AMD Athlon 200GE: Benchmarking The $60 Zen+Vega Chip

Lastly for this initial roundabout of Athlon 200GE benchmarking is a look at the CPU core temperature and AC system power consumption under a variety of workloads.

This is the CPU temperature on a per-second basis over the course of about three hours of load testing. The average temperature under a variety of workloads was about 41 Celsius when using the stock heatsink. The peak temperature even under multi-core workloads on this stock heatsink was a modest 49.5C while being housed within an enclosed 2U chassis. Overall, the temperature is very reasonable and could potentially be paired with some high-end passive heatsinks even with this CPU having just a 35 Watt TDP.

Here is a look at the AC system power consumption over the same tests as recorded by the Phoronix Test Suite automatically interfacing with a WattsUp Pro. This Athlon 200GE + 8GB RAM + SATA 3.0 SSD + Vega 3 + A320M-S2H motherboard had an average AC power draw of just 44 Watts and a peak of 60 Watts.

The CPU idle temperature was about 31 Celsius and the idle power draw of the system was at 33 Watts. Those interested in more thermal/power data on a per-test basis can dig into all of the benchmark details and complementary graphics via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

Overall, the AMD Athlon 200GE is quite a competent processor/APU at the price of $60 USD. This dual-core+SMT 35 Watt Zen processor tended to outperform the Skylake-era Pentium G4400 and compared to older CPUs was often between the speed of Core i5 2500K and Core i5 3470 parts. At just $60 the performance-per-dollar was often the best of the modern CPUs I had available for testing. The Vega 3 graphics are good enough easily for a modern Linux desktop and can also handle lightweight games with ease but obviously not any serious Steam gaming. The thermal and power characteristics of this low-cost Zen+Vega chip also make it ideal for interesting Linux scenarios from networking/router type systems to retro gaming boxes in the living room.

Thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite it's very easy to see how your own Linux system(s) would compare performance-wise to the Athlon 200GE. For the CPU/system benchmarks simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1810043-RA-LOWENDSYS65 or if interested in the onboard graphics benchmarks simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1810059-RA-GRAPHICSL41 for your own side-by-side, fully-automated benchmark comparison against the results found within this article.

Unfortunately as of writing the availability of the Athlon 200GE still appears tight at least among US Internet-based retailers but can be set for auto-notify on stock via NewEgg.