The Best Value CPU: Pentium Gold G5400 vs. Ryzen 3 2200G

[Kaj Hansen]

I'm still dead against the new use of "Pentium" name for lower performance parts and that makes me biased against them. I still recommend i3 as a minimum Intel CPU for friends looking for a general use laptop, with that said the i3s have become a lot better over the last few generations.

I would agree with you except the newest generation i5 mobile cpu's are such a huge step up, with double the cache, cores and threads compared to the i3 counterpart. And apparently not costing a whole lot more according to intels pricelist.. I would not advice anyone now to buy anything less then an i5 8xxx laptop, it really removes the bottleneck from laptop productivity in sub $800 dollar laptops.

Previously you'd have to buy an i7 QM to get this kinda performance.

https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/fil...Apr_03_18_Recommended_Customer_Price_List.pdf

 

[Evernessince]

Interesting how close the performance of the Xeon w3550 (used $10) is to the G5400. (https://technical.city/en/cpu/Xeon-W3550-vs-Pentium-Gold-G5400) Imagine buying a working Dell t3500 with a w3503 chip (about $50-$60) and then spending $10 more to get a W3550 or better.

Electricity cost might be an issue as w3550 is a 130w part.

Yeah, you can find some really slick server processor deals. The hard part can sometimes finding the motherboard if you don't already have the system in front of you.

 

[Evernessince]

Yet despite being '''Zen+' as you say it still performs worse than a Ryzen 3 clock for clock in gaming.

Meanwhile the REAL Zen+ chips aka 2600/2700 have a true and measurable IPC advantage over 1st gen Ryzen and can clock 200MHz higher on average.

At best the APUs can be considered a hybrid between 1st and 2nd gen Ryzen, so no they can't be considered true Zen+ chips.

dGPU performance is most definitely relevant, unless you are saying every 2200G owner is forever limited to the APU for gaming, which is ridiculous. The APU is suitable for older, less demanding titles, but throw any modern AAA title at it and you are forced to run at 720P, and often at low settings as well, in order to get playable framerates. It's completely reasonable to expect a 2200G owner to own a dGPU - either as an upgrade to the APU or as an upfront purchase along with the CPU. Not everyone wants to play at 720P you know...

That being said, the difference between a 8100 and 2200G in gaming would be slight with a GTX 1060 / RX 580 class card, as even at 1080P those cards would be the bottleneck the majority of the time. It's only when you move up to the GTX 1070 like Steve did in this review that you would see noticeable seperation between the two CPUs.

Any AAA modern title? Overwatch works very well on it. Fortnite as well as Rocket league. Rainbow Six Siege gets over 60 FPS at 1080p. I think you need to look over that 2200G review again. Those aren't even the overclocked numbers either. This APU can play modern games. Not at the highest settings but it's amazing enough that you can get that kind of performance for around $100.

"It's completely reasonable to expect a 2200G owner to own a dGPU - either as an upgrade to the APU or as an upfront purchase along with the CPU. Not everyone wants to play at 720P you know..."

It's actually fairly unreasonable to assume that. When you can buy a 2400G and get an even higher clocked CPU and GTX 1030-ish performance in games, you just saved yourself $40 and the system will consume less power. You can overclock that system for an additional 18% performance, putting it above the 1030.

The 2200G and 2400G are good because they provide great performance now and great performance if you want to upgrade to dGPU. You can't do that with the Intel system. You simply have to buy a dGPU right off the bat if you want to do any kind of serious gaming. For anyone buying processors in this price range, you simply aren't going to see the i3 8100's 3% IPC advantage that is evaporated when the 2200G is overclocked (which can be done on the stock cooler). If you had more money you'd be much better off going 2600 or i5 8400.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

Yeah, you can find some really slick server processor deals. The hard part can sometimes finding the motherboard if you don't already have the system in front of you.

The solution seems to be buying a working system with a bog standard bottom end CPU and upgrading within the same family (https://ark.intel.com/). In my case I needed to update BIOS which was accomplished with the OEM 2Ghz chip in place.

 

[CheekyP]

Any AAA modern title? Overwatch works very well on it. Fortnite as well as Rocket league. Rainbow Six Siege gets over 60 FPS at 1080p. I think you need to look over that 2200G review again. Those aren't even the overclocked numbers either. This APU can play modern games. Not at the highest settings but it's amazing enough that you can get that kind of performance for around $100.

"It's completely reasonable to expect a 2200G owner to own a dGPU - either as an upgrade to the APU or as an upfront purchase along with the CPU. Not everyone wants to play at 720P you know..."

It's actually fairly unreasonable to assume that. When you can buy a 2400G and get an even higher clocked CPU and GTX 1030-ish performance in games, you just saved yourself $40 and the system will consume less power. You can overclock that system for an additional 18% performance, putting it above the 1030.

The 2200G and 2400G are good because they provide great performance now and great performance if you want to upgrade to dGPU. You can't do that with the Intel system. You simply have to buy a dGPU right off the bat if you want to do any kind of serious gaming. For anyone buying processors in this price range, you simply aren't going to see the i3 8100's 3% IPC advantage that is evaporated when the 2200G is overclocked (which can be done on the stock cooler). If you had more money you'd be much better off going 2600 or i5 8400.

Try Far Cry 5 or Assasins Creed: Origins and see how the 2200G fares. You using low requirement E-Sports games like Overwatch and Rocket League doesn't really help your argument, and they aren't AAA titles either.

The APUs only make sense right now (from a purely gaming perspective) because of the inflated GPU prices. A 1050 is supposed to cost $100, instead it costs $150, which makes a difference for a budget build. Once GPUs return to MSRP (or even near it) it would make a lot more sense to allocate $100 of your budget towards a dGPU like a 1050 rather than rely on an APU - after all, a 1050 is 2 to 3 times more powerful than the 2200G APU and is much more suited for 1080P gaming. A Pentium system that is (using Steve's prices) about $70 cheaper than the 2200G system would only end up $30 more if the 1050 sold for MSRP and would provide over twice the gaming performance.

You can disagree, but I think it's completely reasonable to expect a 2200G gamer to own a dGPU at some stage. I know some people bought the 2200G and are using the APU to tide them over until the inflated GPUs prices drop - this is a completely reasonable thing to do. The 2200G would cope well up to a 1060 / RX 580 as I said previously, anything faster and you would want a better CPU.

I'm interested to see where you got the 3% IPC advantage figure from? From what I've seen, the difference is a lot more than that.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Ryzen_3_2200G_Vega_8/19.html

The i3 8100 would slot in between the i5 7400 (3.5GHz turbo) and 7500 (3.8GHz turbo) in those charts, and even the overclocked 2200G still trails behind it, and the stock 2200G is obviously further off the pace.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Try Far Cry 5 or Assasins Creed: Origins and see how the 2200G fares. You using low requirement E-Sports games like Overwatch and Rocket League doesn't really help your argument, and they aren't AAA titles either.

Why would anyone put their stock Grand Prix in a NASCAR race just to see how badly it fails? They can do that in a less demanding competitions.

 

[Evernessince]

Try Far Cry 5 or Assasins Creed: Origins and see how the 2200G fares. You using low requirement E-Sports games like Overwatch and Rocket League doesn't really help your argument, and they aren't AAA titles either.

The APUs only make sense right now (from a purely gaming perspective) because of the inflated GPU prices. A 1050 is supposed to cost $100, instead it costs $150, which makes a difference for a budget build. Once GPUs return to MSRP (or even near it) it would make a lot more sense to allocate $100 of your budget towards a dGPU like a 1050 rather than rely on an APU - after all, a 1050 is 2 to 3 times more powerful than the 2200G APU and is much more suited for 1080P gaming. A Pentium system that is (using Steve's prices) about $70 cheaper than the 2200G system would only end up $30 more if the 1050 sold for MSRP and would provide over twice the gaming performance.

You can disagree, but I think it's completely reasonable to expect a 2200G gamer to own a dGPU at some stage. I know some people bought the 2200G and are using the APU to tide them over until the inflated GPUs prices drop - this is a completely reasonable thing to do. The 2200G would cope well up to a 1060 / RX 580 as I said previously, anything faster and you would want a better CPU.

I'm interested to see where you got the 3% IPC advantage figure from? From what I've seen, the difference is a lot more than that.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Ryzen_3_2200G_Vega_8/19.html

The i3 8100 would slot in between the i5 7400 (3.5GHz turbo) and 7500 (3.8GHz turbo) in those charts, and even the overclocked 2200G still trails behind it, and the stock 2200G is obviously further off the pace.

I think Cliff had the best analogy. Assasin's Creed and Far Cry 5 and both poorly optimized games.

I never said upgrading your system with a dGPU when you have an APU wasn't fine. I merely pointed out that buying an APU with a dGPU right off the bat is counter intuitive. There are other CPUs better suited for such a scenario.

"I'm interested to see where you got the 3% IPC advantage figure from? From what I've seen, the difference is a lot more than that.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Ryzen_3_2200G_Vega_8/19.html"

?? The i3 8100 isn't even on this list. No idea what I should be looking at here.

 

[CheekyP]

?? The i3 8100 isn't even on this list. No idea what I should be looking at here.

As I said, it would slot in between the i5 7400 (3.5GHz max turbo) and i5 7500 (3.8GHz max turbo). The 8100 runs at 3.6GHz fixed, no turbo. They are all 4C/4T CPUs, and CFL provides no IPC increase over Kaby Lake.

Again, I ask, where did you get the 3% IPC difference from?

 

[ET3D]

Just because the 2200G isn't on the 12nm doesn't mean it isn't Ryzen+

Looking at the differences in functionality between Pinnacle Ridge and Raven Ridge in Ryzen Master 1.3 (see page 3 of the docs), it seems to me like Raven Ridge is a half gen between Summit and Pinnacle.

Yet despite being '''Zen+' as you say it still performs worse than a Ryzen 3 clock for clock in gaming.

It has a much smaller L3 cache, which likely accounts for the performance deficit.

 

[Tinianxxx]

I3 8100 would have been a good chip to test also.

Where I am the i3-8100 and the 2200g are about $12 apart so that would have been a more honest comparison

 

[Sausagemeat]

This is complete misinformation. Checking PCPartPicker, which tracks pricing in both US and UK online retailers, the Ryzen 2200G is less expensive in both countries. In the US, the 2200G is around $100, while the i3-8100 is around $119. In the UK, the 8100 similarly costs £10-20 more at every retailer listed. The 2200G should be around £90 shipped, not £110. You repeat numerous times throughout your post that the i3 is cheaper, when that's clearly not the case.

And if you reread the introductory paragraphs, you'll see that the point was to compare what they deemed to be the "best value" budget processor from each company's lineup. They're looking to help answer the question of whether it's worth the price difference to move up to the Ryzen 2200G over a Pentium. Sure, they could extend that a bit further to also compare the even higher-priced i3-8100, but they had to draw the line somewhere.

You are incorrect. Right now and since I posted my original comment the price of the 2200G has been cut, mostly on "offers". However both the 2200G and the i3 cost around £140 for a CPU + MOBO. If you dont use the integrated graphics on the APU (And I pity anyone trying to game on these AMD APU's) then the i3 is better value as its faster across the board, offers more PCIE and uses less power. Its interesting though because this article doesnt factor in RAM costs and you arent really going to want to add cheap RAM to an APU.

So the conclusion of the article is that the 2200G is better value than the pentium. But the i3 is better value than the 2200G. Why that fact has been omitted I do not know. Either way I would definitely pick the faster i3 up over the 2200G, even at the same price. That would be good consumer advice!

 

[Digitalzone]

Buying entry-level everything sucks. Buying 2core CPU in 2018 will make you regret very soon. Upgrading CPU is never worth it, older CPU at Intel still cost MRSP.
So, go for anything with at least 4 cores. With 2200G you can wait and buy better GPUs from next gen. With Pentium and entry-level GPU of this gen, it will suck not later than in two years.
The only exception for going into Pentium is office work.