AMD Athlon 220GE and 240GE review - Introduction

AMD Athlon 220GE and 240GE
Athlon in da house y0!

Looking for an affordable processor that will cover all your browsing or media center needs including an integrated graphics unit? Hey, AMD might just have the perfect value proc available. The Athlon series is ongoing, and we review the Athlon 220GE and 240GE. 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 offerings are merely a 35 Watt TDP proc with two cores (but SMT is enabled so you have four threads). It's priced in a 50 to 70 bucks marker (USD), purchasing a heat pipe cooler could be more expensive. Two cores, four threads, and a small integrated graphics unit; we know that recipe, yeah 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, 220Ge and 240GE have integrated graphics, it only has 3 out of 11 Vega Shader unit clusters though, so that is a rather shy 192 stream processors. Then again, fine for normal desktop and media usage really.  With increased clock speeds, the AMD Athlon 220GE and 240GE continue to deliver on AMD’s promise to offer increased responsiveness, choice, and value for everyday PC users, with reliable computing for everything from every day needs to more advanced workloads like high-definition, out-of-the-box 720p gaming.

The Athlon Pro 200/220/240GE 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 3.40 GHz for the 220GE and 3.5 GHz for the 240GE. 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 2019 BIOS, and guess what, it's unlocked on the multiplier - thank you MSI, as with that enabled multiplier you'll manage to reach a better 3.7~3.9 GHz out of the two cores at a voltage with few increased volts.

Previously, one hard restriction you do need to keep in mind is that the memory will be restricted to 2667 MHz maximum (dual-channel). However with the latest BIOS update, that restriction seems to be moved as well, we're running DDR4 memory at 3333 MHz, today fellas!