AMD Athlon is back! The company has revived their legacy brand that's still praised by older enthusiasts and branded their new range of low-end processors with it. The first model is the Athlon 200GE, which we're reviewing today. With a price of only $60, it is the most affordable Ryzen processor on the market. It is also cheaper than most offerings from Intel, which had to increase prices substantially due to their 14 nm production process not being able to fill demand.

AMD was kind enough to give the Athlon 200GE SMT, so its two physical CPU cores get turned into four logical cores, which definitely helps with application performance and ensures that apps that absolutely want to have at least four cores will run. This capability also offsets the Athlon 200GE from the Intel Celerons, which are all dual-core with just two threads. Clocks for the Athlon 200GE are set at 3.2 GHz, which is low, even for Ryzen, which traditionally has lower clocks than Intel counterparts. Unfortunately, AMD didn't include their incredible Precision Boost technology, which, as we found out in recent Ryzen reviews, pretty much obsoletes manual overclocking. I see no reason why Boost wouldn't be included as I doubt there are any Ryzen dies without the capability to run speeds higher than 3.2 GHz. Unlike other Ryzens, AMD has locked the multiplier too; again, I'm not sure why. Overclocking support on the 200GE could have driven motherboard sales (the cheap A320 boards have no OC support) and provided willing people with some dials to play with for higher performance.

Overall CPU performance is alright given the 200GE's pricing, but of course, it's not going to win any medals. Nevertheless, performance is sufficient for light tasks, definitely for handling MS Office productivity, Internet browsing, and media playback with ease. If you choose to run demanding computation tasks, then a more powerful CPU is recommended, or just some extra patience while the calculations complete. Overall system responsiveness is noticeably slower than on high-end CPUs, but not by a lot. We didn't notice any stalls or hangs during normal desktop use, every action just takes a fraction of a second longer, which isn't unexpected given the pricing of the 200GE.

Integrated graphics come in the form of AMD's famous "Vega" architecture. No, the Athlon 200GE will not give you the performance of the Vega 64 cards. Instead of 64 Compute Units like on Vega 64, AMD has given just 3 to the 200GE's integrated graphics, which already sets performance expectations. Nevertheless, you'll be able to play light, or older, games with the 200GE just fine. For modern AAA titles, even at the lowest possible quality setting and 720p resolution, the graphics horsepower is just too low unless you can live with 30 FPS or less. Compared to Intel's GPUs, the 200GE Vega Graphics delivers slightly better performance, but not by a significant amount. If you want entry-level gaming, then AMD's Ryzen 2200G Vega APU should be something to consider—it is twice as fast, giving you 60 FPS in games.

We've seen some reports of DVI monitor outputs not working on cheap ASRock A320 boards with the Athlon 200GE specifically, which ASRock has confirmed to us has been fixed with a recent BIOS update. All Athlon 200GE processors support three active displays at the same time.

Choosing the 200GE as an upgrade path to buy a discrete graphics card later is not the best idea. Our testing with a GTX 1080 Ti shows that even at 720p (where the CPU is the bottleneck), FPS won't reach 60 FPS due to the CPU being too slow. This means that any graphics card that could drive 60 FPS, even if it's just a RX 560, isn't gonna reach 60 FPS in those games. Our recommendation for this plan is to buy a Ryzen 2200G APU today, which is of course twice the price compared to the 200GE, but comes with integrated graphics twice as fast and won't bottleneck the discrete graphics card you buy later by nearly as much. Another option could be to buy a 200GE now and buy something like a Ryzen 3 1200 at the same time as the graphics card, with the money from the sale of the 200GE offsetting the cost.

What's really the deciding factor for the Athlon 200GE is its amazing price point: $60, about what you pay for a single game today. At this price, it's a no-brainer for a multimedia system or an office/Internet browsing computer. Its integrated Vega graphics has enough power to accelerate all video playback up to 4K without problems. Pairing the 200GE with the cheapest A320 chipset motherboard ($50), a cheap case and PSU ($50), storage ($50) and some memory ($120) will give you a computer that will handle all light tasks for less than 300 bucks. The only component that really has an impact in this setup is memory. Memory speeds will have a huge effect on actual performance for both the CPU and integrated GPU. You should absolutely run dual-channel memory (two modules, not just one). Also, I strongly recommend spending a few bucks extra to buy some 2666 MHz memory instead of memory rated at 2100 MHz or 2400 MHz—the performance is worth the small cost increase. If you are on an ultra-tight budget, rather go with 8 GB of RAM (2x 4 GB 2666) instead of the 16 GB I recommended in the config above.