You should probably click away from this video.

(clicks)

- Six grand?

- Linus recently made a video on this.

The AMD Athlon™ 3000G.

It's a very impressive budget processor,

however he tested it in single channel memory mode.

(audience boos)

Which with Ryzen, has a huge, huge impact to performance.

Now of course the comments pointed this out

and I and my superior intellect

would never, ever make a mistake like that.

I mean, clearly, I know what I'm

talking about when it comes to Ryzen.

I would never accidentally run something

in single channel memory when it was supposed

to be in dual or vice versa, which clearly

I know what I'm talking about.

For real though, this is actually

a very interesting processor.

At $50, you're getting a pair of Zen cores

as well as okay integrated graphics

and it's even overclockable.

Which of course begs the question,

that exactly no one has asked for.

Exactly how far can we push it?

Now of course there's the simple method,

we could add dual channel memory,

we could start to overclock it a little bit.

But I have something a little bit more nefarious in mind.

What happens when you pair a $50 CPU

with a $1,200 graphics card?

See I told you this video was gonna be dumb!

You didn't listen to me, did you?

Now you're here, you're committed.

The watch-time is through the roof, because you're stuck

and you can't stop watching the video now.

Now obviously, no one should ever do this.

It's a terrible idea to bottlebeck a system this hard.

But with this, we could very easily go,

from this $50, little tiny Athlon CPU,

to a full 16 core, Ryzen 9

and it would just be a drop-in upgrade.

So well yes, I could and probably should use a better cooler

than the stock one that it comes with.

Realistically, even with trying to overclock this,

we're not gonna be able to get

that much more performance out of it.

And where realistically, where I think

we can get more performance, is areas such as the memory.

So we had some slight issues, in that our X570 motherboard

didn't actually support our very low-end

Athlon 3000G processor which technically it should have.

But I guess no one's ever thought

to do that because that's really dumb.

So instead, we're using the good old A320M Gigabyte board

which is a grand total of like 50 bucks.

With this and a fresh BIOS, we're all setup.

I've got 16 gigs of RAM

just running at 2133 right now, so just very stock.

Let's see what this Athlon can do,

before we throw some of the crazy stuff at it.

Okay, so we have 1,312 as our baseline

benchmark inside Fire Strike.

Now let's jump into CS:GO and see if it'll actually work.

So the thing is, CS:GO is obviously

a fairly old game that's pretty easy to run.

So if I was going to just purely use the Athlon,

that actually would be a good game to try.

But we have a couple other titles that we can also

I'll say stress test with because it's not really fair.

I don't think GTA 5 will run

on this thing at all, actually.

All right, so inside CS:GO, 1080p high,

should be pretty standard settings.

I'm hopeful this is playable.

I seem to recall with some of the earlier Athlons

and low-end Ryzen stuff it's not that bad.

This is fine.

Oh, well that's a big stutter.

We're looking at 30 to 40fps.

Now, is this a (oof) shotgun.

Did I just accidentally buy a shotgun?

I did, didn't I?

Okay, well (clears throat) all right.

I'm willing to say that is a almost playable

40 frames per second on high 1080p.

Shall we, actually throw a graphics card

in this and see what happens.

Okay, so with our 2080 Ti installed,

we should have significantly better performance.

Now by significantly better, it means certainly

not going to be as good as if we had say,

I don't know, a not $50 CPU.

But, I have

high hopes.

We'll say high hopes for this.

Right.

So we have our driver installed

and if we pull it up here you'll see that

now do we have our Athlon 3000G running

at a whopping 3.5 gigahertz that is paired

with 16 gigs of RAM which for some

reason is not showing here.

But importantly, we have our RTX 2080 Ti.

So, let's see exactly how well it can benchmark,

how it can handle 3DMark Fire Strike.

Can I just take a moment and point out

that we're using a $50 CPU, very slow DDR4 memory,

stock speeds and a $50 motherboard

with a $1,200 graphics card?

Whoo, 19, 18!

That's where the CPU comes in.

So while the other tests were graphics, this is purely CPU.

As you can see, we're still complete garbage here.

But once you actually average it all

out together this actually should be okay.

So for reference, our score with

the Athlon by itself was 1,312.

We're up to almost 12,000.

So if you have a $50 CPU

and you want to get 10 times the performance in 3DMark,

spend 24 times that price on a graphics card

and you'll be just fine.

Why don't we try playing some actual game this time?

I'm actually kind of curious

to see what we get with CS:GO

because traditionally, while it's not hard

to get a decent frame rate, to get higher fps

you really do need a very powerful CPU.

But because we have great graphics here,

I'm just going to crank everything

all the way up because why not?

Excuse me, am I at 1440p at 100 frames per second right now?

I mean, yeah, 100 frames per second

is not great with a 2080 Ti.

But I mean, it's not bad.

It's still running pretty smoothly.

I will say, while I have very low expectations for this,

you wouldn't really be able to tell that this is a $50 CPU.

I mean 100 frames per second at 1440p?

Sure, the 2080 Ti can go a lot harder,

you could get a lot more performance.

But I expected this to be a pretty severe bottleneck.

So for games, a little bit more demanding, we have GTA 5

which is running at 1440p with most settings set to high.

Is that 60 frames per second?

What?

Wait.

Wait.

That's pretty much 60 frames per second.

With a $50 CPU, we haven't even overclocked it,

we haven't even like started running the RAM

at like more than the base speed.

And while, yes, a 2080 Ti I should be capable

of more than 50, 60fps at 1440p, but that is very playable.

That is very, very playable.

I am legitimately impressed.

So next up we have F1® 2019.

Now I'm going to try to push this as far as I can.

So 2080 Ti's running at 1440p,

all settings are pretty much set to ultra high.

So let's give the benchmark mode a try.

60fps again, are you serious?

(laughs)

What is going on?

Why is this not bad?

Okay.

When we go outside, we're down to like 50.

My mind is kind of blown right now

that a $50 CPU is not terrible.

I mean it's not great.

Certainly not great.

But 60fps is still not bad

considering that we have everything set to ultra high.

So, I think what we're finding out here

is that a $50 CPU, while not great especially

when you're running it in single channel

memory and the integrated graphics,

this actually wouldn't be so bad.

Especially considering that most AM4 motherboards

are very easy to upgrade.

So you could start out with the Athlon,

and as you get a little bit more money,

you want a little bit more performance, you could upgrade

to say like Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 or something.

So I think the only thing we can do now

is to overclock, because why not?

Let's see what we can actually pull out of this.

Because it's running at stock speeds

and the memory is actually quite slow.

Oh!

Nooooo!

No!

I'm stupid!

No!

I forgot when I started making this video

I was using the X570.

It's a very high-end board.

I can throw high-end memory and overclock.

But I'm using a low-end board

and I forgot I switched it out.

Another day, another motherboard.

And let's see how far we can push the 3000G.

So I was able to push it to 4 gigahertz

on all, well about to say all cores,

It's on both cores.

And I was also able to bump the memory up

to 2666 megahertz which is the rated maximum

and that was as high as I can get it

stable without losing my overclock.

So let's run through Fire Strike again

and see if this is better or not.

So overclock actually isn't too crazy.

So we're somewhere in the neighborhood like 15% higher

on the CPU and another 10, 15% on the memory.

So especially considering

that a lot of this test is graphics-bound,

I don't expect it to be a huge difference.

This is really the only place

where we're going to see any kind of significant difference.

And that's a bit better.

I think before we were actually

at 17, 18fps, now we're like 21.

So the number to beat is 11,963, and we've got

13,300?

Are you serious?

That's actually a pretty reasonable upgrade.

So for context, CS:GO before we are high 1440p

and we were getting roughly 90fps.

So let's see if we can average that out a little bit more.

We're getting a real performance improvement here.

Instead of sitting at like 90 to 100fps,

we're like 100 to 120.

Which makes sense because this game is very much CPU-bound

when you get to those higher frame rates.

So we went from 61 to 70fps in F1®

just by overclocking the CPU and speeding up the memory.

I am legitimately impressed.

And again in GTA5 we're getting a solid

10fps boost just by overclocking.

Now, the cool thing about the CPU

is that, while yes for $50, it is not incredibly powerful,

but it is a really easy upgrade platform.

So if you want to build yourself your first gaming PC,

and you start out with the Athlon,

you can build something for very cheap

and then as you get a little bit more money,

you can add yourself a graphics card,

maybe not quite the 2080 Ti.

And then once you sort of hit the upper limits of that,

you can easily swap it out with something

like Ryzen 3 or Ryzen 5 or theoretically

all the way up to Ryzen 9.

Now yes, there are certainly cases where you might

want to spend a little bit more money.