Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

Go to page:

Rendering, Encoding, and Compression

Rendering

Image 1 of 9

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

Image 1 of 7

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.

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 200GE enjoys a big advantage in these tests.

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.

MORE: Best Cheap CPUs

MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy

MORE: All CPUs Content