AMD Athlon 3000G Review & Overclocking - $50 CPU Benchmarks

The AMD Athlon 3000 G: A Budget CPU with Room for Improvement

We set out to test the AMD Athlon 3000 G, a budget CPU that's priced at around $50. The question on everyone's mind is whether it's worth the money, especially when compared to other CPUs in its class. We'll dive into our testing and see how this CPU performs in various scenarios.

Using the 3000 G for a title like Assassin's Creed or a game on the same engine may not be the best idea, as it wants more cores and that really shows here. First Assassin's Creed just to illustrate the point, we ran some frame time tests with the AMD Athlon 3000 G. The results were disappointing, with frame times getting as high as the upper 30s. Average frame time pacing bounced around between 28 milliseconds and 15 milliseconds at the better end of it. This experience had a few stutters and an overall slow framerate.

We intentionally loaded the CPU hard with these tests because they were built for higher-end products, so 54 FPS average with that configuration is not so bad. You get tuned settings down to improve this easily to the 60 FPS mark. The 3400 G ends up at 62 FPS average stock, but again, you're wasting that money without the IGP in use. It's better to just buy an R5 2600 or something instead.

The 3200 G also runs about 62 FPS average, which is reasonable for $87. The upgrade is about 16% more expensive than the Athlon 3000 G, at $37. So, whether or not that's justifiable will depend on your budget specifically. That'll come up for this one.

We kept it pretty simple by focusing on a CPU's performance in general use cases. It's a crazy time of year right now anyway, so we wanted to keep the scope narrow enough to focus on the thing that we're most interested in using the CPU for. As far as conclusions go, the Athlon 3000 G is a good enough processor at $50. It's hard to make a lot of demands and our test suite is designed to use more CPU in tons of settings. So, there are some games in here where we just probably wouldn't really recommend getting your hopes up playing it with a great framerate.

However, some other games you can bring settings down and improve things a bit, like Hitman 2, as an example. Game testing isn't about absolutes; it's not about how does this CPU perform in these specific games; it's about relative performance and hierarchies and scale. What we learned is that the scale is about 60 to 80 percent benefit by moving to something like an R5 1600 for $100.

A doubling of your cost for the CPU, for a lot of people, is not a feasible thing. So, it's easy to say, "You could spend just $50" or "just $60" or "just $72 more dollars and get a better solution." But that's true; however, the only part is not necessarily "it's worth it" but about their budget for builds and the Athlon 3000 G is a really good part to use for specific situations like home theater builds or low-end desktop computers.

Maybe you just need kind of a decent desktop computer with no fancy or high-powered components, something that's not supposed to be focused on more than 1080p and some lightweight games. That's really where this CPU shines at $50; we think it's a great option for the ultra-budget class. And obviously, we'd recommend upgrading it if you can find a bit more money.

If you do want to have a better overall gaming experience where you're not so CPU constrained as with this and there will be games occasionally that just won't let this CPU launch those games happen sometimes with 2-core 4-thread configurations these days. So, just be prepared for that but otherwise it does fine; it's not impressive but it's also for its price it's pretty damn good.

So, we're okay with it where it is. This is definitely in our opinion one of the best budget CPUs right now by which I mean ultra-truly ultra-budget. The next competitors would be $87 for the 3200 G, which not super worth it as an upgrade from this unless you want to use the IGP in which case it's cheaper and a combined sense.

There are also other options like the R3 series, R3-1200, R3-1300 stuff, which are around $60 to $70, depending on where you're at. Anyway, that's it. Thanks for watching. Subscribe for more. Go to our best CPUs roundup for help in finding a CPU appropriate for your uses as you work towards a PC build for end of year.

We don't go to the store and just document access dotnet to help us out directly like by buying stuff we need or recommending products we've tested. We're funded by revenue from affiliate links, which means if you buy something after clicking on one of our links, we might get a small commission. This doesn't affect the way we test or review things; it just helps support our work.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enand ease off on 3000 g cpu targets the ultra budget market which is one of our favourites to work with for the creativity required to get a good build together the Athlon 3000 G is a 2 core 4 thread CPU with a base clock of 3.5 gigahertz no boost clock offered the CPU is fully unlocked a trend set accidentally by MSI for its be 350 tomahawk by us for the Athlon 200 GT last year this means that overclocking the 4 gigahertz should be common and thanks to the lack of turbo should actually improve performance meaningfully today we're focusing strictly on this product as a low end gaming CPU for pairing with a discrete GPU before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and it's straight power 11 series power supplies the straight power 11 PSU is shipped from 450 Watts up to a thousand watts accommodating most of the gaming PC build requirements you'd encounter and focuses on delivering a higher quality power supply that doesn't sacrifice on efficiency or stability noise is also a heavy point for the straight power 11 using a 135 millimeters silent wins 3 fan that can spin as low as 200 rpm for quieter low load operation learn more at the link in the description below the Athlon 3000 G is a $50 CPU and again we find that segment really fun to work with because it genuinely does take a bit more creativity to get together a really cheap build that's also not using total garbage to your components for things like the motherboard or the power supply where it's often the easiest to go really cheap and then potentially regret it later so it's more fun to build with these cheaper parts because you start looking at the high end and it kind of gets easy you just sort of a maximum price and Add to Cart out of the car not a car okay you're done so this one this is built on 14 nanometer process it is not Zen to architecture it's Zen plus and the CPU is am 4 compatible it's on all the same chipsets you already know but there's one note here which is that X 570 although you obviously shouldn't ever pair it with that anyway but if for some reason you ended up with the free X 570 board and you needed a $50 CPU to go with it then most of those boards will not support the CPU we noticed that when we were testing it and typically the x4 70 B 4 those boards will have support you just need to check on a board by board basis and make sure that they have the CV on their supported CPUs lists and that's just something you should know and do before buying it but anyway it's old process is the point and kind of older architectures not absolute newest it's not Zen - and a cpu does include however nigp in the form of Vega 3 and it's got three Vega Vega architecture see use so that'll put you at 192 stream processors it's super low-end as a graphic solution 1,100 Hertz 3 C use you end up with something that can sort of do 720p and maybe some really lightweight 1080p workloads and that's just we're not really interested in that to be honest we're focused on ok how is this thing as a just a CPU with a discrete GPU added because a $50 CPU and an ultra budget gaming build you start looking at $50 CPU and then maybe $70 $100 GPU something like that and you get a really cheap complete solution for the two major silicon components so that's what we're interested in that's what we're testing today if you wanted the IGP it's mostly useful for things like HTPC is where you need some basic video processing like video actual graphics solution in there you just need something to drive display out but you also don't want to use intel or something like that and intel's pentium g line is not anywhere close to the prices it should be because of their 40 nanometers shortage anyway so that does sort of leave the Athlon 3000 g in an interesting spot where Intel should be and typically is but is not presently occupied at least not in a competent fashion so let's get through the review again we are focusing on this as a standalone CPU if you were to buy a low-end D GPU with it what we're going to do is show you where does performance cap out relative to the other CPUs on the market we've got some 3200 G and 3400 G numbers in here as well with them coupled with D GPUs so none of these are using iGPS today we're going to start with a lighter weight game to illustrate where the 3000 G is best suited the CPU is really meant for games like maybe fortnight or rocket League or similar games that are typically classified as quote eSports titles but obviously it can do more than that f1 at 1080p will give us an idea for the upper bounds of performance in a simpler title but we still get to see the scaling of the hierarchy against other CPUs after all a lot of this is about CPU to CPU scaling more so than it is absolute performance the iPhone 3000 G holds 139 FPS average one stock and that sounds like a lot and it is strictly from a stance of establishing that a $50 CPU is capable of high frame rate in the right type of game but it's obviously much weaker against the rest of the stack the previous worst performer tested that's remotely close and performance would be something like the r5 1600 which manages 43% higher frame rate and more consistent frame times the AMD r5 1600 is about $100 on Amazon these days down from its original price of about $190 and the r5 2600 is $115 these are worth the competitive pricing definitely but an increase in price of $60 is a lot for some people it's not as easy as just spending $60 more and for those unable to justify the extra expense or afford the extra expense the 3000 G is at least able to play this game with a good frame rate while being for those builds affordable overclocking the AMD 3000 G gets to 152 FPS average when at 4 gigahertz allowing a boost to performance of 9.4% that's not bad for about 5 minutes of work still not great but not bad and when we say not great we're really referring to the comparative scaling against the stack obviously 152 FPS is more than enough for a game like this for comparison the and the r3 3200 g4 core 4 thread part runs this same test at about 143 FPS average which isn't a meaningful uplift from the 3000 G stock the 3400 G runs at 156 FPS average at which point you should definitely just buy a D GPU and a cheap CPU unless you have a specific need for the more powerful IGP on the 3400 G let's take a look at the frame times to better understand the consistency of delivery on this 2 core 4 thread CPU as a reminder frame time plots give us a frame to frame look at the time required to generate each new frame measured in frame to frame intervals and dubs frame times by scott watson formerly of tech report lower is better but more consistent is bad the 3000 G isn't bad overall although it doesn't counter spikes that manifest as slight hitches occasionally we've found that excursions from the mean greater than 8 to 12 milliseconds will often be detectable by the player and what happens a handful of times across some of our test passes is exactly that excursions from the mean that become noticeable we're plotting three of them here three different tests passes out of four all showing occasional spikes it's fine overall but not perfectly fluid the fact that we don't encounter many spikes north of 15 milliseconds is a good sign though as for 1440p perforins predictably it's unchanged the game isn't GPU bound at 1440p on the Athlon 3000 g we're clearly in a CPU bound scenario and that'll be true for pretty much all modern cards that cost more than 70 to 100 dollars when working with this specific CPU hitman 2 shows the opposite side of things using a more intensive game for this one the CPU is struggling to keep up at 1080p and obviously 1440 is the same thing the 3000 G at 1080 P holds 47 FPS average allowing the r5 1600 elite of about 80% the r3 1200 would be closer to the 3000 G although we haven't retested this age 2 CPU yet 47 FPS average isn't bad for a $50 part but it's not particularly enjoyable either the good news is that we test hitman 2 with fairly CPU intensive settings that we picked for higher-end parts than this one so with some reduction of simulation quality the CPU would be able to hit these 60 FPS mark it just takes some extra effort and tuning on behalf of the user overclocking the Athlon 3000 G didn't help in this particular title unfortunately and it appears that we're more thread bound than we are frequency bound the overclocked to 4 gigahertz only gained us 5.7 percent to uplift or about 2.7 FPS average so hardly noticeable for most people for a comparison to other low-end Andy CPUs the Athlon are 330 200 G with a d GPU was maxing out at 50 FPS average with the 3400 G at 60 FPS average both of which exhibited similarly poor 0.1% lows as the 3000 G although this title also has some issues with those in general at 1440p because we're CPU bound still the hitman 2 results are within test variants of the original chart so there's really nothing more to talk about here look it out a newer game next shadow of the Tomb Raider gives us our second dx12 title of the three shown so far which means that draw calls on the CPU should be reduced by removing API abstraction layers at 1080p the Athlon 3000gt manages 53 FPS average it's actually pretty good but it's frame time performances spike here then desirable at 26 FPS 0.1% lows on average versus other cheaper parts like the r5 1600 frame Titan consistency is significantly worse on the Athlon CPU the end result is that the player will encounter some stutters and hitches during gameplay something that can only partially be accounted for with graphics tuning overclocking pushes to 58 FPS average in 30 FPS your 1% lows which is an improvement in average frame rate of about nine point four percent it seems about a nine percent uplift is potentially going to be the common gain from an overclock on this adding $60.00 to the bill would get you 106 FPS average on the r5 1600 but it probably better at that point to do the $70 increase and push to the newer r5 2600 with its 116 FPS average our next benchmark is civilization 6 with its turn time benchmarking this gives us another perspective on CV performance allowing us to see how cpu-bound game simulations perform the Athlon 3000 G stock CPU requires 73 seconds to complete a single AI player turn with 5 AI players in the game that puts us at 6 minutes to do a full pass around the AI before you get to take your next turn that's painfully slow obviously and pales in comparison to every other CPU on the chart even though our 530 400 G and our 330 to energy do significantly better at 50 2.8 seconds for the $87 our 3 3200 G that's a turn time reduction of 27% in exchange for the extra 37 dollars now if we use percentages for everything that's a disproportionate increase in spending but percentages are kind of funny stat math sometimes and couldn't misrepresent things either way though you're at about a 74 percent increase in money for the performance gain but it's a meaningful and noticeable uplift in performance so it might be worth it for some that said part of the money would be wasted if you're not intending to use the IGP on the higher-end ap use the Athlon it's more of a throw and it doesn't really count four o'clock in the a phone three thousand G gets it to sixty four point five seconds a reduction of 11 percent for comparison the are five 1600 runs at forty five seconds per turn in exchange for $1,200 pricing a reduction of thirty eight percent from the baseline stock three thousand G part the campaign benchmark for total war war hammer two has the AMD Athlon three thousand G at a completely reasonable 85 FPS average this is in combination with consistent frame time pacing and making the app on part a good fit for ultra budget builds for the total wargames campaign mode overclocking the four gigahertz pushes the result by an impressive fifteen percent up to ninety seven FPS average and 60fps 0.1% lows the 3200 G and 3400 G both run closer to 100 FPS average but given that money is wasted if the IGP isn't used the 3000 G comes away looking better for its price in this game 1440p unsurprisingly it changes nothing as the CPU is still the bottleneck for this benchmark the campaign is only half of a total war game for the rest we need the battle benchmark the top of the battle benchmark charts runs up against GPU bottlenecks but we have plenty of test resolution to see how the 3000 G performs the Athlon 3000 G supports a baseline of 78 FPS average here with a low as reasonably spaced at 39 for 0.1% and with the overclocked pushing us to a well supported 88 F guess average that's an uplift of 12% from just a few minutes of overclocking so not bad altogether the performance of the 3000 G allows the r5 1600 stock CPU to leave the stock 3000 G by about 59 percent which is overall okay for the price Delta the game ends up playable on the 3000 G and that's really the ultimate goal of a super cheap budget class CPU assassin's creed has us at 47 FPS average with lows down in the gutter at 25 FPS 0.1% performance in this game is overall bad and we'd advise against using the 3000 G for a title like this or a game on the same engine assassin's creed wants more cores and that really shows here first asin's creed just to illustrate the point here's a frame time plot with the AMD Athlon 3000 G frame times get as high as the upper 30s here with average frame time pacing bouncing around between 28 milliseconds and 15 milliseconds at the better end of it this experience has a few stutters and an overall slow framerate and as you can see here with the time for each frame to be generated it's really not a fast CPU looking at an older game last Grand Theft Auto 5 establishes a baseline performance for the stock configuration at 54 FPS average which is overall good for the $50 part in a CPU heavy load remember we intentionally load the CPU hard with these tests because they were built for higher-end products so 54 FPS average with that configuration is not so bad you get tuned settings down to improve this easily to the 60 FPS mark the 3400 G ends up at 62 FPS average stock but again you're wasting that money without the IGP in use so it's better to just buy an r5 2600 or something instead the 3200 G also runs about 62 FPS average which is reasonable at 87 dollars the upgrade is about 16% outlets for 37 bucks so whether or not that's justifiable will depend on your budget specifically that'll cabot for this one we kept it pretty simple it's a crazy time of year right now anyway so we wanted to just keep the scope narrow enough to focus on the thing that we're most interested in using the CPU for and as far as conclusions go the iPhone 3000 G is a good enough processor at $50 it's hard to make a lot of demands and our test suite is designed to use more CPU in tons of settings so there are some games in here like Assassin's Creed 2 where we just probably wouldn't really recommend getting your hopes up playing it with a great framerate in general with the CPU but some of the other games you can bring settings down and improve things a bit like hitman 2 as an example now game testing isn't about absolutes it's not about how does this CPU perform in these specific games it's about relatives and hierarchies and scale and what we learned is that the scale is about 60 to 80 percent benefit by moving to something like an r5 1600 for $100 but a doubling of your cost for the CPU for a lot of people is not a feasible thing so it's easy to say he could spend just 50 just 60 just 72 more dollars and get a way better solution and that's true but the just part is not necessarily just it's not not only $50 for a lot of people who are using these types of parts and it has nothing necessarily to do with a person's wealth overall but about their budget for builds and the Athlon 3000 G is a really good part to use for specific like home theater builds or low end you just need kind of a decent desktop computer maybe throw a d GPU in there something that's not supposed to be fancy or high-powered or focused on more than 1080p and some lightweight games so that's really where this CPU shines at $50 we think it's a great option for the ultra budget class and obviously we'd recommend upgrading it if you can find a bit more money and if you do want to have a better overall gaming experience where you're not so CPU constrained as with this and there will be games occasionally that just won't let this CPU launch those games happen sometimes with 2 core 4 thread configurations these days so just be prepared for that but otherwise it does fine it's not impressive but it's also for its price it's pretty damn good so we're ok with it where it is this is definitely in our opinion one of the best budget CPUs right now by which I mean ultra truly ultra budget the next competitors would be $87 3200 G which not super worth it as an upgrade from this unless you want to use the IGP in which case it's cheaper and a combined sense and then there's also the R 3 series R 3 1200 1300 ex stuff like that but those aren't those maybe 60 $70 and where you look what region you're in so anyway that's it thanks for watching subscribe for more go to our best CPUs roundup for help in finding a CPU appropriate for your uses as you work towards a PC build for end of year I didn't go to store documents access dotnet to help us out directly like by buying our shirts mod mats mugs toolkits and other items we'll see you all next timeand ease off on 3000 g cpu targets the ultra budget market which is one of our favourites to work with for the creativity required to get a good build together the Athlon 3000 G is a 2 core 4 thread CPU with a base clock of 3.5 gigahertz no boost clock offered the CPU is fully unlocked a trend set accidentally by MSI for its be 350 tomahawk by us for the Athlon 200 GT last year this means that overclocking the 4 gigahertz should be common and thanks to the lack of turbo should actually improve performance meaningfully today we're focusing strictly on this product as a low end gaming CPU for pairing with a discrete GPU before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and it's straight power 11 series power supplies the straight power 11 PSU is shipped from 450 Watts up to a thousand watts accommodating most of the gaming PC build requirements you'd encounter and focuses on delivering a higher quality power supply that doesn't sacrifice on efficiency or stability noise is also a heavy point for the straight power 11 using a 135 millimeters silent wins 3 fan that can spin as low as 200 rpm for quieter low load operation learn more at the link in the description below the Athlon 3000 G is a $50 CPU and again we find that segment really fun to work with because it genuinely does take a bit more creativity to get together a really cheap build that's also not using total garbage to your components for things like the motherboard or the power supply where it's often the easiest to go really cheap and then potentially regret it later so it's more fun to build with these cheaper parts because you start looking at the high end and it kind of gets easy you just sort of a maximum price and Add to Cart out of the car not a car okay you're done so this one this is built on 14 nanometer process it is not Zen to architecture it's Zen plus and the CPU is am 4 compatible it's on all the same chipsets you already know but there's one note here which is that X 570 although you obviously shouldn't ever pair it with that anyway but if for some reason you ended up with the free X 570 board and you needed a $50 CPU to go with it then most of those boards will not support the CPU we noticed that when we were testing it and typically the x4 70 B 4 those boards will have support you just need to check on a board by board basis and make sure that they have the CV on their supported CPUs lists and that's just something you should know and do before buying it but anyway it's old process is the point and kind of older architectures not absolute newest it's not Zen - and a cpu does include however nigp in the form of Vega 3 and it's got three Vega Vega architecture see use so that'll put you at 192 stream processors it's super low-end as a graphic solution 1,100 Hertz 3 C use you end up with something that can sort of do 720p and maybe some really lightweight 1080p workloads and that's just we're not really interested in that to be honest we're focused on ok how is this thing as a just a CPU with a discrete GPU added because a $50 CPU and an ultra budget gaming build you start looking at $50 CPU and then maybe $70 $100 GPU something like that and you get a really cheap complete solution for the two major silicon components so that's what we're interested in that's what we're testing today if you wanted the IGP it's mostly useful for things like HTPC is where you need some basic video processing like video actual graphics solution in there you just need something to drive display out but you also don't want to use intel or something like that and intel's pentium g line is not anywhere close to the prices it should be because of their 40 nanometers shortage anyway so that does sort of leave the Athlon 3000 g in an interesting spot where Intel should be and typically is but is not presently occupied at least not in a competent fashion so let's get through the review again we are focusing on this as a standalone CPU if you were to buy a low-end D GPU with it what we're going to do is show you where does performance cap out relative to the other CPUs on the market we've got some 3200 G and 3400 G numbers in here as well with them coupled with D GPUs so none of these are using iGPS today we're going to start with a lighter weight game to illustrate where the 3000 G is best suited the CPU is really meant for games like maybe fortnight or rocket League or similar games that are typically classified as quote eSports titles but obviously it can do more than that f1 at 1080p will give us an idea for the upper bounds of performance in a simpler title but we still get to see the scaling of the hierarchy against other CPUs after all a lot of this is about CPU to CPU scaling more so than it is absolute performance the iPhone 3000 G holds 139 FPS average one stock and that sounds like a lot and it is strictly from a stance of establishing that a $50 CPU is capable of high frame rate in the right type of game but it's obviously much weaker against the rest of the stack the previous worst performer tested that's remotely close and performance would be something like the r5 1600 which manages 43% higher frame rate and more consistent frame times the AMD r5 1600 is about $100 on Amazon these days down from its original price of about $190 and the r5 2600 is $115 these are worth the competitive pricing definitely but an increase in price of $60 is a lot for some people it's not as easy as just spending $60 more and for those unable to justify the extra expense or afford the extra expense the 3000 G is at least able to play this game with a good frame rate while being for those builds affordable overclocking the AMD 3000 G gets to 152 FPS average when at 4 gigahertz allowing a boost to performance of 9.4% that's not bad for about 5 minutes of work still not great but not bad and when we say not great we're really referring to the comparative scaling against the stack obviously 152 FPS is more than enough for a game like this for comparison the and the r3 3200 g4 core 4 thread part runs this same test at about 143 FPS average which isn't a meaningful uplift from the 3000 G stock the 3400 G runs at 156 FPS average at which point you should definitely just buy a D GPU and a cheap CPU unless you have a specific need for the more powerful IGP on the 3400 G let's take a look at the frame times to better understand the consistency of delivery on this 2 core 4 thread CPU as a reminder frame time plots give us a frame to frame look at the time required to generate each new frame measured in frame to frame intervals and dubs frame times by scott watson formerly of tech report lower is better but more consistent is bad the 3000 G isn't bad overall although it doesn't counter spikes that manifest as slight hitches occasionally we've found that excursions from the mean greater than 8 to 12 milliseconds will often be detectable by the player and what happens a handful of times across some of our test passes is exactly that excursions from the mean that become noticeable we're plotting three of them here three different tests passes out of four all showing occasional spikes it's fine overall but not perfectly fluid the fact that we don't encounter many spikes north of 15 milliseconds is a good sign though as for 1440p perforins predictably it's unchanged the game isn't GPU bound at 1440p on the Athlon 3000 g we're clearly in a CPU bound scenario and that'll be true for pretty much all modern cards that cost more than 70 to 100 dollars when working with this specific CPU hitman 2 shows the opposite side of things using a more intensive game for this one the CPU is struggling to keep up at 1080p and obviously 1440 is the same thing the 3000 G at 1080 P holds 47 FPS average allowing the r5 1600 elite of about 80% the r3 1200 would be closer to the 3000 G although we haven't retested this age 2 CPU yet 47 FPS average isn't bad for a $50 part but it's not particularly enjoyable either the good news is that we test hitman 2 with fairly CPU intensive settings that we picked for higher-end parts than this one so with some reduction of simulation quality the CPU would be able to hit these 60 FPS mark it just takes some extra effort and tuning on behalf of the user overclocking the Athlon 3000 G didn't help in this particular title unfortunately and it appears that we're more thread bound than we are frequency bound the overclocked to 4 gigahertz only gained us 5.7 percent to uplift or about 2.7 FPS average so hardly noticeable for most people for a comparison to other low-end Andy CPUs the Athlon are 330 200 G with a d GPU was maxing out at 50 FPS average with the 3400 G at 60 FPS average both of which exhibited similarly poor 0.1% lows as the 3000 G although this title also has some issues with those in general at 1440p because we're CPU bound still the hitman 2 results are within test variants of the original chart so there's really nothing more to talk about here look it out a newer game next shadow of the Tomb Raider gives us our second dx12 title of the three shown so far which means that draw calls on the CPU should be reduced by removing API abstraction layers at 1080p the Athlon 3000gt manages 53 FPS average it's actually pretty good but it's frame time performances spike here then desirable at 26 FPS 0.1% lows on average versus other cheaper parts like the r5 1600 frame Titan consistency is significantly worse on the Athlon CPU the end result is that the player will encounter some stutters and hitches during gameplay something that can only partially be accounted for with graphics tuning overclocking pushes to 58 FPS average in 30 FPS your 1% lows which is an improvement in average frame rate of about nine point four percent it seems about a nine percent uplift is potentially going to be the common gain from an overclock on this adding $60.00 to the bill would get you 106 FPS average on the r5 1600 but it probably better at that point to do the $70 increase and push to the newer r5 2600 with its 116 FPS average our next benchmark is civilization 6 with its turn time benchmarking this gives us another perspective on CV performance allowing us to see how cpu-bound game simulations perform the Athlon 3000 G stock CPU requires 73 seconds to complete a single AI player turn with 5 AI players in the game that puts us at 6 minutes to do a full pass around the AI before you get to take your next turn that's painfully slow obviously and pales in comparison to every other CPU on the chart even though our 530 400 G and our 330 to energy do significantly better at 50 2.8 seconds for the $87 our 3 3200 G that's a turn time reduction of 27% in exchange for the extra 37 dollars now if we use percentages for everything that's a disproportionate increase in spending but percentages are kind of funny stat math sometimes and couldn't misrepresent things either way though you're at about a 74 percent increase in money for the performance gain but it's a meaningful and noticeable uplift in performance so it might be worth it for some that said part of the money would be wasted if you're not intending to use the IGP on the higher-end ap use the Athlon it's more of a throw and it doesn't really count four o'clock in the a phone three thousand G gets it to sixty four point five seconds a reduction of 11 percent for comparison the are five 1600 runs at forty five seconds per turn in exchange for $1,200 pricing a reduction of thirty eight percent from the baseline stock three thousand G part the campaign benchmark for total war war hammer two has the AMD Athlon three thousand G at a completely reasonable 85 FPS average this is in combination with consistent frame time pacing and making the app on part a good fit for ultra budget builds for the total wargames campaign mode overclocking the four gigahertz pushes the result by an impressive fifteen percent up to ninety seven FPS average and 60fps 0.1% lows the 3200 G and 3400 G both run closer to 100 FPS average but given that money is wasted if the IGP isn't used the 3000 G comes away looking better for its price in this game 1440p unsurprisingly it changes nothing as the CPU is still the bottleneck for this benchmark the campaign is only half of a total war game for the rest we need the battle benchmark the top of the battle benchmark charts runs up against GPU bottlenecks but we have plenty of test resolution to see how the 3000 G performs the Athlon 3000 G supports a baseline of 78 FPS average here with a low as reasonably spaced at 39 for 0.1% and with the overclocked pushing us to a well supported 88 F guess average that's an uplift of 12% from just a few minutes of overclocking so not bad altogether the performance of the 3000 G allows the r5 1600 stock CPU to leave the stock 3000 G by about 59 percent which is overall okay for the price Delta the game ends up playable on the 3000 G and that's really the ultimate goal of a super cheap budget class CPU assassin's creed has us at 47 FPS average with lows down in the gutter at 25 FPS 0.1% performance in this game is overall bad and we'd advise against using the 3000 G for a title like this or a game on the same engine assassin's creed wants more cores and that really shows here first asin's creed just to illustrate the point here's a frame time plot with the AMD Athlon 3000 G frame times get as high as the upper 30s here with average frame time pacing bouncing around between 28 milliseconds and 15 milliseconds at the better end of it this experience has a few stutters and an overall slow framerate and as you can see here with the time for each frame to be generated it's really not a fast CPU looking at an older game last Grand Theft Auto 5 establishes a baseline performance for the stock configuration at 54 FPS average which is overall good for the $50 part in a CPU heavy load remember we intentionally load the CPU hard with these tests because they were built for higher-end products so 54 FPS average with that configuration is not so bad you get tuned settings down to improve this easily to the 60 FPS mark the 3400 G ends up at 62 FPS average stock but again you're wasting that money without the IGP in use so it's better to just buy an r5 2600 or something instead the 3200 G also runs about 62 FPS average which is reasonable at 87 dollars the upgrade is about 16% outlets for 37 bucks so whether or not that's justifiable will depend on your budget specifically that'll cabot for this one we kept it pretty simple it's a crazy time of year right now anyway so we wanted to just keep the scope narrow enough to focus on the thing that we're most interested in using the CPU for and as far as conclusions go the iPhone 3000 G is a good enough processor at $50 it's hard to make a lot of demands and our test suite is designed to use more CPU in tons of settings so there are some games in here like Assassin's Creed 2 where we just probably wouldn't really recommend getting your hopes up playing it with a great framerate in general with the CPU but some of the other games you can bring settings down and improve things a bit like hitman 2 as an example now game testing isn't about absolutes it's not about how does this CPU perform in these specific games it's about relatives and hierarchies and scale and what we learned is that the scale is about 60 to 80 percent benefit by moving to something like an r5 1600 for $100 but a doubling of your cost for the CPU for a lot of people is not a feasible thing so it's easy to say he could spend just 50 just 60 just 72 more dollars and get a way better solution and that's true but the just part is not necessarily just it's not not only $50 for a lot of people who are using these types of parts and it has nothing necessarily to do with a person's wealth overall but about their budget for builds and the Athlon 3000 G is a really good part to use for specific like home theater builds or low end you just need kind of a decent desktop computer maybe throw a d GPU in there something that's not supposed to be fancy or high-powered or focused on more than 1080p and some lightweight games so that's really where this CPU shines at $50 we think it's a great option for the ultra budget class and obviously we'd recommend upgrading it if you can find a bit more money and if you do want to have a better overall gaming experience where you're not so CPU constrained as with this and there will be games occasionally that just won't let this CPU launch those games happen sometimes with 2 core 4 thread configurations these days so just be prepared for that but otherwise it does fine it's not impressive but it's also for its price it's pretty damn good so we're ok with it where it is this is definitely in our opinion one of the best budget CPUs right now by which I mean ultra truly ultra budget the next competitors would be $87 3200 G which not super worth it as an upgrade from this unless you want to use the IGP in which case it's cheaper and a combined sense and then there's also the R 3 series R 3 1200 1300 ex stuff like that but those aren't those maybe 60 $70 and where you look what region you're in so anyway that's it thanks for watching subscribe for more go to our best CPUs roundup for help in finding a CPU appropriate for your uses as you work towards a PC build for end of year I didn't go to store documents access dotnet to 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