Should you buy a $50 CPU??

this CPU right here the AMD Athlon 3000 G costs just fifty dollars I mean let's put that in perspective that's like a night at the movies and you might not even both get your own popcorn and drink I mean for that little money how good could it possibly be well Intel actually also has a CPU that's just $65 that on paper looks pretty comparable but the Athlon 3000 G has a trick up its sleeve an unlocked multiplier so today's plan is to overclock thus not under this thing and see just how badly it can shred Intel's equivalent then take a look at what you're giving up compared to what we would consider to be the best bang for the buck chip on the market the AMD rise in 530 600 what's going in and out of your PC when you're connected to the Internet find out with glasswire and see if there are any suspicious apps that are behaving badly use offer code line is to get 25% off at the link below [Music] all right so in front of me right here in front of me right here are two systems this one with the Athlon 3000 G and this one with the pentium g 4560 a budget cpu that was pretty awesome when it first came out two years ago but I think might have had its super budget rain come to an end by this point right I'm supposed to do a Senate bench r20 drag race so I will come back around to this side ready and one two three can he operate two mice at the same time yeah honestly guys is it just me or is this like watching a race between like a Yaris and a Honda Fit neither of them is fast this is fascinating our AMD chip has actually been behind Intel for most of this race but it seems to be making up granite I think Andy has come out into the lead to be clear guys I'm not hating on cheap processors there's a time and a place for every CPU at every budget it's just that the time in place is not now and not sentiment are talking for these kinds of chips in a stunning turn of events our Intel bench is now out ahead again I was not expecting this to be so exciting and Intel finishes first with a whopping 841 points so that's not what we expected but this is its talk and this one can be overclocked so I still think our argument that this one's a better value it's also 15 dollars cheaper should be fine yep here are the basics of the Athlon 3000 G with this chip you're getting two cores and four threads that run at a base clock of 3.5 gigahertz and there is no boosting what you see is what you get three point five g's it also comes with radeon vega three graphics though and given that AMD has been pretty good and equipping their cpus with decent onboard graphics over the years I feel like it's worth taking a look at what kind of a gaming experience you might expect out of nothing but what you see here just a cpu single stick of RAM remember this is a budget system where upgrade path might be more important than raw performance today and no graphics card whatsoever so running here is Rainbow six siege a five year old game that is pretty darn easy to run by modern standards we're at 1080p on low settings and that should give you some idea why we're gonna be using a dedicated graphics card for our testing because even a budget gaming rig is still probably gonna want to run a little better than that once again though guys I'm not hating on budget rigs I'm just saying if you're gonna do it do it smart so ignoring dumb things like that we're using Trident 0 old memory it's it's just running at low speeds to simulate cheap memory this rig is about three hundred dollars assuming that you picked up like a budget case and power supply and built a full system around it for just another fifty dollars you could pick up a rise in three 3200 G that has double the cores of the 3000 G and Vega eight graphics with 512 graphics pipelines compared to the Vega threes 192 for just fifty dollars more that is all lot more performance if all you need is onboard memory for the basics however you guys might have noticed we did not in fact switch to a 3200 G even though it's a better value if you're running onboard graphics that's because we think a particularly interesting config could be the cheapest possible CPU here with a GPU like the 1650 super from Nvidia most games especially eSports ones or older ones don't need a ton of processor cores so we suspect that with the right sort of value combination here we might be able to get near the performance of a CPU that costs darn near four times as much something like a risin 5 2600 especially if we can get a decent overclock out of it so let's go ahead and fire this puppy back up wow this is already a good sign at least at least the menu runs smoothly so what settings would you recommend alright hi alright why let's hit the benchmark and who knew adding a graphics card to your gaming system gives you better performance so instead of around 20 FPS although we're now running let's see a hundred and thirty FPS average and this is on high details instead of low but what I'm about to find out is how this graphics card ran with what we think is arguably the best bang for the buck CPU on the market horizon 530 600 how'd that do yeah 192 so we have some ground to make up okay yeah that's fine we can do that we haven't started overclocking yet 60 FPS not hard here we go the right way to overclock is to slowly increase your frequency and voltage until you run into thermal limits then back it off etc etc etc stability and so forth we're just gonna go full hail-mary so we're gonna assume that our cheap Ram can do twenty six 66 megahertz overclocked without too much trouble that should be doable we're gonna try and hit four gigahertz we're gonna pump it to 1.3 volts and we're gonna do an SSE voltage at 1.2 and just kind of see what happens well it's not a blue screen it's also not booting one thing to note is that this is like a 75 dollar motherboard if you had a 300 dollar motherboard you can probably push this further but I was not working that would be pretty stupid though yeah well we can try one point four volts and see what happens I mean the thing is guys with a cheap chip I'm not saying fifty dollars isn't a lot of money I'm saying that usually they're not going to die like immediately so by the time it actually dies in this time to replace it a fifty dollar CPU brand-new on the used and now out-of-date market probably not very much so I tend to be a little bit more comfortable pushing lower end hardware to its breaking point well the anti-malware stuff and things start up when you start the computer everything just chugs yep what he said the good news is that we're booted it okay it's not four gigahertz but it's 3.9 gigahertz and twenty four hundred megahertz Ram so let's see how much additional performance that ended up being worth I'm not gonna have task manager running in the background hey it uses like 1% CPU on something like mid-range to high-end sometimes and it's stable enough to run the benchmark but honestly speaking guys my expectations are pretty low right now we only managed an 11% overclock going from 3.5 to 3.9 gigahertz and the difference in performance that we're trying to make up is more like but 30% it's quite a bit more now the good news is that we're obviously heavily CPU bound our GPU will be able to suck up any extra performance it can get so you know who knows maybe it'll scale even better than linearly but I wouldn't expect that one 39.9 I was barely okay so yeah not a lot better it looks like in Rainbow six siege anyway the difference in performance might have really come about from the extra course in the first place I mean okay in fairness though you know 72 minimum 139 average like that is very playable and you could rock this for like two or three years and then once you've saved up or once they get cheap on the used market which I mentioned before you pick up one of these bippity Boppity off to the races so we do a sanity check run one more game yeah all right I was really help it overclocked a bit more than it has I mean I don't think another 100 megahertz was gonna make a difference I wonder if being able to get the RAM a bit higher would make a big difference possibly I don't think that's realistic for a budget system though you know and that's actually running reasonably smooth I'm definitely seeing some small stutter enos that would be explained by some relatively high frame times even though the average FPS is in the 30 to 40 range so far but this is what settings are we add so we're at 1080p and what's the score to beat 78 PS with a minimum of 60 we're not getting there yeah I know all right let's see how this goes and you can really see particularly in panning or moving shots that the motions not smooth like some of the frames are being delivered much faster than others and that can easily be caused by a CPU bottleneck 28 minimum 48 average yeah even overclocked it didn't hold up and up until this point we've ignored that the Verizon 530 600 can also be overclocked so the 3600 still looks like a terrific value because remember guys when you calculate the value of an individual component you don't just take it in isolation so you can't say this cost four times as much as 3000 G therefore it should perform four times better you've got to look at the price of the system so this system right now is 450 dollars if we spent another hundred and fifty on our CPU that would put it at $600 but that's only a 30% increase in our budget for what would be more than a 30% increase in performance that's why at the end of the day the lesson is and continues to be build yourself a balanced system because that is how you get the best bang for your buck I'm a little disappointed well do we want to try and push it further like we do have a chiller we do have really good motherboards but the problem is that what at best we're gonna get another 100 200 300 megahertz I think the ultimate lesson here is that unless you're on an extreme budget playing much older games or you just need basic office functionality the age of multi-core processors rather than dual-core processors is absolutely upon us yeah I mean we even went out of our way to make sure that there was no windows or steam update though you know nonsense running in the background and this was still the best we could do so I would spend the extra for the 3200 G if I was doing like an extreme budget station and then I would I would wait and do my graphics upgrade later or something like that or buy it used or I would just go for something like a 3600 in the first place speaking of things I would go for in the first place this segue to our sponsor the manscaped perfect package 2.0 kit includes their lawnmower 2.0 body trimmer it's waterproof TSA and travel friendly USB rechargeable and it's cordless it's got proprietary skin-safe technology so it won't Nick or snag your nuts and manscaping accidents can finally be a thing of the past they've also got the crop preserver an anti chafing ball deodorant and moisturiser and everything comes with a money-back guarantee so get 20% off and free shipping of manscaped with code tech at the link in the video description why wait if you guys enjoyed this video and you love budget gaming maybe check out the recent budget high refresh rate gaming monitor roundup that we did there's actually some real gems in there for not very much at all or even scrapyard Wars yeah we're scrapyard Wars that's all about budget gaming with used hardware mind you but I'm a huge advocate of that if you if you're on a budget used Hardware a lot of the time it's so cheap compared to new that even if like 20% of it died you're still out ahead

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,139,752

Keywords: fast, $50, cpu, amd, athlon, 3000g, gaming, performance, processor, computer

Id: JISJ_YTI9s0

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Deepfried_Lemon]

Top comment:

"Todays plan is to see just how badly it can shred its Intel equivalent."

*Runs a single Cinebench test, which the Intel wins, then never touches the Intel again leaving us with no idea "how badly it can shred its Intel equivalent," or even if it can "shred its Intel equivalent" at all.*

Fully agreed, not to mention no dual channel. This video is less than useless, it actually provides some misleading conclusions.

[u/GonzaSpectre]

He didn’t even use dual channel

[u/needcshelp1234]

The 1600 af is just 35 more and is comparable to a 2600. If you're gonna add a dgpu, it will make a huge difference

[u/[deleted]]

I bought a ryzen 1200 for 50$ like new idk still works like new

[u/Jylobo]

awful video he didn't even use dual channel sticks >:(

[u/rekker22]

The video was not satisfactory.