AMD Athlon 200GE Review: Zen and Vega Get Cheap

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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.

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.   

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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.