 This CPU right here, the AMD Athlon 3000G, costs just $50. I mean, let's put that in perspective. That's like a night at the movies, and you might not even both get your own popcorn and drink. I mean, for that little money, how good could it possibly be? Well, Intel actually also has a CPU that's just $65, that on paper looks pretty comparable. But the Athlon 3000G has a trick up its sleeve, an unlocked multiplier. So today's plan is to overclock the snot out of this thing and see just how badly it can shred Intel's equivalent, then take a look at what you're giving up compared to what we would consider to be the best bang for the buck chip on the market, the AMD Ryzen 5 3600. What's going in and out of your PC when you're connected to the internet? Find out with GlassWire and see if there are any suspicious apps that are behaving badly. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off at the link below. Alright, so in front of me right here, uh, in front of me right here are two systems. This one with the Athlon 3000G, and this one with the Pentium G 4560, a budget CPU that was pretty awesome when it first came out (*cough*) two years ago, but I think, uh, might have had its super budget reign come to an end by this point. Right? I'm supposed to do a Cinebench R20 drag race, so I will come back around to this side. Ready? And one, two, three, can he operate two mice at the same time? Yeah! Yes he can. Honestly guys, is it just me or is this like watching a race between like a Yaris and a Honda Fit? (*laughs*) Neither of them's fast. This is fascinating. Our AMD chip has actually been behind Intel for most of this race, but it seems to be making up ground and I think AMD has come out into the lead! To be clear guys, I'm not hating on cheap processors. There's a time and a place for every CPU at every budget. It's just that the time and place is not now and not Cinebench R20 for these kinds of chips. In a stunning turn of events, our Intel bench is now out ahead again. I was not expecting this to be so exciting. And Intel finishes first with a whopping 841 points. So that's not what we expected, but this is at stock and this one can be overclocked. So I still think our argument that this one's a better value, it's also $15 cheaper, should be fine. Yep. Here are the basics of the Athlon 3000G. With this chip, you're getting two cores and four threads that run at a base clock of 3.5 GHz and there is no boosting. What you see is what you get, 3.5 Gs. It also comes with Radeon Vega 3 graphics though, and given that AMD has been pretty good at equipping their CPUs with decent onboard graphics over the years, I feel like it's worth taking a look at what kind of a gaming experience you might expect out of nothing but what you see here. Just a CPU, single stick of RAM, remember this is a budget system where upgrade path might be more important than raw performance today, and no graphics card whatsoever. So running here is Rainbow Six Siege, a five-year-old game that is pretty darn easy to run by modern standards. We're at 1080p on low settings and... Whoops. That should give you some idea why we're going to be using a dedicated graphics card for our testing, because even a budget gaming rig is still probably going to want to run a little better than that. Once again though, guys, I'm not hating on budget rigs. I'm just saying if you're going to do it, do it smart. So ignoring dumb things like that we're using Trident Z Royal memory, it's just running at low speeds to simulate cheap memory. This rig is about $300, assuming that you picked up like a budget case and power supply and built a full system around it. For just another $50, you could pick up a Ryzen 3 3200G that has double the cores of the 3000G and Vega 8 graphics with 512 graphics pipelines compared to the Vega 3's 192. For just $50 more, that is a lot more performance if all you need is onboard memory for the basics. However, you guys might have noticed we did not in fact switch to a 3200G, even though it's a better value if you're running onboard graphics. That's because we think a particularly interesting config could be the cheapest possible CPU here with a GPU like the 1650 Super from Nvidia. Most games, especially eSports ones or older ones, don't need a ton of processor cores. So we suspect that with the right sort of value combination here, we might be able to get near the performance of a CPU that costs darn near four times as much, something like a Ryzen 5 2600, especially if we can get a decent overclock out of it. So let's go ahead and fire this puppy back up. Wow, this is already a good sign. At least the menu runs smoothly. So what settings would you recommend? Hi. Hi? Alright. Apply. Let's hit the benchmark. And who knew adding a graphics card to your gaming system gives you better performance? So instead of around 20 FPS all low, we're now running, let's see, 130 FPS average and this is on high details instead of low. But what I'm about to find out is how this graphics card ran with what we think is arguably the best bang for the buck CPU on the market, the Ryzen 5 3600. How'd that do? Yeah, 192. So we have some ground to make up. Okay. That's fine. We can do that. We haven't even started overclocking yet. 60 FPS, not hard. Here we go. The right way to overclock is to slowly increase your frequency and voltage until you run into thermal limits, then back it off, etc, etc, etc, stability and such and so forth. We're just going to go full Hail Mary. So we're going to assume that our cheap RAM can do 2666 megahertz overclocked without too much trouble. That should be doable. We're going to try and hit 4 gigahertz. We're going to pump it to 1.3 volts and we're going to do an SOC voltage of 1.2 and just kind of see what happens. Well, it's not a blue screen. It's also not booting. One thing to note is that this is like a $75 motherboard. If you had a $300 motherboard, you could probably push this further. But how is that working? That would be pretty stupid though. Yeah. Well, we can try 1.4 volts and see what happens. I mean, the thing is guys with a cheap chip, I'm not saying $50 isn't a lot of money. I'm saying that usually they're not going to die like immediately. So by the time it actually dies and it's time to replace it, a $50 CPU brand new on the used and now out of date market is probably not very much. So I tend to be a little bit more comfortable pushing lower end hardware to its breaking point. Well, the anti-malware stuff and things start up when you start the computer. Everything just chugs. Yep. What he said. The good news is that we're booted at, okay, it's not 4 GHz, but a 3.9 GHz and 2400 MHz RAM. So let's see how much additional performance that ended up being worth. I'm not going to have task manager running in the background. Hey, it uses like 1% CPU on something like mid-range to high-end sometimes. And it's stable enough to run the benchmark. But honestly speaking guys, my expectations are pretty low right now. We only managed an 11% overclock going from 3.5 to 3.9 GHz. And the difference in performance that we're trying to make up is more like 30%. It's quite a bit more. Now the good news is that we're obviously heavily CPU bound. Our GPU will be able to suck up any extra performance it can get. So, you know, who knows? Maybe it'll scale even better than linearly, but I would not expect that. 139.9. That was barely an improvement. Okay. So yeah, not a lot better. It looks like in Rainbow Six Siege anyway, the difference in performance might have really come about from the extra course in the first place. I mean, okay, in fairness though, 72 minimum, 139 average, like that is very playable. And you could rock this for like two, three years and then once you've saved up. Or once they get cheap on the used market, which I mentioned before, you pick up one of these, bippity boppity off to the races. Should we do a sanity check, run one more game? Yeah. All right. I was really hoping that it would overclock a bit more than it has. I mean, I don't think another 100 MHz was going to make a difference. I wonder if being able to get the RAM a bit higher would make a big difference. Possibly. I don't think that's realistic for a budget system though, you know. And that's actually running reasonably smooth. I'm definitely seeing some small stutteriness that would be explained by some relatively high frame times, even though the average FPS is in the 30 to 40 range so far. But this is, what settings are we at? So we're at 1080p medium. And what's the score to beat? 78 FPS with a minimum of 60. We're not getting there. Yeah, no. All right, let's see how this goes. And you can really see particularly in panning or moving shots that the motion's not smooth. Like some of the frames are being delivered much faster than others, and that can easily be caused by a CPU bottleneck. 28 minimum, 48 average. Yeah, even overclocked, it didn't hold up. And up until this point, we've ignored that the Ryzen 5 3600 can also be overclocked. So the 3600 still looks like a terrific value, because remember, guys, when you calculate the value of an individual component, you don't just take it in isolation. So you can't say this costs four times as much as a 3000G, therefore it should perform four times better. You've got to look at the price of the system. So this system right now is $450. If we spent another 150 on our CPU, that would put it at $600, but that's only a 30% increase in our budget for what would be more than a 30% increase in performance. That's why at the end of the day, the lesson is and continues to be, build yourself a balanced system, because that is how you get the best bang for your buck. I'm a little disappointed. Well, do we want to try and push it further? Like we do have a chiller, we do have really good motherboards. But the problem is that, what? At best, we're going to get another 100, 200, 300MHz. I think the ultimate lesson here is that, unless you're on an extreme budget playing much older games, or you just need basic office functionality, the age of multi-core processors rather than dual-core processors is absolutely upon us. Yeah. I mean, we even went out of our way to make sure that there is no Windows or Steam update, you know, nonsense running in the background, and this was still the best we could do. Yeah, it's not ideal. So I would spend the extra for the 3200G if I was doing like an extreme budget station, and then I would wait and do my graphics upgrade later or something like that. 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That's all about budget gaming. With used hardware, mind you, but I'm a huge advocate of that. If you- If you're on a budget, get used hardware. A lot of the time it's so cheap compared to new that even if like 20% of it died, you're still out ahead.