AMD Athlon 240GE and 220GE Review: Retaking the Low Ground

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Office and Productivity

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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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Paul Alcorn
Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech

Paul Alcorn is the Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.