AMD is expanding their famous "Athlon" brand, which enthusiasts are very fond of, because Athlon offered legendary price/performance in the years around 2004/2005. The company's new Athlon 3000G is a dual-core processor that features SMT to bring the total thread count to four, which helps in both applications and gaming—some games even flat out refuse to start on systems with only two cores (without SMT). While the "3000G" naming would suggest that this processor is based on this year's AMD's Zen 2 architecture, it is actually based on first-generation Zen "Raven Ridge". That's right, it's not even Zen+, we confirmed this with AMD. Fabricated on a 14 nanometer process at GlobalFoundries, the processor lacks all the improvements seen with Zen+ and Zen 2. It looks like AMD still had a bunch of unsold Raven Ridge dies and decided to turn them into the Athlon 3000G.

While that doesn't sound impressive at first, you have to consider its price: at only $49, the processor is the most affordable entry into AMD's processor ecosystem, which impresses with a solid upgrade path thanks to AMD's long-standing Socket AM4 support. Unfortunately, our X570 Taichi board refused to start with the 3000G, displaying a POST code error 4D. We reached out to ASRock, and they told us that AMD defined that X570 does not support this processor. AMD, on the other hand, told us that motherboard vendors can choose to enable support for Athlon on X570 if they are willing to do so. We are still confirming limitations, but the bottom line is that you're probably not going to be able to run the Athlon 3000G on X570. That's why we performed all our testing on a B350 motherboard, which is more in line with a typical use case for this processor.

Looking at the overall performance results we see the Athlon 3000G at the lowest end of the performance spectrum, which isn't unexpected given the price. Overall performance is roughly 15% behind the Ryzen 3 1200 (which is a quad-core processor without SMT). Intel's Pentium G5600 comes out 22% ahead, but does cost significantly more due to supply shortages and mark-ups. We didn't test the Pentium G5400, but I would estimate it to be slightly slower than the 3000G. Intel's most affordable quad-core Coffee Lake CPU, the Core i9-9100F quad-core, ends up a massive 65% faster, but costs twice as much. On the bright side, the performance on tap is sufficient for every kind of mom and pop workload. Web browsing, Office programs, including Photoshop, run fine, and Windows is smooth enough for daily work.

While Intel has been charging premium for unlocked multipliers (the cheapest unlocked Intel processor is the Core i3-9350KF for $150), AMD is offering it on a processor a third that price. Overclocking isn't possible on the cheapest motherboards with the A320 chipset, but B350 includes that capability, for around $10 more than A320. We saw good overclocking potential on our Athlon 3000G and were able to reach 4.00 GHz easily. Going beyond that required significant voltage increases which aren't worth it in my opinion. Bringing up the CPU frequency from 3.50 GHz to 4.00 GHz yielded a performance improvement of 13%, which is quite decent and helps gain ground on the multiplier-locked Intel Pentium G5600. On the other hand, it is not a game changer that turns this into a completely different class of processor. Still, it's a great move by AMD that will definitely help with this processor's popularity.

While first Raven Ridge processors were limited in the maximum memory frequency they supported, we had no problems running the Athlon 3000G at DDR4-3200 with tight timings. No fine-tuning was needed to achieve that; we only activated the XMP profile in BIOS, which had everything run completely stable.

The Athlon 3000G comes with integrated Vega 3 graphics, which translates into 192 stream processors and is simply not enough for any AAA title. We tested seven games at the lowest-possible settings, and even at 720p, only two of them reached 30 FPS, far from the 60 FPS gamers desire. Now, of course there are older games and casual gaming, for which the integrated GPU should be sufficient, but don't expect to turn up the eye candy. If you are looking for gaming, then definitely pair the Athlon 3000G with a discrete graphics card, even if it's a super-affordable one. Compared to Intel's hopeless integrated graphics, the Athlon 3000G is MUCH better, delivering around 20% higher performance on average, which sounds good, but unplayable vs. unplayable is still unplayable.

One remedy might be overclocking the integrated graphics, which on our sample yielded an amazing +50% GPU clock increase. This turned into a +40% FPS improvement, which is pretty impressive, but still not good enough to reach 60 FPS in most games.

We also ran tests with a discrete graphics card, the RTX 2080 Ti, to eliminate any GPU bottleneck at lower resolutions, and results were interesting here, too. Due to the CPU being a bottleneck, many titles were severely constrained in the performance they could achieve. For example, Assassin's Creed Odyssey reached around 40 FPS at all resolutions, which is a clear indicator of a CPU bottleneck. No matter what graphics hardware you use, the game will not run faster than that. Reducing settings can help because lower settings often put less load on the processor. If you are looking for an affordable gaming CPU to pair with a midrange graphics card, check out the Core i3-9100F, which is more expensive, but has the CPU horsepower to achieve almost twice the framerate of the the Athlon 3000G.

AMD is including a basic heatsink with the 3000G, which looks weak at first but does a perfectly sufficient job at keeping the CPU cool. We measured 59°C, which is barely warm by today's standards. This means that you should not spend money on an aftermarket heatsink. Rather, use the bundled one and invest towards hardware that makes a difference, like an SSD, or bump the RAM up to 16 GB.

Power consumption of the Athlon 3000G is extremely low. When fully loaded, we measured whole system power consumption of around 70 W, which makes the Athlon 3000G an excellent choice for a small form factor system that has limited power and cooling capabilities. AMD's Vega integrated graphics have good driver support and can perform hardware-accelerated video decoding, which is a plus for the media PC scenario, too.

The biggest highlight of the Athlon 3000G is without any doubt its price. For $49 you get a capable CPU that can handle typical consumer tasks just fine—perfect for an entry-level system that doesn't break the bank. Right now, Intel is having serious supply issues, which drives up their CPU prices, helping AMD's offerings. Looking at what the Athlon 3000G offers, it beats all comparable Intel offerings easily. The only interesting Intel CPU here is the more expensive Core i3-9100F, which has much better CPU performance, but does require a discrete graphics card ("F" means "no integrated graphics"), so that could be an alternative for a gaming-focused system with a graphics card. If you want more CPU performance with integrated graphics, the Ryzen 3 3200G is a good option; slightly more expensive, but with four physical cores and much faster integrated graphics.