AMD Athlon 200GE vs 220GE vs 240GE: Which should you buy?

Best reply: Since all three are essentially the same hardware simply with different clock speeds, get the cheapest of the bunch, the 200GE. Most motherboards now permit you to overclock it upwardly to iii.9GHz without whatsoever trouble.

Little creature: AMD Athlon 200GE ($57 at Amazon)

The three variants of the Athlon 200 serial APU are essentially the exact same chips but with different clock speeds. When they launched, if you wanted the most performance you lot'd buy the higher clocked 240GE, just things have changed.

Fifty-fifty though officially AMD notwithstanding doesn't support overclocking on the Athlon 200GE, the motherboard manufacturers have been pushing out BIOS updates in recent months that unlocked the feature. What this means is that in most cases, you can overclock the Athlon 200GE with a couple of clicks up to iii.9GHz without any need to touch on voltages or your cooling.

No two chips are truly identical. For case, our ain only overclocked to 3.8GHz, but that'southward still a 600MHz increase on the stock clock speed without whatsoever effort at all. It's basically costless performance. Temperatures will increase a footling, only the stock cooler is still plenty to keep the lilliputian 200GE cool under this increased pressure.

The price difference between the three Athlons isn't massive — the 220GE costs around $lxx and the 240GE costs a petty less than that — only a saving is a saving. And when y'all consider the Athlon 240GE is only clocked at 3.5GHz anyway, ownership the cheapest and overclocking makes even more sense.

Gaming on the Athlon 200GE

The lilliputian two core, four thread Athlon 200GE as well has very adept integrated graphics, especially for something this affordable. This APU is a perfect choice for a really low budget build thanks to its operation at such a depression price.

It's non something y'all'll buy specifically to build a gaming PC with, certainly not without a defended graphics card paired with it, but it tin can get some gaming done, and surprisingly well. Tomb Raider at 720p on low settings tin can play at an higher up 60 frames per 2nd (FPS) average.

The Vega 3 GPU cores aren't overclockable, and boosting the CPU cores to iii.9GHz only adds a few actress frames per second, but the results from something that costs less than $60 are remarkable.