AMD Athlon 200GE review - Introduction

AMD Athlon 200GE
Athlon is back in the house?

If you are in the market for a very simple processor that will cover all your browsing or media center needs, hey, AMD might just have the perfect value proc available. The Athlon series is back, join us as we review the Athlon 200GE. Yeah, Athlon, it brings back good memories from AMD's past, the value series that kicks in with a bit of extra value often found in overclocking (anyone remembers the old pencil trick to get things unlocked?) :)

In this day and age, things are a bit more regulated though. Today's offering is merely a 35 Watt TDP proc with two cores (but SMT is enabled so you have four threads). It's priced at 55 USD, a cooler could be more expensive. Two cores, four threads, and a small integrated graphics unit; yes, we just stumbled into Raven Ridge. "Raven Ridge" is based on a 14nm fabbed die. Opposed to desktop Ryzen (aside from GE) the Athlon 200GE has integrated graphics, it only has 3 out of 11 Vega Shader units though, bringing that number to 192 stream processors. Which is fine for desktop usage really. 

The Athlon Pro 200GE is a dual-core part with SMT-enabled, so it has four threads active and 512 KB L2 cache per core, and 4 MB shared L3 cache. The base clock is 3.20 GHz. The primary limitation is PCI-Express 3.0 at x8 for graphics. Raven Ridge is an unlocked processor, or at least it should be. We're testing on a B450 board with the latest AGESA 1006 BIOS, and guess what, it's unlocked on the multiplier - thank you MSI, as with that enabled multiplier we managed to get a proper 3.9 GHz out of the two cores at a voltage of 1.4 volts. One thing you do need to keep in mind is that the memory will be restricted to 2667 MHz maximum (dual-channel). So if you opt for this proc, please do not opt for a more expensive 3200 Mhz kit or anything.