at stock settings, but you can allocate more through the BIOS' UMA frame buffer setting. Of course, this does eat into available system RAM. The operating system also dynamically shares unused system memory with the GPU ("Shared GPU Memory" in the task manager screenshot above is RAM that Windows provisions based on workload). By default, the operating system limits this shared pool to half of the system memory's total capacity.

AMD says the benefit of a larger UMA frame buffer is evident in the ability to specify higher levels of detail. Just don't expect faster frame rates at 1080p. This should be an interesting setting to experiment with. Right out of the gate, AMD says that a user with 16GB of DDR4 would benefit from assigning 4GB to the graphics engine.

A Quick Look At Memory Latency

We ran some benchmarks on Raven Ridge's cache hierarchy in our Ryzen 5 2400G review and noticed latency improvements attributable to AMD's architectural tweaks. Of course, those improvements were made possible by paring back capacity, so trade-offs had to be made.

Our tests include several types of data access to measure latency, which we explained in AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Game Mode, Benchmarked.

	L1	L2	L3	Main Memory
Range	2KB - 32KB	32KB - 512KB	512KB - 8MB	8MB - 1GB

As a result of the new single-CCX design (and other tweaks), Ryzen 5 2400G achieves the lowest L2 and L3 cache latency seen from a Ryzen CPU. AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G trails its counterpart, but also beats the other Ryzen models handily in most access patterns.

Test Methodology & Systems

AMD's Raven Ridge performs best with Windows 10 Build 1709, so we fully updated our test systems before benchmarking.

The latest Windows build adds Multi-Plane Overlay, providing a more efficient way of rendering video and compositing 2D surfaces. It also saves power by alpha-blending accelerated surfaces and culling the ones you cannot see. That major change means you can only compare these test results to our previous Raven Ridge review.

AMD sent along the mini-ITX Gigabyte AB350N Gaming WiFi motherboard and a 2x 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-3200 memory kit. We used the bundled Wraith Stealth cooler for testing applications and games at stock settings, then switched over to the aforementioned Noctua cooler for overclocking.

Test Systems

Test System & Configuration
Hardware	Gigabyte AB350N Gaming WiFiAMD A10-9700Ryzen 3 1300XAMD Ryzen 5 2400GRyzen 3 2200GFlare X 16GB DDR4-3200 @ 2400, 2699, & 3200Intel LGA 1151 (Z370)Core i3-8100Core i5-8400Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon ACG.Skill RipJaws V DDR4-3200 (2x 8GB) @ 2400 & 2666Intel LGA 1151 (Z270)Pentium G4620Intel Core i3-7100MSI Z270 Gaming M7G.Skill RipJaws V DDR4-3200 (2x 8GB) @ 2400AllEVGA GTX 1080Samsung PM863 (960GB)SilverStone ST1500-TIHydro H115i Windows 10 Pro 64-bitCreators Update v.1709 (10.0.16299.214)

Test System & Configuration

Hardware

Gigabyte AB350N Gaming WiFi @ 2400, 2699, & 3200Intel LGA 1151 (Z370) @ 2400 & 2666Intel LGA 1151 (Z270) @ 2400All Creators Update v.1709 (10.0.16299.214)

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3DMark & Battlefield 1

We added the Ryzen 3 1300X and Pentium G4620 to our previous round of benchmarks. The Intel CPUs and Ryzen 3 1300X are matched up to an Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 add-in card, facilitating a more even comparison with AMD's Raven Ridge-based processors. And again, we're testing the Core i5-8400's UHD Graphics 630 engine, along with AMD's Bristol Ridge-based A10-9700, at 1280x720.

Platform Cost	Ryzen 5 2400G	Ryzen 3 2200G	Pentium G4620	Ryzen 3 1300X	Core i5-8400	Core i3-8100	Core i3-7100	AMD A10-9700
MSRP	$169	$99	$85	$129	$187	$119	$117	$99
+GPU	-	-	$89	$89	$89	$89	$89	-
Total Platform Cost	$169	$99	$174	$218	$276	$208	$206	$99

Pairing the Intel processors with a GeForce GT 1030 makes them more competitive in games, but it also increases platform cost dramatically. A dedicated graphics card is mandatory with the Ryzen 3 1300X, since that's purely a host processor. Keep those price differences in mind as you peruse the test results.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Intel Pentium G4620

3DMark

3DMark's DX11 and DX12 CPU tests provide useful insight into the raw amount of horsepower available to game engines.

We know that Ryzen 3 2200G and 1300X are architecturally dissimilar: the quad-core Ryzen 3 2200G has integrated graphics and 4MB of L3 cache, while the quad-core Ryzen 3 1300X doesn't have integrated graphics and wields 8MB of L3 cache. The 1300X is composed of two four-core CCXes, so the processor sports eight physical cores, even though only four are active. Both 65W processors feature the same 3.5 GHz base and 3.7 GHz Precision Boost frequencies.

Interestingly, then, Ryzen 3 1300X outperforms the 2200G in the DX12 CPU test by 12%. That advantage jumps to a massive 37% in the DX11 test. There are several possible reasons for such a disparity, one of which includes the synergistic power rail. This single rail is shared between the CPU and GPU, and AMD's logic dynamically increases current to either the CPU or GPU depending on whichever is more active. It's possible that such an interaction robs the execution cores of their peak potential during the DX11 test. We even see Intel's Pentium G4620 pull ahead during this heavily threaded synthetic workload.

We normally run VRMark as part of the standard suite, but none of our contenders passed the minimum threshold of 109 FPS.

Battlefield 1

At 1280x720, AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G shows that it is in a different class compared to other CPUs with integrated graphics engines. The processor easily outpaces AMD's A10-9700 and Intel's UHD Graphics 630.

But it still trails the setups complemented by discrete graphics at stock settings. Then again, consider that GeForce GT 1030 adds more than $100 of platform cost at today's inflated prices. Meanwhile, Ryzen 3 2200G is readily available right at $100. AMD's doing alright in our comparison, we think. The 2200G also responds well to overclocking, which propels it to an average of 74.5 FPS and ahead of those GT 1030-equipped PCs.

Make sure to flip through our 1080p test results. We set the quality preset to Low, yet still ran into a few hitches with both Raven Ridge processors at stock settings. The Ryzen 5 2400G fared better at 1080p after tuning, but Ryzen 3 2200G still suffers from stuttering and hitching. AMD is clear that its 2200G is primarily for 720p gaming, and Battlefield 1 concurs.

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Civilization VI AI Test

Civilization's AI test measures performance in a turn-based strategy game.

Ryzen 3 2200G readily competes against the Pentium G4620 at stock settings, but fares quite a bit better after some tuning, again emphasizing the advantage of AMD's unlocked multipliers. The tuned Ryzen 3 2200G even beats Core i3-8100, a 20%-pricier processor.

The stock Ryzen 3 2200G also towers over Core i5-8400 and its UHD Graphics 630 engine, along with AMD's A10-9700.

Civilization VI Graphics Test

The Ryzen 3 2200G plays Civilization VI well enough at 720p, but does trail its modern competition. Although a Pentium G4620 and GeForce GT 1030 beat the chip at its stock settings, a bit of overclocking propels Ryzen 3 into a second-place finish.

Our results at 1080p similarly show the 2200G starting from the bottom (close to much more expensive CPUs bound by graphics bottlenecks), then landing second-from-the-top after tuning.

Dota 2

Dota 2 was one of the first games to receive a patch with Zen-specific optimizations. Nevertheless, it's still a challenge for both Raven Ridge-based processors. Even overclocking isn't enough to surpass the Intel competition with Nvidia graphics at 720p. Fortunately for AMD, we achieve smooth average frame rates.

Performance falls off sharply at 1080p. Not even overclocking can save us from some hitching and stuttering in our frame time graphs. We'd recommend dropping the detail preset to Low to smooth out gameplay at this resolution.

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Far Cry Primal

We were a bit surprised to see Far Cry Primal in AMD's list of suggested benchmarks, so we decided to give it a shot using the lowest-quality settings possible.

As it turns out, this game is playable on Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G processors at 720p.

Intel's Pentium G4620 also serves up great frame rates with Nvidia's GeForce GT 1030 installed. The G4620 is fast enough to not bottleneck performance, making it a smart pairing with entry-level discrete graphics cards.

Unfortunately, a smooth experience at 1080p is still out of reach for all of these configurations.

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V finds the Core i5-8400 averaging a ridiculous 166.7 FPS at 720p. This result was so far beyond our expectations that we re-tested using several measurement utilities to confirm. We're still not sure how to explain the outcome.

The Core i3-8100 and i3-7100 demonstrate odd frame time spikes in our tests at 1280x720, emphasizing why you should consider average and minimum frame rates incomplete without frame time data. The Pentium G4620 also suffers through this benchmark. Strangely, the anomalous results vanish when we re-test at 1920x1080.

Ryzen 3 2200G does well at 720p, though, and it gets better after overclocking. In fact, we even record playable frame rates from AMD's $100 processor at 1080p (albeit with low-quality settings). But it's the Ryzen 3 1300X that surprises us most by taking the lead at 1080p.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt plays surprisingly well on most systems. AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G performs well enough at 720p, though we're not happy enough with its 1080p results to consider them playable.

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Adobe Creative Cloud

AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G beats the Ryzen 3 2200G in our Adobe suite, though the stock 2200G does pull off a few slight wins in Photoshop.

We do spot hiccups coming from the Raven Ridge processors, though. Ryzen 3 1300X beats both chips in several workloads, including Adobe Illustrator. The 1300X even beats the overclocked 2200G in that benchmark.

Intel's Pentium G4620 also performs well, beating Ryzen 5 2400G by a slim margin and opening up a larger lead over the Ryzen 3 2200G.

Web Browser

Web browser tests may not be the most demanding ones in our suite, but they are indicative of responsiveness in a common desktop computing task.

The Krakken suite measures JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. It tends to go Intel's way due to the Core architecture's better per-core performance. Indeed, it takes an aggressive overclock for Ryzen 3 2200G to land in front of Intel's Pentium and Core i3s. Otherwise, a stock 2200G trails the modern pack.

The MotionMark benchmarks, which focus on testing graphics rather than JavaScript performance, are very sensitive to clock rate and IPC throughput. Ryzen 3 1300X carves out another win over its replacements, which may be due to more power being allocated to Raven Ridge's on-die Radeon Vega block. Regardless, the AMD CPUs (even the overclocked ones) cannot catch Intel's Pentium, Core i3, and Core i5.

Productivity

The start-up test calculates load times for several types of applications, such as word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers, in both warm- and cold-start conditions. This metric historically favors Intel's processors, so it's no surprise that they take the top four spots. Once again, Ryzen 3 1300X leads the AMD bunch, edging out an overclocked Ryzen 5 2400G.

Video conferencing measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection during the workload. This time, Ryzen 3 2200G gets ahead of Intel's Pentium G4620 (though just barely). But the stock Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G both trail AMD's Summit Ridge-based Ryzen 3 1300X, which isn't slowed down by an on-die GPU processing video output.

The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries that use the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized. So, with its Radeon Vega block unencumbered, Ryzen 3 2200G jumps ahead of the Pentium G4620 and Ryzen 3 1300X.

The spreadsheet workload favors high clock rates and IPC throughput, so Intel's processors lead convincingly. Ryzen 3 1300X again takes a lead over the Ryzen 3 2200G.

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Rendering

Ryzen 3 2200G effectively ties the Ryzen 3 1300X in Cinebench's single-core test, and then carves out a slight lead in the multi-core metric.

Meanwhile, Intel's Pentium G4620 trails in the parallelized workload. But strong per-core performance gives the little Pentium an advantage in lightly-threaded tasks; it even beats a stock Ryzen 5 2400G in the single-core benchmark. These same observations carry over to the other benchmarks, too.

Ryzen 5 2400G's SMT technology allows it to dominate the Ryzen 3 2200G in threaded workloads, while the 2200G maintains a lead over Ryzen 3 1300X in most of those same tests. These benchmarks are driven by host processing, so the 2200G's available power is dedicated to the Zen cores, facilitating the newer chip's win.

Encoding & Compression

AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G matches the Ryzen 3 1300X in compression and decompression workloads, again indicating that its execution cores (and single CCX configuration) are far more potent when the graphics engine is idle.

The Pentium G4620 struggles mightily through this round of testing due to its dual-core design.

We also provide results from y-cruncher, a single- and multi-threaded program that computes Pi using AVX instructions. We tested with version 0.7.3.9474, which includes Ryzen optimizations. Coffee Lake-based processors lead the single-threaded tests convincingly, while AMD's Raven Ridge processors are naturally more competitive in the threaded workload.

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Final Analysis

Ryzen 3 2200G fuses the strengths of AMD's Zen and Vega architectures together into a highly integrated processor selling for about $100. It offers offers more performance in threaded workloads than Intel’s $85 Pentium G4620, decimating that chip's HD Graphics 630 solution in the process.

However, Ryzen 3 2200G does trail in some applications when its execution cores and compute units are utilized simultaneously. That's a result of the balancing work necessary to share power and memory bandwidth between both subsystems. To be fair, Intel's Pentium G4620 does perform well in lightly-threaded tasks, and it pairs well with entry-level discrete graphics cards. But that extra cost pushes the combination closer to $200. But if you’re willing to overclock and invest in a better thermal solution, AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G can challenge the Pentium and GeForce platform in many games.

AMD aims its Ryzen 3 2200G at eSports gamers, and we'd agree those lighter-weight titles suited to lower resolutions are a good fit. You may be able to overclock and see playable performance at 1920x1080 in some cases, but don't count on it.

Right now, the prices of other components are the biggest impediment to building a new Ryzen 3 2200G-based PC. RAM is astronomically expensive; a decent 16GB kit can set you back $180. That may force you to compromise on your memory, possibly costing precious bandwidth that'd otherwise go to improving Radeon Vega's frame rates.

Fortunately, Ryzen 3 2200G isn’t just destined for low-end gaming rigs. These processors are excellent for HTPCs and small form factor desktops. They might also serve as a respite from soul-crushing graphics card prices during the current shortage of mid-range boards.

In the end, there's no way we'd recommend a Pentium's two physical cores over Ryzen 3 2200G's four. And the dead-end Z270 chipset does little to help Intel's case. Coffee Lake-based Pentium processors can't get here fast enough. Even then, though, it's a safe bet they won't arrive with on-die graphics capable of battling AMD's Radeon Vega.

If you’re looking for a value-oriented processor with serviceable on-die graphics, Ryzen 3 2200G has what it takes to satisfy at a $100 price point.

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AMD Raven Ridge Thermal/Power Analysis: Ryzen CPUs With Vega

Igor Wallossek — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 14:00:00 +0000

Introduction & Test System

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review: Zen, Meet Vega went in-depth on the Raven Ridge architecture and explored the flagship processor's performance. Today, we're taking a closer look at the power consumption, clock rates, and temperatures of AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G. We're also pitting the stock thermal solution against our high-end chiller in order to find a temperature-independent power limit for the Ryzen 5 2400G.

It is also interesting that AMD uses heat-conducting paste instead of solder between its Raven Ridge dies and heat spreaders. However, with an average power dissipation of less than 100W, this cost-cutting measure is probably tolerable for everyday operation. Of course, we also ran a series of more demanding workloads to tax both processors. It comes as little surprise that we figured out how to get the 2400G to throttle. We weren't expecting, however, to get its Radeon Vega Graphics engine stuck that way.

We’re using the same hardware for today's testing as what you saw yesterday: AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G, the Gigabyte AB350N Gaming WiFi with two 8GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-3200 modules, and AMD’s Wraith Stealth cooler (an OEM part from AVC’s massive portfolio sporting an AMD label). Four screws hold the thermal solution in place, giving us a much more secure mounting mechanism than Intel's push-pin system.

In order to establish the limits of AMD's Raven Ridge-based processors, we need to push them as far as they can go. That's where Alphacool's powerful Eiszeit 2000 compression chiller comes into play. We combine it with the Alphacool Eisblock XPX, replacing AMD's Wraith Stealth heat sink. Motherboard components are cooled by 22°C air from a large fan blowing across them.

But before we dig into our findings, let's quickly recap the hardware used to test, the equipment in our lab responsible for our accurate measurements, and some of the software we run to monitor sensors:

Test Equipment & Environment
System	AMD Ryzen 5 2400GRyzen 3 2200GGigabyte AB350N-Gaming WiFiFlare X 16GB DDR4-3200MX300 SSD 1050GBDark Power Pro 10 (850W)
Cooling	AMD Stock CoolerAlphacool Eisblock XPXAlphacool Eiszeit 2000 ChillerThermal Grizzly Kryonaut (Used when Switching Coolers)
PC Case	Microcool Banchetto 101
Monitor	Eizo EV3237-BK
Power Consumption Measurement	Motherboard Sensors, HWiNFO64, AIDA64, Custom Software (by Igor Wallossek)Contact-free DC Measurement at Eight-Pin EPS ConnectorDirect Voltage Measurement at Applicable Power Supplies and PSU1x Rohde & Schwarz HMO 3054, 500 MHz Digital Multi-Channel Oscilloscope with Storage Function 2x Rohde & Schwarz HZO50 Current Probe (1mA - 30A, 100 kHz, DC) 2x Rohde & Schwarz HZ355 (10:1 Probes, 500 MHz)
Thermal Measurement	1x Optris PI640 80 Hz Infrared Camera + PI Connect Real-Time Infrared Monitoring and Recording
Operating System	Windows 10 Pro (1709, All Updates)

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AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Gaming: Benchmarks & Results

The Witcher 3 (Skellige)

The Witcher 3 is our go-to title for power consumption measurements because it almost always ends up generating results in line with manufacturer-defined power limits. The Skellige map produces the highest GPU and voltage converter loads that this game offers, so that's what we use. Host processing loads are somewhat below-average, though, especially since this title doesn't scale well with increasing core counts.

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

The smaller of AMD’s two Raven Ridge-based processors averages 32W across our 15-minute run, including spikes as high as 62W. Performance ranges from 34 to 43 FPS, depending on the scene, showing this to be an efficient chip. Processor temperatures peak at 44°C, while the voltage converters make it all the way to 48°C. Really, both are good results.

An average clock rate of 2.86 GHz lands far below the 2200G's base frequency, meaning there's still headroom to spare. The same can’t be said for AMD's on-die graphics engine, which operates at its 1100 MHz ceiling almost the entire time.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

Not surprisingly, Ryzen 5 2400G is faster, but also more power-hungry. Its 40W average and 85W peaks are significantly higher than what we saw from Ryzen 3 2200G. In exchange, though, it offers frame rates between 38 to 50.

The 2400G's Zen cores operate at higher frequencies, though their rate over time is a bit erratic. Meanwhile, the Vega-based graphics engine stays at an almost-constant 1240 MHz.

We do measure higher temperatures, but they remain under 50°C using AMD's stock cooler. Its fan isn't obtrusively loud by any means.

Final Fantasy XV’s Benchmark

Final Fantasy XV’s stand-alone benchmark won’t get a permanent spot in our suite, but it’s a great choice for testing at 1280x720 using the lowest preset with Nvidia’s HairWorks turned off. The reason we're using it is that Final Fantasy does apply a substantial CPU load. In stark contrast to The Witcher 3, this game actually utilizes the cores we throw at it.

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Ryzen 3 2200G, with its four Zen cores and 512 Stream processors, runs out of steam quickly. Its 24 to 30 FPS simply aren’t playable.

The benchmark run’s average power consumption increases to 37W, and the peaks rise to 67W. Our average temperature measurements hit just over 45°C for the processor and ~48°C for the voltage converters. Still, none of those numbers are cause for concern.

The CPU clock rate oscillates between an average of ~2.8 GHz and a maximum of 3.6 GHz. Again, the graphics engine is pegged at its 1100 MHz ceiling throughout almost all of our benchmark run.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

Just because the Ryzen 5 2400G is faster doesn't mean it's fast. Frame rates between 26 to 36 fluctuate quite a bit; we believe this is due to relatively slow DDR4 memory shared by the CPU and GPU.

Our average temperature measurement is now up to 54°C, while the voltage converters reach 58°C. Still, though, those results aren't cause for concern. AMD’s Wraith Stealth thermal solution is up to the task, so long as you're running normal workloads and not overclocking.

The CPU bounces around between ~3 GHz and 3.7 GHz, while the GPU sticks at an almost-constant 1240 MHz. The visible drops almost always hit the host and graphics processing blocks simultaneously, making it look like the skipping is caused by scene transitions or loading of some sort.

In the end, AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G fares well enough at 720p. Of course, as we saw yesterday, even 1080p is attainable if you dial down the details far enough. Older titles like Need for Speed: Underground 2 and GTA: San Andreas run smoothly at 1920x1080, even with anti-aliasing enabled!

Losing simultaneous multi-threading and three Compute Units makes the Ryzen 3 2200G an inferior choice, despite its lower price tag. If you aren't up for overclocking, reserve that one for office machines and simpler HTPCs tasked with video playback (and not gaming).

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AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

CPU & GPU Stress Testing: Benchmarks & Results

CPU Stress Test: Prime95 Small FFTs

Prime95 is to CPUs what FurMark is for GPUs: a true classic, updated over the years with support for new instructions. Current versions support AVX extensions, which they use to generate massive thermal loads. Running such an intensive task pushes many platforms over the edge. That's why some enthusiasts are forced to set AVX offsets in their BIOSes. Often, that's the only way to stabilize an aggressive overclock.

We’re using the most extreme settings to determine how far AMD's Zen cores will go with no load on the graphics subsystem.

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

At a reading in excess of 80°C, the stock cooler is pushing as hard as possible. As expected, we observe a massive power consumption increase: the average is 54W, while the peaks hit 67W. This gets us close to AMD's TDP rating. But there's still a little room left...

The graphics unit idles along at 220 MHz, while the Zen cores operate at a fairly consistent ~3.65 GHz.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

The stock cooler faces a real challenge now, but manages to keep Ryzen 5 2400G at 85°C. Its efforts are much more audible by this point, too.

The 15-minute run’s average of 76W and peaks as high as 83W exceed AMD's 65W TDP by a large margin. However, it’s not like AVX-optimized applications make an everyday appearance on platforms powered by sub-$200 processors.

The CPU’s clock rate drops a little as the temperature rises. However, the difference between our initial 3.75 GHz measurement and the later 3.7 GHz reading is barely noticeable.

GPU Stress Test: MSI Kombustor Core Burner

MSI’s Kombustor applies a taxing load to the graphics engine exclusively, giving us plenty of options for configuring various tests. The rule of thumb is to choose a resolution that’s just high enough for smooth frame rates without stuttering.

There’s a reason why we cut our run's length from 15 to 7.5 minutes: we observed a mysterious phenomenon using the Ryzen 5 2400G, which started at ~4 minutes into the test. We'll go into more detail below. Don't worry, though: the processor does warm up completely within this time frame.

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

The 512-shader Ryzen 3 2200G consumes an average of ~38W in this benchmark, which is less than we expected. A maximum GPU temperature of 51°C and a voltage converter ceiling of 56°C aren't bad, either.

In spite of the debilitating load, AMD's graphics engine maintains its 1100 MHz clock rate. That's incredibly impressive for integrated graphics during such a taxing benchmark.

The CPU’s occasional spikes are lost among general noise, and the Zen cores operate at a fairly consistent clock rate.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

So, about that mysterious phenomenon we mentioned earlier: it involves inexplicable clock rate measurements. We asked AMD for guidance, and its representatives couldn't come up with an answer. Next, we asked MSI to validate what we found on Gigabyte's board, and it reliably replicated our results using an MSI motherboard. So, what we observed is neither a fluke nor an isolated incident.

For one reason or another, the 2400G throttles while its total power consumption is at a rather moderate average of 44W. The spiky behavior only starts after the throttling-like phenomenon kicks in. This is most definitely not due to thermal limits either, since an average temperature of 52°C and a ~60°C peak aren't problematic readings.

The phenomenon is evident in extreme GPU frequency oscillations as well, providing further evidence of something strange going on. There’s no reason for these spikes and dips: no unexpected CPU load is applied and no other applications are running.

What makes this worse is that the throttling doesn't stop, even after the stress test ends and the system idles for a prolonged period of time. The only way to get back to normal frequencies is rebooting the system.

For what it's worth, the issue we're describing only appears to affect Ryzen 5 2400G. But it can be triggered on every sample we've seen.

The distribution of peak loads between the CPU and GPU blocks works well, even though AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G demonstrated strange and unexpected behaviors that we cannot explain. The throttling we observed didn’t occur when running games or normal applications, but was reproducible during the GPU stress test, several GPGPU applications, and GPU-accelerated render/encode benchmarks in our suite.

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AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Combined Stress Testing: Benchmarks & Results

Extreme Stress Test with the Stock Cooler

The individual CPU and GPU stress tests pushed AMD's stock thermal solution to its limit. So what happens when we tax both sides of Raven Ridge simultaneously? How well are the two blocks balanced, what does maximum power consumption look like, and how much heat is generated?

Once again, this represents an extreme scenario that doesn’t have much to do with either processor's everyday operation. One way or another, though, both chips have to survive the gauntlet.

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

After ~6 minutes, AMD’s Ryzen 3 2200G hits 95°C. That's well above its thermal limit. And the result doesn't change, even when we push the fan to its fastest rotational speed. With that said, the processor doesn't falter; it keeps going, albeit at an uncomfortably high temperature.

The hottest voltage converters toe the 80°C mark. Average power consumption is close to 88W, while peak power use falls just shy of the 100W threshold.

Plotting frequency over time shows us that the Zen cores slow down slightly once the processor exceeds 94.5W. However, Ryzen does balance this demanding workload well; the missing 100 MHz toward the end of our test is no big deal, particularly since Radeon Vega Graphics isn't affected at all.

In the end, AMD's stock cooler passes our test in a photo finish, with the Zen cores dialing back just a touch.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

The higher-end Ryzen 5 2400G enjoys greater utilization via simultaneous multi-threading and features more Stream processors. Surely it'll hit a wall when we push it hard, right? An average power consumption measurement of ~99W over 15 minutes and peaks close to 128W just can't be dealt with using a small aluminum sink.

Sure enough, after about three minutes, the CPU starts throttling to protect itself. After that, temperatures peak around 92°C, and the voltage converters run at 80°C.

Our corresponding frequency curve shows the throttling kick in even more clearly. The controller tries to maintain balance by frantically bumping clock rates up and back down. After two minutes of failing to rein in thermals, the temperature hits 95°C and AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G pulls the emergency brake. A small frequency dip affects the CPU and GPU, bringing voltage and current down a bit.

After the processor frantically changes the CPU’s frequency (near its thermal limit), it can achieve the original higher clock rate again after a short cooling-off period without a load. However, as soon as the graphics engine throttles, it takes a reboot to recover full functionality. Even a prolonged idle period doesn't help. AMD couldn't (or wouldn't) explain the cause of this behavior.

Extreme Stress Test with the Chiller

Enough of that diminutive stock heat sink and fan. We’re switching to our chiller and a good CPU water block to eliminate thermal bottlenecks. Even under full load, the liquid stays at a constant 20°C, while the air-conditioned room provides 22°C to the blower running at full-blast.

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Cooling the Ryzen 3 2200G wasn't a challenge for our massive thermal solution. Consequently, we never had an issue with heat. Average power consumption through our 15-minute run was ~90W, with peaks approaching ~101W. In spite of this, the processor's temperature never exceeded 57°C, and the voltage converters peaked at ~62°C.

The CPU and GPU frequencies remain stable. This means it's possible to circumvent AMD's throttling mechanism on the lower-end 2200G, even under brutal loads, by using an ample cooler. You just need something better than the Wraith Stealth.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

But what's this? Ryzen 5 2400G shows us that the chip's throttling behaviors can't be attributable to thermal limits. CPU and GPU temperatures in the 60°C range don't require corrective action by the processor's telemetry. And yet, we again see Ryzen 5 pull its emergency chute, dropping average power consumption from just over 114W (with up to 131W peaks) to ~100W. The voltage converters were at a mere 64°C before the processor started throttling.

Clock rates plotted over time illustrate the drop as well, though they're not as pronounced as our thermal readings. Both the CPU and GPU lose ~100 MHz. And again, it takes a reboot for Ryzen 5 2400G’s frequencies to hit their ceilings once this behavior starts. Simply giving the chip a break to cool off doesn't restore full functionality.

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AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Power Consumption & Noise

Power Consumption

We put the previous pages' results into one bar graph to sum them all up. It’s plain to see that the brief and sporadic peaks convey a worst-case picture of power consumption. However, you'll never see these processors try to maintain those levels. Consequently, we base our analysis on the red bars, which represent averages over prolonged periods of time.

AMD’s Ryzen 3 2200G stays below the 40W mark during everyday gaming loads. It takes a stress test to push the chip much higher. It's only then that you'll see power numbers in excess of 65W.

The Ryzen 5 2400G is more power-hungry thanks to higher clock rates, a more resource-rich GPU, and the ability to better-utilize its Zen cores through SMT technology. Still, it stays below 50W during everyday gaming loads.

Power consumption does rise sharply when we fire up the stress tests, of course. And at that point, AMD's Wraith Stealth cooler throws in the towel, resulting in throttling.

Ultimately, both of AMD’s Raven Ridge-based processors are easy to cool under normal operating conditions. There’s really no reason to suggest a better cooling solution unless you plan on overclocking, in which case you'll almost assuredly want something with more thermal capacity.

Noise

AMD’s latest processors appear almost identical when we measure the noise their bundled fans make. Both of them require a 100% duty cycle under load in order to keep up. Consequently, we're comparing acoustics at idle to the noise you'll hear in a typical gaming scenario.

With nothing else going on, the two systems run at 1588 RPM and ~32°C. There's barely any low-frequency bearing noise apparent in the spectrum analysis. The motor is responsible for readings under 1 kHz, while the rest is due to fan turbulence. At 33.7 dB(A), we'll call this solution quiet, which is to say the fan is almost inaudible in a closed PC case.

But it's not completely silent. We're blaming that on the motherboard's somewhat overzealous fan controller. Dipping down to 1200 RPM probably would have been fine, resulting in a measurement of just over 30 dB(A).

Under load, the fan runs at almost maximum speed. It doesn't matter whether you use PWM or voltage control; the motherboard only allows up to 1906 RPM. Both processors reach this, whether you're gaming or running a stress test. And as we've established, there's just not enough airflow for prolonged stress testing. To be sure, a beefier cooler would have been nice.

At this observed maximum speed, the noise level increases to 37.5 dB(A) for both gaming and stress testing.

These numbers are alright for everyday operation, but the noise is definitely noticeable. While we wouldn't call it loud, the motor sounds strained and it growls a bit more. Our frequency spectrum graph reflects this.

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AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Summary & Conclusion

Again, we went in-depth on Raven Ridge's performance in AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review: Zen, Meet Vega. Today was all about power, temperatures, and noise.

Generally speaking, AMD’s Wraith Stealth cooler, which comes bundled with the Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G, is completely sufficient for everyday operation. Only enthusiasts pursuing a quieter stock configuration or higher performance via overclocking should seriously consider a higher-end thermal solution.

Be especially careful if your third-party heat sink and fan of choice is a tower cooler. Such a combination can lead to heat build-up on your motherboard's voltage converters, since they don't blow air down and across those components. Also pay close attention to how you install it. The cooler should blow in the I/O shield’s direction.

AMD uses a processor from its mobile portfolio with a low-profile die that's shallower than many surrounding SMD components. Therefore, the heat spreader above the die has to be a little thicker. Whether it would have made more sense to use solder in between the two surfaces cannot be answered with a clear yes or no.

The distance between the die and bottom of the cooler is quite large, from what we've seen of de-lidded Raven Ridge chips. So, the bundled heat sink can't quite prevent thermal throttling during our stress tests. Fortunately for most, a combination of Prime95 and MSI Kombustor isn't particularly realistic outside of our test lab. AMD could have included a fan capable of spinning slightly faster, though. Then we wouldn't have had a reason to worry.

It is also important that the motherboard's fan curve is designed in such a way to hit the fan's maximum speed before Ryzen reaches its thermal limit. Your board's standard settings are not necessarily optimal, so you may want to get into the BIOS to tune its profile for more speed to avoid thermal surprises.

Our testing did uncover an interesting phenomenon that we'll refer to as a self-preservation measure (rather than thermal throttling). We only observed it using the Ryzen 5 2400G. When the CPU cores exceed 94.5°C, their clock rates, power consumption, and waste heat are reduced. The working hypothesis is that this is a voltage and current limit. It's different from the throttling behavior you might expect to encounter based on temperature alone, and we tested that theory by cooling our 2400G to 60°C. Power consumption pulled back sharply anyway, despite low temperatures.

Separately, if the integrated graphics engine is stressed beyond its limits for several minutes, then both the GPU and CPU are throttled equally. A moderate clock rate reduction helps limit waste heat, ameliorating the issue. But this doesn't just affect stress testing. It can also be triggered by extensive GPU-accelerated video encoding and compute applications. If you push the GPU hard enough, the throttling can kick in with total power consumption under 50W and a sub-50°C temperature!

All of this wouldn’t really be worth writing about if it wasn’t for the fact that Ryzen keeps on throttling, even after the conditions that caused throttling in the first place are relaxed. A reboot is necessary to reset the chip's operating parameters. There’s no rhyme or reason to this, and AMD can't explain it.

The good news, however, is that both of AMD's new Ryzen processors can be cooled without any issues using the company's bundled Wraith Stealth cooler. We used a number of especially demanding workloads to push these chips as hard as possible. But that's above and beyond what they'll encounter outside of the lab.

The worst we can say, then, is that the Wraith Stealth thermal solution gets a little loud under load. It might even be possible to cool a Ryzen 3 2200G passively, since its 65W TDP is so difficult to approach running desktop apps and mainstream games. For the most part, AMD does everything right with Raven Ridge.

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AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

Lower Power Ryzen 2400GE, 2200GE APUs Leaked By Motherboard OEMs

Leon Chan — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 21:50:00 +0000

Lower-power versions of AMD’s recently announced Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G APUs might be coming soon, according to the support pages of some AM4 motherboards.

A Ryzen 5 2400GE and Ryzen 3 2200GE have been spotted on the CPU compatibility lists of several AM4 motherboards. The new chips have the same tier-branding, but they’re labelled “GE,” instead of “G.” Notably, they’re listed with a 35W TDP, whereas the released “G” APUs have a 65W TDP.

Other specs, apart from lower clock speeds, are currently unknown. On the compatibility list for an Asrock B350 motherboard (pictured above), the Ryzen 5 2400GE and Ryzen 3 2200GE are both listed with a base clock of 3.2GHz, down from the 3.6GHz and 3.5GHz of their respective “G” counterparts.

This isn’t the first time that AMD has done a staggered launch for its APUs, however. Last year’s 35W A-series (Bristol Ridge) APUs arrived a year after their 65W siblings launched in 2016. The 35W Bristol Ridge APUs are identical in all ways to the 65W versions except for their lower base and boost clock speeds, and are designated “E.” We don’t expect that AMD is doing anything different with the Ryzen “GE” products. Indeed, listings for these chips on the compatibility list of an Asus B350 motherboard (pictured above), show that core count and cache size between the 2400G and 2400GE are the same (listings for the 2200G and GE appear to be erroneous). Given that the first process refinement development for the Zen architecture is releasing this April, in the form of Zen+ and the 400-series chipsets, we don’t expect that there will also be a year-long wait for these “GE” parts, though.

Motherboard OEMs Release New AM4 BIOSes Ahead Of Raven Ridge Launch (Updated)

Leon Chan — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 17:23:00 +0000

Update 2, 2/12/18, 9:23am PT: Gigabyte officially announced the updated BIOSes for its AM4 motherboards. Biostar announced and released new BIOSes for its AM4 motherboards as well, and we’ve added a table for them below.

Update 2/12/18, 7:10am PT: We originally reported that AMD hadn’t released any CPUs before Raven Ridge that are capable of utilizing the onboard video outputs on AM4-socket motherboards. This is incorrect. AMD’s A-series (Bristol Ridge) APUs, based on the older “Excavator” CPU architecture, were the first chips to be released that can support AM4 motherboards’ onboard video outputs. We have corrected the error in the article above.

Also, Asrock made an official announcement of its updated BIOSes.

Originally published 2/9/18, 12:15pm PT:

Last year, AMD launched the AM4-socket X370, B350, A320, and A300 platforms for Ryzen CPUs. These chipsets have onboard video outputs, but AMD hasn’t released many chips that can utilize them yet. That’s changing soon with the release of AMD’s Ryzen-based APUs, known as Raven Ridge. Launching February 12, the Ryzen 2400G and 2200G combine a four-core, eight-thread CPU with integrated graphics based on AMD’s Vega architecture.

In preparation for the impending launch, major motherboard manufacturers have released new BIOSes for their existing AM4 motherboards to support the new chips.

Asus Motherboards

Asus made an official announcement for its new BIOSes. Owners can check Asus' website for links to their motherboard’s new BIOS, and for instructions on how to update it.

Chipset	Model Name	Supported BIOS version
X370	ROG CROSSHAIR VI EXTREME	3502
	ROG CROSSHAIR VI HERO (WI-FI AC)	3502
	ROG CROSSHAIR VI HERO	3502
	ROG STRIX X370-F GAMING	3803
	ROG STRIX X370-I GAMING	3803
	PRIME X370-PRO	3803
	PRIME X370-A	3803
B350	ROG STRIX B350-F GAMING	3803
	ROG STRIX B350-I GAMING	3803
	TUF B350M-PLUS GAMING	3803
	PRIME B350-PLUS	3803
	PRIME B350M-A	3803
	PRIME B350M-E	3803
	PRIME B350M-K	3803
	B350M-DRAGON	3803
A320	PRIME A320M-C R2.0	3803
	PRIME A320M-A	3803
	PRIME A320M-E	3803
	PRIME A320M-K	3803
	EX-A320M-GAMING	3803

ASRock Motherboards

ASRock now has an announcement on its North American website about new BIOSes. In short, all of its AM4 motherboards have new BIOSes.

Chipset	Model Name	Supported BIOS version
X370	X370 TAICHI	4.40
	X370 KILLER SLI/AC	4.50
	X370 KILLER SLI	4.50
	FATAL1TY X370 PROFESSIONAL GAMING	4.40
	FATAL1TY X370 GAMING K4	4.50
	FATAL1TY X370 GAMING X	4.50
	FATAL1TY X370 GAMING-ITX/AC	4.40
B350	AB350 PRO4	4.60
	AB350M PRO4	4.50
	AB350M	4.40
	AB350M-HDV	4.40
	FATAL1TY AB350 GAMING-ITX/AC	4.40
	FATAL1TY AB350 GAMING K4	4.60
A320	A320M PRO4	4.50
	A320M	4.40
	A320M-DGS	4.40
	A320M-HDV	4.40

Biostar Motherboards

Biostar announced and released new BIOSes for most of its AM4 motherboards. We’ve compiled the full list of them below.

Chipset	Model Name	Supported BIOS version
X370	X370GTN	X37AK209.BSS
	X370GT7	X37AG209.BST
	X370GT5	X37AG209.BSS
	X370GT3	X37AS212.BSS
B350	B350GTN	B35AK209.BSS
	B350GT5	B35AG209.BSS
	B350GT3	B35AS212.BSS
	B350ET2	B35BS209.BSS
	Hi-Fi B350S1	N/A
	TB350-BTC	B35BG209.BSS
A320	TA320-BTC	A32BG209.BSS
	A320MH PRO	A32AS209.BSS
	A320MD PRO	A32BS209.BSS

Gigabyte Motherboards

Gigabyte officially announced updated BIOSes for its AM4 motherboards. Below is a list of all of them.

Chipset	Model Name	Supported BIOS version
X370	GA-AX370M-GAMING 3	F20
	GA-AX370M-DS3H	F20
	GA-AX370-GAMING K7	F20
	GA-AX370-GAMING K5	F20
	GA-AX370-GAMING K3	F20
	GA-AX370-GAMING 5	F20
	GA-AX370-GAMING 3	F20
	GA-AX370-GAMING	F20
B350	GA-AB350M-GAMING 3	F20
	GA-AB350N-GAMING WIFI	T20h
	GA-AB350M-DS3H	F20
	GA-AB350M-D3V	F20
	GA-AB350M-HD3	F20
	GA-AB350M-DS2	F20
	GA-AB350M-D3H	F20
	GA-AB350-GAMING 3	F20
	GA-AB350-GAMING	F20
A320	GA-A320M-S2H	F20
	GA-A320MA-M.2	F20
	GA-A320M-D2P	F20
	GA-A320M-DS2	F20
	GA-A320M-HD2	F20
	GA-A320-DS3	F20

MSI Motherboards

MSI announced the new BIOSes for its AM4 motherboards on its website. We’ve compiled a list of all its AM4 motherboards and their new BIOSes.

Chipset	Model Name	Supported BIOS version
X370	X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM	7A31v1C
	X370 GAMING M7 ACK	7A35v15
	X370 GAMING PRO CARBON AC	7A32v28
	X370 GAMING PRO CARBON	7A32v1C
	X370 KRAIT GAMING	7A33v19
	X370 GAMING PRO	7A33v48
	X370 GAMING PLUS	7A33v58
	X370 SLI PLUS	7A33v39
B350	B350 GAMING PRO CARBON	7B00v19
	B350 KRAIT GAMING	7B08v18
	B350 GAMING PLUS	7A34vM7
	B350 TOMAHAWK PLUS	7B36v14
	B350 TOMAHAWK ARCTIC	7A34vHA
	B350 TOMAHAWK	7A34v1C
	B350 PC MATE	7A34vAA
	B350M GAMING PRO	7A39v2C
	B350M MORTAR ARCTIC	7A37vAA
	B350M MORTAR	7A37v1B
	B350M BAZOOKA	7A38v1A
	B350I PRO AC	7A40v11
	B350M PRO-VDH	7A38vA9
	B350M PRO-VD PLUS	7B38v25
	B350M PRO-VH PLUS	7B07v25
A320	A320M GAMING PRO	7A39v19
	A320M BAZOOKA	7A38v28
	A320M GRENADE	7A39vA8
	A320M PRO-VH PLUS	7B07v36
	A320M PRO-VD PLUS	7B38v15
	A320M PRO-VHL	7B07v16
	A320M PRO-VD/S	7A36v27
	A320M PRO-VD	N/A

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review: Zen, Meet Vega

palcorn@outlook.com (Paul Alcorn) — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 14:00:00 +0000

Gamers on a budget know that there aren't many options for affordable platforms capable of passable performance, especially with mainstream graphics cards flying off shelves and landing in cryptocurrency mining rigs. AMD aims to give those folks an all-in-one solution with a fresh wave of what the company once called Accelerated Processing Units. Although it's shying away from using APU these days, the new Raven Ridge chips combine host processing, graphics, memory control, and fixed-function accelerators, just like their predecessors. One of the best gaming CPUs you can buy, the flagship Ryzen 5 2400G comes with four SMT-enabled Zen cores and 11 Radeon Vega Compute Units that deliver up to 1.76 TFLOPS. According to AMD, it should be fast enough to run some AAA games at 1080p with low-quality detail settings.

The Raven Ridge family follows last year's Summit Ridge debut, where we were introduced to AMD's Zen architecture in CPU form, without integrated graphics. The 4.8-billion-transistor Zeppelin die allowed AMD to cram eight cores, lots of cache, and plenty of PCIe into a Socket AM4 interface. But it was only an option if you were pairing it up to a discrete GPU. Obviously, that left out the masses content with integrated graphics. Before now, those folks could either pick between Intel's modern Core processors or the aging Bristol Ridge APUs, with Excavator cores and GCN 3.0-based graphics.

Clearly, AMD's Zen design needed a companion, and the Vega graphics architecture was a logical choice for modernizing the company's portfolio. Though enthusiasts have mixed feelings about Radeon RX Vega 64 and 56 cards, we'll soon see that the graphics architecture works particularly well in an integrated package. As proof, even Intel is leaning on Vega graphics for its Kaby Lake-G processors.

Raven Ridge couldn't hit the market at a more interesting time. We're weathering the worst GPU shortage ever as cryptocurrency miners snatch up discrete cards in bulk to fuel their bullish outlooks on Ethereum and other altcoins. So, PC gamers may be willing to consider less expensive hardware to tide them over until add-in boards become more affordable. And those who consider Raven Ridge for its value may stay for some fun, because we’re finding that these processors are great for tuners and enthusiasts alike.

Climbing Raven Ridge

At least to start, Raven Ridge is available in two SKUs. Again, the flagship Ryzen 5 2400G boasts four Zen cores with simultaneous multi-threading and 11 CUs, yielding 704 Stream processors. It should be priced around $170.

There's also a Ryzen 3 2200G that comes with four physical cores (without SMT) and eight CUs (512 Stream processors) for a mere $100. AMD positions this processor for the eSports crowd interested in 720p gaming.

Both Raven Ridge models make good on AMD's promise to support the AM4 platform until 2020; they drop into standard Socket AM4 interfaces on motherboards with display outputs. Of course, existing boards need a firmware update to recognize the new models, while newer platforms will include a "Ryzen Desktop 2000 Ready" badge signaling drop-in compatibility.

Specifications

AMD continues with its basic value proposition of offering unlocked ratio multipliers on all of its processors. And now you can optimize the on-die graphics, too. A refined memory controller officially supports DDR4-2933 (up from DDR4-2666) for dual-channel kits, and also touts improved memory overclocking capabilities. That's an important improvement for extracting maximum performance from an SoC heavily dependent on available bandwidth.

Interestingly, these new processors will replace the existing Ryzen 5 1400 and Ryzen 3 1200 models. Many of the notable differences between those older CPUs and the new ones are tied to a single four-core CCX (Core Complex) design and AMD's 14nm+ process. The outgoing Ryzen models employed two CCXes, leaving no room on the die for a graphics engine.

	Ryzen 5 2400G	Ryzen 5 1400	Ryzen 3 2200G	Ryzen 3 1200
Socket	AM4	AM4	AM4	AM4
CPU Cores / Threads	4 / 8	4 / 8	4 / 4	4 / 4
CPU Base/Boost Frequency (GHz)	3.6 / 3.9	3.2 / 3.4	3.5 / 3.7	3.1 / 3.2
iGPU CUs	11 (704 ALUs)	X	8 (512 ALUs)	X
iGPU Clock (MHz)	up to 1250	X	up to 1100	X
L3 Cache	4MB	8MB	4MB	8MB
Memory Speed	up to DDR4-2933	up to DDR4-2666	up to DDR4-2933	up to DDR4-2666
PCIe 3.0 Lanes	8	16	8	16
TDP	65W	65W	65W	65W
Process	14nm+	14nm	14nm+	14nm
MSRP	$170	$170	$100	$110

The move to a single CCX eliminates the need for communication between distant groups of cores, so memory and cache access latency is more consistent than we've seen from other Ryzen models. Then again, each CCX usually has 8MB of cache. AMD took the redesign a step further and also reduced the amount of cache on a single CCX, so the Raven Ridge chips only come with 4MB of L3 cache. Fortunately, gaming tends to prefer lower memory latency over high capacity. We'll explore this in more depth through our benchmarks, though.

AMD also tells us that its 14nm+ manufacturing process is more efficient than what came before, facilitating higher operating frequencies. Sure enough, both new Ryzen chips enjoy a 400 MHz base clock rate improvement over Ryzen 5 1400 and Ryzen 3 1200. Moreover, those older CPUs utilized a dual-core Precision Boost feature. But now the company is using a more sophisticated multi-core Precision Boost 2 algorithm that can accelerate by up to 500 MHz.

PCI Express 3.0 connectivity is still available through the Raven Ridge processors. You get four lanes dedicated to the chipset and four more that work well for connecting PCIe-based storage. An additional eight lanes are available for attaching discrete graphics, though that's unfortunately a step back from Summit Ridge-based CPUs with 16 extra lanes. Then again, we don't expect anyone to run a multi-GPU config on an entry-level platform.

Then there's the issue of pricing. Ryzen 5 2400G features the same number of CPU threads and cores at the same price as Ryzen 5 1400, but now it also includes integrated graphics. The same applies to Ryzen 3 2200G versus Ryzen 3 1200, though in that case, you'll actually pay $10 less for Raven Ridge. This puts Ryzen 3 2200G up against some of Intel's Pentium processors. Both AMD models include a bundled 65W cooler, too.

Memory Support	Speed
2 DIMMS - Single Rank	up to DDR4-2933
4 DIMMS - Single Rank	up to DDR4-2133
2 DIMMS - Dual Rank	up to DDR4-2667
4 DIMMS - Dual Rank	up to DDR4-1866

Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G are rated at 65W, just like Ryzen 5 1400 and Ryzen 3 1200. That means swapping out one CCX for a handful of Compute Units ends up being a wash for power. AMD points out that all AM4 motherboards support 95W as a basic requirement, even in the mini-ITX form factor. This leaves plenty of headroom for overclocking. We're also expecting 400-series motherboards to surface in April, along with Zen+ CPUs. Those boards will be less expensive than what we have now, and we anticipate that they'll incorporate lower power consumption, better multi-hub USB throughput, improved power delivery, and memory layout optimizations. All of the existing Ryzen models will drop right in.

As mentioned, AMD doesn't want to call its Raven Ridge chips APUs, perhaps in an effort to shed preconceived notions of lackluster performance from the previous-gen implementations. To AMD's credit, Raven Ridge is an entirely new beast. But the company now wants us to call its flagship the AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with Radeon Vega Graphics. No matter what you call it, though, the 2400G is a powerful chip for $170.

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Zen, Meet Vega

If you missed our coverage of the Zen design, check out Everything Zen: AMD Presents New Microarchitecture At HotChips. We're not going that deep in today's review. But to better understand how the Raven Ridge die operates, we have to take a quick look at the Zeppelin silicon that made Ryzen famous.

Zeppelin Die

The Zen microarchitecture centers on a four-core CCX building block. AMD complements each CCX with an 8MB L3 cache split into four slices. Two CCXes (we outlined one in green) come together to create an eight-core Zeppelin die. All Ryzen desktop processors, until now, featured the same underlying design, regardless of the number of active cores.

CCXes communicate with each other via AMD’s Infinity Fabric, which is an optimized version of HyperTransport, and share memory controllers over the bus. This is basically two quad-core CPUs talking to each other over an on-die interconnect that also handles northbridge and PCIe traffic.

Raven Ridge essentially replaces the second CCX with a graphics engine. Now, the die is divided up into one CCX, Vega Graphics, and the uncore. The uncore includes an Infinity Controller, the Infinity Fabric, and the I/O and System Hub. Whereas Zeppelin is composed of 4.8 billion transistors across 213mm², the Raven Ridge die below has 4.94 billion transistors and measures 209.8mm².

Raven Ridge Die

Unlike previous Ryzen products, all four execution cores reside in a single CCX (orange block to the left in the image above). That means an application running on multiple cores does not have to traverse the Infinity Fabric to communicate with other cores and cache. We know from past tests that working across the Infinity Fabric with a set of “remote” cores (and cache) can negatively affect performance in latency-sensitive applications, such as games. Raven Ridge’s single CCX should fare better in those situations.

We outlined the four-core CCXes with green boxes. Similar to what you've seen from AMD's Zeppelin die, the center of a Raven Ridge CCX contains vertical rows of L3 cache. Of course, a Zeppelin CCX has four rows of L3 cache units in the center, which add up to 8MB. The Raven Ridge CCX only sports two rows, giving us 4MB. That means Raven Ridge's L3 capacity isn't an arbitrary restriction or the product of market segmentation. Rather, it was an architectural design choice.

The orange block in the upper-left corner of Raven Ridge contains the interconnect circuitry and control units. That's in the same place on Zeppelin. But the DDR4 memory controllers and platform I/O circuitry around the edges move to different locations. Work definitely went into getting this die's layout just right, and even though the cores themselves appear identical, the CCX design is new.

Raven Ridge processors use Infinity Fabric to connect the CPU cores and on-die Vega CUs (the blue block on the right). But the fabric is merely a protocol. That means it can travel through a number of physical connections, such as interposers, PCB traces, or internal PCIe lanes. One could guess that the protocol operates over an internal PCIe bus, and that the graphics engine consumes some available connectivity, thus trimming Raven Ridge's externally-accessible lanes down to eight. It's also possible that the drop from 16 to eight lanes was another design choice, just like less L3 cache.

As we've demonstrated, increasing the system's memory frequency also improves Infinity Fabric throughput, speeding transfers between the execution cores and CUs. And of course, the Vega-based graphics engine stands to benefit greatly from more memory bandwidth, so you'll want to crank up DDR4 frequencies up as much as possible for better performance.

Unfortunately, we can't yet measure Infinity Fabric latency improvements with existing tools, though we're working on ways around that. In the meantime, we ran some benchmarks on the new cache hierarchy. Despite Ryzen 5 2400G's lower cache capacity, we are expecting speed-ups attributable to design tweaks.

	L1	L2	L3	Main Memory
Range	2KB - 32KB	32KB - 512KB	512KB - 8MB	8MB - 1GB

From a high level, Ryzen 5 2400G's single-threaded cache throughput remains comparable with the previous-gen Ryzen. But multi-threaded throughput declines significantly due to fewer responding regions.

As a result of the new single-CCX design and other tweaks, we observe the lowest L2 and L3 cache latency seen from a Ryzen CPU. That's a good omen of what we might see from latency-sensitive applications. This trend holds true for all three types of data access, which we've explained in-depth. We also provide zoomed-out versions of the latency measurements that show main memory latency. The 2400G excels in the sequential and full random access tests to main memory.

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14nm+ & Precision Boost 2

According to AMD, its 14nm+ process is denser and more power-efficient than the 14nm node it was using previously. However, the company isn't sharing much beyond those claims. To be clear, this is not the GlobalFoundries 12nm LP process that AMD will transition to in April when the Zen+ processors are expected to launch. That new process will provide even more of a performance boost over the current 14nm+ LPP FinFET.

We do know that 14nm+ enables higher frequencies at a given voltage, which AMD turns into higher base and boost clocks. The company also improved its Precision Boost 2 feature, which is comparable to Intel's multi-core Turbo Boost technology.

Precision Boost 2 is a DVFS (Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling) implementation designed to improve performance in multi-threaded workloads. AMD's current-gen Ryzen processors only offer dual-core or all-core boost frequencies. But the Precision Boost 2 algorithms operate on anywhere from one to eight active threads. This should help Ryzen 5 2400G capitalize on the architecture's already-strong threaded performance. AMD can also now control the frequency and voltage of each core independently (in the past, Ryzen processors could only adjust each CCX as an entire unit).

This technology should help when relatively light threads keep other cores active. These lighter threads don't utilize a given core fully, but because the core is working on something, it can still cause the processor to drop from its dual-core turbo setting into a slower all-core frequency. Game engines are notorious for this type of behavior, often running several helper threads (such as audio) on different cores.

AMD doesn't share a list of specific multi-core Precision Boost bins because the algorithm is truly opportunistic and will boost to different frequencies based upon temperature, current, and load. That isn't too surprising—Intel also stopped sharing its multi-core Turbo Boost ratios for similar reasons.

Precision Boost 2 is intricately woven into the capabilities of AMD's SenseMI suite. For instance, Pure Power uses an array of 1000 sensors to monitor all of those critical parameters, thus enabling real-time adjustments. This information flows through the Infinity Fabric. The coherent control and data interface services six different clients in the SoC, including the multimedia engines, display engine, DDR4 memory controllers, I/O and System Hub, host processing cores, and the graphics engine. AMD split the Infinity Fabric into control and data planes to optimize performance and granularity (1ms intervals) for the real-time telemetry data.

Power Enhancements

As with any product destined for mobile applications, power is key. Raven Ridge-based SoCs have the ability to shut down different blocks in order to curb consumption. The SoC also uses internal and external (on the motherboard) voltage regulators that communicate with each other, but operate independently. This allows the processor to deactivate a regulator when it isn't needed, dropping the chip into a lower power state.

Intel's Kaby Lake and AMD's Bristol Ridge processors feature two power rails, one dedicated to the CPU and another dedicated to the GPU. Raven Ridge employs a single rail for both regions to enable power sharing. This allows the SoC to dedicate more current to regions that are experiencing heavier load, purportedly boosting performance.

Shutting off areas of the chip, or power gating, requires a fast resumption time (gate exit). Simply put, if you put a core to sleep, you want it to quickly resume activity when it's called upon. AMD implemented faster resumption times to allow power gating without negatively affecting the user experience.

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SoC & Chipset Connectivity

As we've discussed, Raven Ridge gets eight PCIe 3.0 lanes for add-in graphics, rather than Zeppelin's 16, along with four general-purpose lanes. This isn't a deal-breaker, though. Modern graphics cards (even the high-end ones) don't fully utilize wide PCIe links. Moreover, these processors include capable on-die graphics.

The processor also has its own USB and SATA controllers, which complement the I/O you get from an X370, B350, or A320 chipset.

	USB 3.2 Gen2	USB 3.1 Gen1	USB 2.0	PCIe Gen3 (Gfx)	PCIe Gen2 (General Use)	SATA	SATA Express
Raven Ridge	4	1	1	8 Lanes	4 lanes	2	-
X370 Chipset Provides	2	6	6	-	8	4	2 (or 4 more SATA)
B350 Chipset Provides	2	2	6	-	6	2	2 (or 4 more SATA)
A320 Chipset Provides	1	2	6	-	-	2	-

Display

Raven Ridge supports FreeSync with supported displays and motherboards. It also supports HDCP 1.4/2.2 for streaming 4K+HDR content. AMD plans to have a production-class PlayReady 3.0 DRM graphics driver in Q3, which you'll need to stream 4K content from Netflix. Wireless display via Miracast is also supported.

The processors sport a wide range of hardware-accelerated video encode and decode features that execute on Vega's Video Core Next (VCN) silicon. Naturally, the most important comparison is to Intel's UHD Graphics 630, which has a broader range of hardware-accelerated video encode capabilities, such as MPEG-2, VP8, and VP9 8-bit. AMD does support VP9 10-bit decode, which Intel has yet to offer.

The Vega Graphics Engine

Chris Angelini covered the Vega architecture in-depth in our AMD Radeon Vega RX 64 8GB Review, so check that story out for more detail on Vega itself.

Ryzen 5 2400G features a Vega-based graphics engine with 11 Compute Units, while the lower-end Ryzen 3 2200G includes eight CUs. The 2400G wields 44 texture units (four per CU), 704 Stream processors, and 16 ROPs. That's an impressive list of resources crammed next to a quad-core CPU. But it pales in comparison to Radeon RX Vega 64's 4096 Stream processors.

AMD uses the same Raven Ridge die for its mobile and desktop products. As such, Ryzen 5 2400G looks a lot like the Ryzen Mobile 7 2700U, though the 2400G features an extra CU. It also has a lower maximum graphics frequency of 1250 MHz compared to the 7200U's 1300 MHz.

Ryzen 3 2200G and the Ryzen Mobile 5 2500U both have eight CUs, and they share the same 1100 MHz peak graphics clock rate.

Of course, comparisons to Intel's Kaby Lake-G family are inevitable. Those Intel models come with two flavors of Radeon RX Vega graphics: 100W processors featuring "GH" graphics and 65W models with "GL" graphics.

The GH implementation sports 24 CUs and 1536 Stream processors. It features a base clock of 1063 MHz that accelerates up to 1190 MHz, plus 4GB of HBM2 (4-hi stack) directly attached via Intel's EMIB technology. Single-precision performance tops out at 3.7 TFLOPS, compared to the 2400G's 1.76 TFLOPS.

Taking a step down, the GL graphics engine features 20 CUs. Lower base/boost frequencies of 931 and 1011 MHz, respectively, further differentiate the two configurations. Intel does maintain 4GB of HBM2. But peak compute performance falls to 2.6 TFLOPS compared to the 2200G's 1.126 TFLOPS.

Aside from the brawnier allocation of CUs on Intel's Kaby Lake-G models, they also profit from HBM2 and its massive throughput advantage. Raven Ridge is fed by much slower DDR4 system memory. While overclocking is going to help augment AMD's stock graphics performance, Intel is going to enjoy the leg up in frame rate comparisons.

As an aside, AMD announced the Radeon Vega Mobile at this year's CES. It features HBM2 and the same 1.7mm Z-height as Intel's Kaby Lake-G processors. With Kaby Lake-G going into Intel's NUC form factor, there's a chance we could see AMD take a similar path to the desktop. That would give those CUs a lot more bandwidth to work with, if the company could incorporate the solution into a high-end processor. This also raises questions of whether Intel would make EMIB available to AMD.

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Power & Thermals, Briefly

We love that AMD uses Indium solder between its die and heat spreader on Ryzen CPUs. However, the company broke from tradition and applied non-metallic thermal interface material to its 2000-series processors. AMD claims this is necessary, given their low cost. Both Raven Ridge-based processors are rated for 65W and Ryzen CPUs typically only hit ~4 GHz anyway, so we don't foresee significant problems with heat dissipation from the die to the IHS.

AMD bundles its Wraith Stealth cooler with these processors. The aluminum-core sink is designed for 65W chips, so you'll want a beefier aftermarket solution for aggressive overclocking. The down-blowing design usually helps with additional airflow over voltage regulation circuitry, which is a nice bonus. However, it doesn't come with the bright LEDs like AMD's higher-end models. The company does sell its 125W Wraith Max for $45.

We can generate multiple power consumption and thermal profiles for a processor with such a beefy graphics engine. Some applications tax the CPU cores or GPU, while others spread load between the units. There are a number of ways to represent the data and interpret its impact. As a result, we're splitting that part of our review into a separate story. We also have a couple of slides under The Witcher 3 to give you an idea of how these processors behave in a real-world game.

Overclocking

Overclocking with AMD's Ryzen Master utility is simple. The execution cores responded readily to our efforts, and the Ryzen 5 2400G floated up to 4 GHz with a 1.4V vCore setting. We also adjusted the VDDCR SoC voltage, which is a single rail that feeds the uncore and graphics domains, to 1.25V. That allowed us to dial in an easy 1555 MHz graphics clock rate and push the memory up to DDR4-3200 with 14-14-14-34 timings.

A Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4 cooler helped us circumvent thermal challenges (we measured 75°C under the AIDA CPU/GPU stress test).

We tested gaming at 1280x720 and 1920x1080, but didn't have time to run comparison tests with the BIOS-enabled UMA frame buffer setting. Increasing this setting allocates more system memory to the on-die graphics, although it also chews into memory available for other tasks. As you can see in the screenshot above, the graphics subsystem consumes system memory at stock settings, so allocating even more is a bit of a trade-off. Shared GPU memory is RAM that the system dynamically provisions between the CPU or GPU based on workload. By default, the operating system limits this shared pool to half of the system memory's total capacity.

Test Methodology & Systems

AMD's Raven Ridge performs best with Windows 10 Build 1709, so we fully updated our test systems before benchmarking. The latest Windows build adds Multi-Plane Overlay, which provides a more efficient way of rendering video and compositing 2D surfaces. It also saves power by alpha-blending accelerated surfaces and culling the ones you cannot see. That major change means you cannot compare these test results to previous reviews.

Test Systems

Test System & Configuration
Hardware	Gigabyte AB350N Gaming WiFiAMD A10-9700AMD Ryzen 5 2400GRyzen 3 2200GFlare X 16GB DDR4-3200 @ 2400, 2699, & 3200Intel LGA 1151 (Z370)Core i3-8100Core i5-8400Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon ACG.Skill RipJaws V DDR4-3200 (2x 8GB) @ 2400 & 2666Intel LGA 1151 (Z270)Intel Core i3-7100MSI Z270 Gaming M7G.Skill RipJaws V DDR4-3200 (2x 8GB) @ 2400AllEVGA GTX 1080Samsung PM863 (960GB)SilverStone ST1500-TI Windows 10 Pro 64-bitCreators Update v.1709 (10.0.16299.214)Hydro H115i

Test System & Configuration

Hardware

Gigabyte AB350N Gaming WiFi @ 2400, 2699, & 3200Intel LGA 1151 (Z370) @ 2400 & 2666Intel LGA 1151 (Z270) @ 2400All Creators Update v.1709 (10.0.16299.214)

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We're matching the Intel CPUs up to an Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 add-in card, facilitating a more even comparison with AMD's Raven Ridge-based processors. We're also testing the Core i5-8400's UHD Graphics 630 engine and AMD's Bristol Ridge-based A10-9700 at 1280x720. We didn't bother benchmarking them at 1920x1080, and you'll see why.

Platform Cost	Ryzen 5 2400G	Ryzen 3 2200G	Core i5-8400	Core i3-8100	Core i3-7100	AMD A10-9700
MSRP	$169	$99	$187	$119	$117	$99
+GPU	-	-	$89	$89	$89	-
Total Platform Cost	$169	$99	$276	$208	$206	$99

Pairing the Intel processors with a GeForce GT 1030 makes them more competitive, but it also increases platform cost dramatically. Keep those price differences in mind as you peruse the test results.

AMD A10-9700

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

3DMark

3DMark's DX11 and DX12 CPU tests provide useful insight into the raw amount of horsepower available to game engines. The Ryzen 5 2400G takes an easy lead over AMD's Ryzen 3 2200G. Both processors feature four physical cores, but the 2400G's SMT functionality helps keep the hardware better-utilized.

Overclocking delivers a big benefit, too. The 2400G scales up 16.5% in the Fire Strike workload and 13% in Time Spy after a bit of tuning.

We normally run VRMark as part of the standard suite, but none of our contenders passed the minimum threshold of 109 FPS.

Battlefield 1

Ryzen 5 2400G enjoys a significant uplift after a bit of tuning, jumping 18.5% in the 720p benchmark. Even at stock settings, however, it's an effective gaming processor, yielding a 67.9 FPS average. Although we dropped the quality settings a bit, the game could be played smoothly.

Needless to say, Intel's UHD Graphics 630 is out of its element, much like AMD's previous-gen A10-9700.

Make sure to flip through our 1080p test results. We set the quality preset to Low, yet still ran into a few hitches with Ryzen 5 2400G. It really benefited from overclocking though, jumping up 16.3% after tuning and smoothing out some of those wrinkles. The Core i5-8400 and i3-8100 paired with a GeForce GT 1030 demonstrated slightly lower frame rates than the overclocked Ryzen 5 2400G, but provided a smoother experience.

We received a BIOS and graphics driver update late in the review cycle that improved AMD's performance and consistency. It's plausible that future updates may also help.

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Civilization VI AI Test

Civilization's AI test measures performance in a turn-based strategy game. As you can see, AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G really excels after some tuning, going so far as to beat Intel's Core i5-8400. Notably, a stock Ryzen 5 2400G also bests the Core i3-8100, which could be due in part to the Core i3's lack of Turbo Boost (Intel limits the chip to a static 3.6 GHz, while AMD's 2400G jumps up to 3.9 GHz).

The A10-9700 serves as a great reminder of how far AMD has come since navigating away from the Bulldozer architecture.

Civilization VI Graphics Test

If your eyes keep wandering over to that overclocked Ryzen 3 2200G, you aren't alone. AMD positions the 2200G for lower-resolution gaming, but we also experimented with the overclocked 2200G configuration and included its results at 1920x1080. We're focusing on Ryzen 5 2400G for this review. However, we plan to expand our test pool to include Intel's Pentium G4620 for our Ryzen 3 2200G coverage. The Pentium family badly needs a challenger, and Ryzen 3 2200G seems up to the task.

Ryzen 5 2400G tops our 720p chart after some tuning, and the plucky 2200G isn't far behind. We averaged 63.1 FPS with the 2400G, representing a 12% speed-up over stock. Using Medium graphics settings for both sets of tests, the Ryzen 5 2400G surprisingly encountered more variance at stock settings during the 720p run than it did at 1080p. This reinforces our hypothesis that AMD needs to continue optimizing its graphics drivers. Tuning easily overcomes those hiccups though, and the 2400G tops our charts by a large margin.

Dota 2

Dota 2 was one of the first games to receive a patch with Zen-specific optimizations.

Core i5-8400 and i3-8100 hit a graphics bottleneck during the 720p benchmark, while the Ryzen processors trail even after tuning. It is hard to call 104.3 FPS at 720p problematic, though.

AMD's overclocked Ryzen 5 2400G serves up 63.4 FPS at 1080p using medium-quality settings, yielding a smooth gaming experience.

Intel's UHD Graphics 630 engine and the A10-9700 are simply unplayable at 720p with these settings.

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Far Cry Primal

We were a bit surprised to see Far Cry Primal in AMD's list of suggested benchmarks, so we decided to give it a shot using the lowest-quality settings possible. As it turns out, the game is playable on Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G processors at 720p. However, all of our contenders run into trouble at 1080p.

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V finds the Core i5-8400 averaging a ridiculous 166.7 FPS at 720p. This result is so far from our expectations that we re-tested using several measurement utilities to confirm. We're still not sure how to explain the outcome.

Our results at 720p emphasize why you should consider average and minimum frame rates incomplete without frame time data. Even though the averages show most processors offering great performance, frame time plots reveal nasty-looking outliers from several configurations. A second chart with the Core i3-8100 and -7100 removed show Ryzen 5 2400G providing a nice, flat line of frame times through our 720p benchmark. But the Core i5-8400 and its abnormally-high average runs into several frame time spikes that manifest as visible stuttering. We even reproduced those results several times.

The Core i5-8400 oddly doesn't experience the same variance at 1080p, and neither do the Core i3 models. We're testing with a relatively new test image to accommodate Raven Ridge, so there's still some troubleshooting to do.

Regardless, the Ryzen 5 2400G fares well at 720p. And although it isn't stellar at 1920x1080, it's still playable.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt plays surprisingly well on most systems (except the A10-9700 and UHD Graphics 630 engine, of course).

Ryzen 5 2400G takes the lead at both resolutions after applying our overclock. All of the systems suffer a frame time spike at the same point during our test corresponding to a scene transition.

We can confidently recommend the Ryzen 5 2400G for 1080p gaming at low settings in The Witcher 3. The game plays really well.

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Adobe Creative Cloud

AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G beats the Ryzen 3 2200G in our Adobe suite, though a stock 2200G does pull off a few marginal wins in Photoshop.

The real winners are Intel's Core i5-8400 and i3-8100, though. Core i3-7100 is competitive against the stock Ryzen processors, but once again Intel's locked multipliers are a liability. The Ryzen models jump ahead after tuning.

Web Browser

Web browser tests may not be the most demanding ones in our suite, but they are indicative of responsiveness in the most common workload for desktop computers.

The Krakken suite measures JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. It tends to go Intel's way due to the Core architecture's better per-core performance. This generalization holds true with AMD's Ryzen processors at their stock settings. However, overclocking allows the 2400G to carve out a lead. We see a similar outcome in WebXPRT.

The MotionMark benchmarks, which focus on testing graphics rather than JavaScript performance, are very sensitive to clock rate and IPC throughput. Not surprisingly, then, Intel's processors lead.

Productivity

Video conferencing measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for video playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection during the workload. This complex task responds well to extra threads, so the overclocked Ryzen 5 2400G excels. Core i5-8400 does lead, but by less than the benchmark's inherent margin of error.

The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries that use the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, and this time AMD's overclocked Ryzen 5 2400G wins (though again, by a slim margin). The 2400G isn't as convincing at stock settings, but it does beat the Core i3-8100 and -7100.

The spreadsheet workload favors high clock rates and IPC throughput, so the Intel processors lead convincingly.

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Rendering

We expect Ryzen 5 2400G's eight threads to compete readily with the more expensive Core i5-8400's six physical cores in well-parallelized tasks. Although AMD never leads at stock settings, it at least holds its own after some casual overclocking.

The Core i5-8400 wins in every benchmark except one. However, the Ryzen 5 2400G is solid in tasks that fully utilize its SMT-enabled cores, such as Cinebench, Corona, and LuxMark.

As expected, the single-threaded benchmarks go Intel's way. Tuning does help Ryzen close the gap, though.

Encoding & Compression

The Ryzen architecture has always excelled in decompression workloads. This continues with Raven Ridge. AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G shows well in the multi-core compression workload as well. Meanwhile, the Core i3-7100 and AMD A10-9700 demonstrate just how under-powered they are in demanding tests.

The Ryzen 5 2400G performs exceedingly well in LAME, which is primarily single-threaded. This result leads us to believe that the benchmark benefits from low cache latency, as Intel processors maintain their per-core performance advantage.

There's normally a larger delta between Intel and AMD processors during our HandBrake x265 test compared to the x264 benchmark due to the former's heavy use of AVX instructions. But we don't really see that this time around. The Ryzen 5 2400G is much more competitive in AVX-heavy workloads than we expected.

Speaking of AVX, we also provide results from y-cruncher, a single- and multi-threaded program that computes Pi using AVX instructions. We tested with version 0.7.3.9474, which includes Ryzen optimizations. The Intel processors take a big lead in our single-threaded run. Again, though, the delta between Intel and AMD contenders is smaller than expected when we divide this task across available physical and logical cores. We theorize that a lower cache latency helps feed the cores in these data-hungry AVX workloads, thus speeding performance.

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Final Thoughts

Our mission today was to determine if AMD's Ryzen 5 2400G could truly play games at 1920x1080 using low-quality settings. The answer is yes, though your mileage may vary depending on the title. Vega or not, we're still dealing with integrated graphics. So, the fact that this sub-$200 piece of highly integrated hardware gets us there at all is impressive. Raven Ridge-based processors aren't going to make you swear off add-in cards any time soon. But they do serve up playable frame rates, satisfying their mission in life.

In comparison, the locked multipliers you find on Intel's low-cost CPUs hurt their value proposition among budget-minded enthusiasts. The company did make a half-hearted attempt to court power users with an unlocked K-series Core i3, but the thing is too expensive, no way around it. Moreover, it requires a Z-series chipset for overclocking and doesn't even include a heat sink. Hard pass.

Meanwhile, every AMD CPU is overclockable on B350 and X370 motherboards. Specifically, our Ryzen 5 2400G sample overclocked easily. With some extra time, we think we could have squeezed even more performance from it. That's particularly important because AMD needs the helping hands of enthusiasts to beat Intel in benchmarks it'd otherwise lose at stock settings.

AMD made some significant changes to Raven Ridge's architecture compared to the Zeppelin die. It reduced L3 cache capacity and latency, moved to a single-CCX layout, and bumped clock rates higher thanks to a refined 14nm+ manufacturing process. The result is a more competitive entry-level processor than anything we've seen from AMD before in our CPU-focused application workloads. Ryzen 5 2400G's ability to work on eight threads concurrently help it battle effectively, whether you're looking at highly parallelized workloads or simpler tasks like LAME encoding.

But the addition of AMD's Vega-based graphics engine is what everyone was holding their breath for. That combination of new Zen cores with modern 3D capabilities played well together throughout our benchmark suite at 1280x720. It also earned approving nods in most of the 1080p-based tests. The previous-generation A10-9700 and Intel's current UHD Graphics solution simply get slaughtered when they show up in the same charts.

We're impressed with Ryzen 5 2400G's overall performance story, especially in light of the chip's $170 price tag. It's a solid value paired with an inexpensive motherboard and a fast memory kit. As with APUs of the past, this processor gives you the ability to buy one chip without the expense of an add-in card. You can imagine the integration does some interesting things for builders and small form factors, too. Ryzen 5 2400G would be great in a mini-ITX box next to your TV.

AMD’s value pitch has long consisted of more cores for less money, and Raven Ridge brings that same philosophy to integrated graphics. The Ryzen 5 2400G is a surprisingly good processor for those looking for a capable gaming build on the lower end of today's pricing scale.

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Raven Ridge Unboxed: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G, Ryzen 3 2200G First Look

Igor Wallossek — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 14:00:00 +0000

CPU Unboxing...The Quick Way

Instead of a step-by-step unboxing, let's start with a quick dump to the tabletop, for those of you in a rush. Here's what we saw when we dropped the lot from one of the chip boxes onto our studio table.

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Meet the First Raven Ridge Twins

Let's do this unboxing the more conventional way now. One has SMT and the other doesn't, but apart from that, the Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G share the same genes (and much the same outer packaging).

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The APUs In Their Shells

Okay, we've gotten the chips out of their larger retail boxes. Inside, they come in the usual shiny black cardboard mini-boxes, with the chip encased in a clear-plastic clamshell inside. Very gothic.

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So, What Is That We're Looking At?

We broke out our digital microscope and got up close with the APUs. What are we looking at? It's not a Mandelbrot graphic or a solar flare...

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In Close-Up: Any Better Idea?

At an angle, it should be much easier to figure out what we are looking at. (It's a few of the pins on these new APUs.)

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This Is Why Thermal Paste Isn't Optional

No, that isn't a lunar landscape; it's the rounded edge of one of the heatspreaders atop one of the APUs. Without the right paste applied, heated air would be trapped in all of those grooves and pits in the metal, leading to inefficient cooling performance.

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The New APUs: Front On

Okay, we're back out to a normal viewing distance now. Here's a look at the heatspreaders on the new Raven Ridge desktop chips. No sign of Vega branding here...just Ryzen.

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It's a Small Board, After All

Of course, every APU also needs the right foundation to build upon. For the purposes of our unboxing, that's the Gigabyte AB350N-Gaming WiFi, a space-saving Mini-ITX mobo.

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Slots & Expansion...

With two DIMM banks and a PCI Express slot, this Mini-ITX board gives you just enough expansion to work with for a basic PC build. The voltage regulators on the Gigabyte AB350N-Gaming WiFi have a proper heat sink, too, and are also cooled by partial airflow from the chip's in-box cooler. (More on the cooler shortly.)

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...And Let's Show the I/O

The AB350N-Gaming WiFi offers plenty of connectivity for a space-saving PC. Keep in mind the PCI Express x16 expansion doesn't need to be occupied by a graphics slot, thanks to the Vega graphics integrated into the CPU.

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Installing The Hardware

Here, we've mounted one of the Raven Ridge chips into the board's AM4 socket, along with 16 GB of the matching DDR4-3200. The whole thing looks much closer to complete now. But something important is missing...

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Bring On The Stock Cooler

Without the requisite CPU cooler, this chip will of course overheat very quickly. The in-box Wraith cooler (sorry, no LEDs on this model) does what it’s supposed to do on that front, but we'll have to see in our testing whether it’s enough for enthusiasts' tastes.

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For The Cool Kids: Let's Chill For A While

Of course, you can expect some testing of these chips with our Alphacool chiller. We cool the CPU and provide additional mainboard cooling with supplemental cooling fans. Stay tuned to find out what that will reveal.

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And So...On With The Testing

We're hard at work testing, but we'll have to wait until AMD's embargo lifts to share our results, of course. Expect reviews of these two chips soon, as well as a detailed thermal analysis. Expect much more on Raven Ridge to come.