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AMD is getting serious about beating Intel in the budget CPU stakes, with the company releasing an impressively cheap processor, the Athlon 3000G, for just $49 (around £40, AU$70).Aimed to compete with Intel’s budget Pentium G5400, the AMD Athlon 3000G offers some pretty impressive specs considering it costs less than a PC game.The AMD Athlon 3000G features two cores running at 3.5GHz, along with four threads and 4MB L3 cache.
It’s based on AMD Zen+ 12nm architecture, and even features Vega 3 integrated graphics.It supports up to DDR4-2933 RAM, and comes with a cooler as well.That’s pretty solid spec for a $49 processor, but what’s perhaps most interesting is that the AMD Athlon 3000G can be overclocked as well, allowing owners to eke out even more performance.TechPowerUp was able to overlock the chip to 4GHz, which is a decent bump up in performance – and if you’re lucky with the silicon lottery (and brave) you may be able to push it even further.TechPowerUp also ran a few benchmarks, and found it could even run Battlefield V pretty well – though this is at 720p resolution.
Still, the AMD Athlon 3000G managed 54.9FPS – a pretty decent result for such a cheap processor, though this is at a low resolution and with graphical settings set to minium.Still, it beat the Intel G5600, which could only manage 31.2FPS.
In other tests the Intel G5600 had the performance edge, but it’s also more expensive at $86 (around £70, AU$130).Overall, the AMD Athlon 3000G looks like a great little CPU for building an ultra-budget PC for watching media, and even a little bit of gaming, though if you’re after a better gaming processor, you’re better off spending a little bit more.Via ExtremeTech
