AMD ATHLON 3000G PROCESSOR WITH RADEON GRAPHICS

AMD Athlon 3000G Processor with Radeon Graphics

Offering solid performance (and decent on-chip graphics silicon) right out of the box, AMD's Athlon 3000G is a worthwhile AM4-socket processor solution for anyone who can't quite afford a Ryzen 3 or Core i3.

The Athlon 3000G is AMD's newest entry in its economy desktop processor line, but in truth the AMD Athlon 3000G is mostly old CPU wine in a new bottle. But still, it's a good vintage: On a hardware level, the AMD Athlon 3000G is largely identical to the Athlon 240GE—a dual-core, four-thread processor operating at 3.5GHz. The new chip has a few new moves, though, as it's the first Ryzen-based Athlon CPU to support overclocking. This key feature helps the AMD Athlon 3000G to stand above the other Athlons as the go-to part for anyone looking for a budget-friendly CPU with relatively strong performance.

Basic Specs for a Basic CPU

Just like all of AMD's other Ryzen-based Athlon processors, the 3000G features two SMT-enabled CPU cores. (SMT, or simultaneous multi-threading, is the technology that allows each CPU core to operate on two threads at a time.) This reduces processor stalls and leads to better utilization of the CPU's resources, which in turn results in a significant increase in performance in multi-threaded tasks.

The cache on this processor is also untouched compared to the other Athlon CPUs, which means it comes with 192K of L1 cache, 1MB of L2, and 4MB of L3. It's also still based on AMD's first-gen Ryzen architecture and built on a 14-nanometer process, as opposed to the "Zen 2" 7nm process used by AMD's latest higher-end desktop CPUs. Clock for clock, the CPU portion of the processor is identical to that of the Athlon 240GE, with both parts operating at the same 3.5GHz base clock.

Only a little has changed about the integrated graphics processor (IGP) built into the chip. The AMD Athlon 3000G's Radeon Vega 3 graphics silicon features three compute units with a total of 192 pixel shaders, a dozen TMUs, and four ROPs. This matches the IGP found in the other desktop Athlons, but the 3000G operates its Vega 3 IGP at a slightly higher clock speed of 1,100MHz (versus 1,000MHz for the Athlon 240GE).

This chip, like other Ryzen desktop chips, is designed for use in AMD AM4 motherboards. You'll want to check for compatibility (some very high end AM4 boards with AMD's top-end chipsets may not support Athlons), but we expect that most buyers will pair a budget chip like this with a budget AM4-socket motherboard, such as those based on the B450 and A320 chipsets.

As mentioned in the intro, the key differentiating feature with the Athlon 3000G is overclocking support. This means you should be able to push the processor to work at higher clock frequencies to gain a bit more performance. AMD's Ryzen CPUs haven't shown to overclock particularly well in the past, but those also operate at significantly lower clock speeds than the AMD Athlon 3000G. With a base clock of 3.5GHz, the 3000G is likely to have a bit more headroom. I'll experiment with overclocking the chip a bit later, but first let's get into some benchmarks at stock speeds.

As this is a budget CPU, not many people are likely to shell out for an aftermarket cooler for an Athlon (or a Celeron or a Pentium, for that matter). Testing with the stock cooler, therefore, provides the most accurate look into the processor's real-world performance. To check for thermal throttling, I ran a couple of the benchmark tests below over again with CPUID's hardware monitor open to keep an eye on temps and see if the CPU down-clocked.