AMD Athlon 3000G Review

Today we’re taking a look at the new Athlon 3000G, AMD’s most affordable Zen-based processor yet coming in at just $50. To be clear, this unfortunately isn’t a Zen 2 processor. In order words, this is similar to the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G, featuring Zen logic cores with an integrated Vega GPU.

This also means that Athlon 3000G is just a refresh of the Athlon 240GE, which as many of you will know is a slightly higher clocked version of the $55 200GE. When compared to the 240GE, the 3000G still has 2 cores with SMT support for 4 threads, it operates at the same 3.5 GHz base frequency, packs 5 MB of cache and a Vega 3 graphics engine with 192 cores. The iGPU has been overclocked by 100 MHz, so it now operates at 1.1 GHz.

There is however one rather significant change that sees the Athlon 3000G to be completely unlocked. With previous releases you couldn’t overclock the CPU, GPU or DDR4 memory, while the 3000G is unlocked, allowing you to tinker with everything.

The headroom we anticipate won’t be huge, but you should be able to extract -10% more out of the chip. The memory overclocking side is particularly useful given the default spec only calls for DDR4-2666 and this will limit iGPU performance quite a bit. So we’ve tested with DDR4-3200 memory which will give the 3000G a big advantage over the previously tested Athlon 200GE (we never got our hands on the 240GE).

An overclockable 240GE doesn’t sound too bad, especially considering AMD’s $75 offering is now down to $50 with the Athlon 3000G. For testing we’re using the MSI B450 Tomahawk Max and we’ve got fresh iGPU game data comparing a range of new and old Ryzen parts to the Intel Core i3-8100. Before that though, let’s check out some application