Flexibility
All three chips can form a solid
foundation for an upgradable custom
system, and all are relatively new (the
oldest, the Core i9-9100, is less than a
year old). Longevity is to be expected
from CPUs in this day and age, and
each chip here presents that. Quad-
core (or quad-thread, in the case of
the 3000G) is enough to handle any
ordinary work on a regular basis, and
there’s the potential to upgrade to a
discrete GPU for more graphical oomf.
But which of these chips best supports
future upgrades and expansions?
The i3-9100 might not be the obvious
answer; it has the slowest memory
support, and its higher price makes it
look more like a budget upgrade piece
than an upgradable baseline. But it
has more cache memory, a higher
boost clock, and most importantly, it
has more available PCI Express lanes,
thanks to Intel graphics connecting
differently. This leaves more support
for upgrades; expansion cards, SSDs,
whatever else you might want to add
to a evolving build. There are a lot of
factors at play here. If the AMD chips
had support for PCIe 4.0—currently an
AMD-exclusive feature of Zen 2—we
might have changed our minds, but as
it stands, we’re giving the win to Intel.Winner: Core i3-9100Overclocking
AMD’s been having a hard time with
overclocking. The Zen 2 Ryzen CPUs
(3600 and up) have had serious issues
with overclocking headroom, rarely
able to hit their advertised boost clocks
across multiple cores. The 3200G uses
the 12nm Zen+ architecture, which is a
bit more stable, but still isn’t able to hit
any particularly dizzying heights. The
Athlon 3000G comes unlocked, using
the even older 14nm Zen architecture,
and is capable of boosting its 3.5GHz
base clock up to 3.9GHz. That might
not sound like much, but it’s the same
increase as the 3200G’s theoretical
base to boost clock.
Intel has the edge here, though, with
the reliable Coffee Lake architecture
capable of handling an overclock of
up to 600MHz more than its base
clock of 3.6GHz. It can do this easily
in single cores, or a little less reliably
across all cores. It still comfortably
outperforms the other two in manual
overclocking. With auto overclocking,
the waters are muddied. AMD’s Ryzen
Master software gives the 3200G a
slight edge, and does tend to improve
performance by a reasonable amount.
Overall, though, we’d have to give it to
the Intel chip; the potential headroom
for overclocking is simply greater.
Winner: Core i3-9100We’re calling this one a tie. That’s
between AMD’s Athlon 3000G and the
Intel Core i3-9100; the Ryzen 3 3200G
is a good low-end gaming APU, but
it lacks the raw CPU performance
of the i3-9100 or the exceptionally
modest pricing of the 3000G. Just so
we’re clear, the i3-9100 is the better
processor, but it sits almost in a
different bracket to the Athlon 3000G.
We included an Intel chip for variety,
but it overpowers both of these AMD
APUs; a more realistic comparison
would be the excellent Ryzen 5 3400G.
The Athlon 3000G sits at the ultra-
budget end, and we love it for that.
It’s almost hilariously affordable,
and we can’t wait to build with it.
The low price makes it a great chip
for budget systems, and we might
even go so far as to recommend it
for more esoteric purposes, such as
CPU-bound cryptocurrency mining.
It’s worth noting that while the 3200G
is the loser here, it’s not a bad chip.
All three of these are worthy APUs
in their own rights; the real deciding
factor for any prospective buyer
should actually just be the price.And the
Winner Is...
ROUND 4 ROUND 5
From lef t to right:The 3200G is
currently the
cheapest third-
gen Ryzen chip.Intel’s Core
i3-9100 is a more
expensive but
speedier APU.This is AMD’s
newest, shiniest
Athlon chip yet.maximumpc.com JAN 2020 MAXIMUMPC 21