Ryzen 3 2200G was the first entry-level APU from AMD after a long time since the release of the Fm2 APUs and proved to be superior to any other entry-level APU available in the market. This gave a beautiful option to the budget gamers to build a gaming PC. AMD RYZEN 3 2200G Quad-Core 3.5 GHz Socket AM4 65W Desktop Processor YD2200C5FBBOX General Information. The Unlocked, Quad-Core Processor with Best-in-Class eSports Gaming. 4 'Zen' Cores, with powerful Radeon Vega 8 Graphics onboard. Advanced, High-Performance Processing.
Let’s just lay our cards down at once. AMD’s Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G APUs are everything budget gamers have been praying for: surprisingly decent gaming performance at a shockingly low price.
In years past, such a statement would be met by skepticism and dismissive “whatever” animated GIFs. But AMD actually over-delivered on its Ryzen CPUs last year, so talks of combining those same Zen cores with the latest and greatest Radeon Vega graphics cores has cash-strapped gamers in a tizzy of excitement.
And it turns out the excitement is warranted. Compared to a similarly equipped Intel-based system running a Core i3, the lower-end Ryzen 3 2200G is 142 percent faster in 3DMark Firestrike, 154 percent faster in 3DMark Time Spy, and 203 percent faster in Rainbow Six Siege. Those are just a few of the highlights from our game performance testing, which you can see if you jump to our gaming tests.
In practical terms, AMD's new budget wonder chips should be able to produce a reasonable 60 fps at 720p in many games, and some will be playable at 1080p, too. So if you've been avoiding building a gaming PC because of sky-high GPU prices, these new AMD APUs provide some intriguing options—at least on the budget end.
Now we'll dig into the Ryzen APU specs and architecture before we return to our performance results.
Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G specs
There are two Ryzen APU parts being released Monday. The Ryzen 3 2200G ($99 on Amazon) features four Zen cores without symmetrical multi-threading (SMT), which is AMD’s version of Intel’s Hyper-Threading. The cores have a base clock of 3.5GHz with a boost clock of 3.7GHz.
For graphics, it features eight Vega compute units (CUs) inside. Yup, the same Vega cores used in the company’s impossible-to-obtain Radeon Vega cards (reviewed here).
Mentioned in this article
One step up is the Ryzen 5 2400G ($169 on Amazon). It still nets you a quad-core chip, but with SMT switched on for a total of eight threads of computing power. AMD also increases the base clock to 3.6GHz and the boost clock to 3.9GHz. For graphics, you get about a third more CUs, with 11 Vega units inside.
Both are AM4-based and should work in most AM4 socket motherboards that have display outputs and the latest BIOS available. Unlike Intel, which locks its lower-end chips, AMD has left them unlocked for those who want to explore overclocking.
Ryzen APU vs. Ryzen CPU
Although the actual Zen cores are the same, the Ryzen APUs differ from Ryzen CPUs in a couple of key ways. In the chart above, three things should jump out: less cache, half the GPU PCI lanes, and the use of a single, unified CCX in the APU, rather than the dual-CCX design in the current CPU.
All Ryzens are modular and built around the basic four-core CCX unit. An eight-core Ryzen 7, for example, features two CCX units. On the six-core Ryzen 5 CPU, AMD disables a core on each CCX and links them together. On the four-core Ryzen 5 CPU, two cores are disabled on each CCX.
This CCX link has a real cost in latency (which tech website PCper.com thoroughly explores here.) With its new APU, AMD said it needed to save space and make thermal room for the overhead of the Vega cores, so it went with a single four-core CCX. This eliminates the latency issue, but also lowers total cache, as each of those CCX units has a dedicated cache.
AMD said the practical impact in its own testing was minimal: Some games pick up a little gain from lowering the latency, while others benefit slightly from the increased cache size. To help make up for the cache decrease, AMD said, it buffs the clock speeds a bit.
AMD didn’t get into why it cut the PCIe lanes, but we’d guess it’s due to the mobile roots of the APU. These APUs were designed to scale up from laptops to desktops and you just don’t need all of those lanes in laptops. Many tests over the years have shown PCIe lanes typically don’t impact GPU performance.
AMD penny-pinches on the paste
One last divergence between the CPUs and the APUs is a shift from a metallic solder thermal interface material (TIM) used in Ryzen CPUs to a paste-type material in the Ryzen APUs. AMD admits it did it to save bucks.
When the internet learned Intel used a paste TIM in its Skylake-X chips, nerds went apoplectic at the thought of lowly paste in a performance CPU. With the Ryzen APUs, I anticipate less rage. Even though the move to paste will lower the APU’s overclocking potential, these are budget parts, not $2,000 CPUs.
How we tested
For our performance test, we built on an AMD-supplied MSI B350 Pro AC motherboard and 16GB of G.Skill Flare DDR4/3200 RAM, approved and supplied by AMD. For storage we opted to use a 240GB Kingston HyperX Savage SATA SSD rather than an M.2 NVMe device, which would add to the cost and likely isn’t the first choice of someone buying a $99 APU. All testing used the bundled AMD cooler.
For performance context, we decided to use an Intel Core i3-7100 chip. It’s a dual-core 7th-generation Kaby Lake CPU with Hyper-Threading, and costs $115 on Amazon. It doesn’t have TurboBoost, but its base clock is a hefty and constant 3.9GHz. For graphics, it features Intel HD 630, which is used on everything from Core i7 to Core i3. We sourced this CPU from Amazon and used the stock cooler for our tests, along with a Gigabyte GA-H270M-DS3H MicroATX board.
If you’re thinking we intentionally tried to make Intel look bad by not using the similiarly priced 8th gen Core i3-8100, we can explain our real reason in two words: motherboard costs.
With Kaby Lake, you can get an LGA1151 board for as cheap as $50 using H-series chipsets. So far, Intel has not released a budget chipset for its 8th-gen CPUs, which means the cheapest Z370-board we could find was $120.
The graphics comparison should mostly be the same, as Intel’s UHD 630 is essentially the same as its HD 630. While the Core i3-8100 is a quad-core, its lack of Hyper-Threading and overall lower clock speed (there’s no Turbo Boost) would probably put the two a lot closer in performance than you’d expect.
Why we tested at DDR/2400
One last thing we want to note: We used 16GB of DDR4 on both platforms, both rated for DDR4/3200. However, the Core i3 would not run higher than DDR/2400 on our H-series board. That led us to ponder whether it was fair to test the AMD using higher-clocked RAM than the Intel board.
Mentioned in this article
Ultimately we did test the AMD APUs at the higher speed as well as DDR/2400, but for our CPU section, we decided to present results at DDR4/2400 clock speeds. In our gaming section, because memory clock speeds are critical, we show multiple speeds. Because Ryzen does benefit from higher clock speeds, you can basically add about 5 to 6 percent to the performance of both APUs at higher clock speeds.
Lastly, while we had no issues running the Ryzen 3 2200G at DDR4/3200, the Ryzen 5 2400G was finicky with reboots occurring when using the preset XMP 3200 profiles. We suspect this is mostly a tuning issue that will eventually be worked out.
Meltdown and Spectre performance
All our tests were completed with fresh installs of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update with the latest patches installed. And yes, that means we ran our tests with patches for the Meltdown and Spectre exploits in place. On the AMD platform, that means just OS updates. On the Intel platform, that meant a microcode update as well. Although some vendors have yanked their Spectre microcode fixes, Gigabyte still offered it for the motherboard we used, so we installed it and verified it with GRC’s InSpectre.
3D rendering performance
Our first test is the venerable Cinebench R15.038 test. Based on Maxon’s professional rendering engine, it’s pretty much a pure CPU test and scales well with thread and core count.
The result is no surprise: The quad-core $99 Ryzen 3 2200G easily outstrips the $116 Core i3 by 42 percent. Going from the Ryzen 3 2200G to the Ryzen 5 2400G, we see about a 35-percent bump by adding SMT support.
Not everything is multi-threaded, though, so we also run Cinebench R15 using a single compute thread. Here’s one test where the Core i3 ekes out a win.
Should you be surprised? Not really. Intel’s advantage in IPC (instructions per clock) efficiency is real. When combined with its full-time 3.9GHz clock speed, it’s a fantastic chip for single-threaded tasks. In fact, for uses outside of gaming, it’s a fine CPU.
Encoding performance
Our next test uses the free and popular HandBrake encoder to convert a 1080p high-bit-rate file using the Android Tablet preset. HandBrake, like most video editing and encoding applications, loves CPU threads, and the Ryzen APUs walk away from the dual-core Core i3. We suspect the Core i3-8100 would be very competitive here with the Ryzen 3 2200G, but again—it’s another $70 out of your pocket to run that Coffee Lake CPU.
Compression performance
Our next test uses the free 7-Zip utility and its built-in performance benchmark. The test is a CPU test and doesn’t look at the disk I/O as a factor. AMD again leads the way, with the dual-core Core i3 landing where we expect.
Ryzen APU gaming performance
Now we know AMD gives you more cores or more threads than Intel for the money, but Intel’s cores are also generally better. Let’s see how that plays out in games.
3DMark Sky Diver is fairly lightweight—basically like playing a typical eSports game—and therefore a useful tool for measuring, say, integrated graphics. Rather than use the overall score, which factors in CPU performance, we’re drilling down into the graphics subscore. The score you see for the HD 630 should be familiar, as it’s what most IGP-based Intel laptops have coughed up for the last year or two. With the Ryzen 3 2200G and its Vega 8, you’re looking at more than a 133 percent increase in performance compared to Intel’s Core i3. The Ryzen 5 2400G takes that to 178 percent. Let’s say that again, but slowly: 133 percent and 178 percent.
The thing is, on desktop chips, it really doesn’t get any better for Intel. Its Iris Plus lineup of graphics with EDRAM isn’t available in a socket. And mind you, this isn’t even accounting for the speed advantage of using higher-clocked RAM in Ryzen.
Ryzen APU performance in 3DMark FireStrike
Let’s step up to something a little harder: 3DMark Fire Strike. It’s obvious Intel’s HD 630 isn’t up to the task, so we pulled numbers from a Ryzen 5 1600 system with a Radeon RX 550 2GB card in it. This Polaris-based GPU can be found everywhere from $110 to $150. The tests we selected are mostly GPU bound, so the obvious increase in core count on the Ryzen 5 1600 should have minimal impact.
I’m also going to rope in performance results for the Ryzen APUs with faster RAM. As a reminder, I used DDR4/2933 scores for our Ryzen 5 2400G, because it wasn’t quite stable at DDR4/3200 with the G.Skill modules AMD provided.
The results speak for themselves. The Radeon RX 550 clearly has a lead, but those APUs come close. It’s really hard to justify a $110 to $150 premium for that difference. Putting that money into a larger SSD or more RAM—or socking it away until you have enough for an RX 570—makes a lot more sense.
Ryzen APU performance in 3DMark Time Spy
Our last 3DMark test for now is Time Spy. It’s a test built completely to test DirectX 12 gaming performance. Interestingly, the lead the Radeon RX 550 had in the DX11 Fire Strike test evaporates, and surprise, the Ryzen 5 2400G is equal to it when running higher-clocked memory.
The Ryzen 3 2200G also represents well and for the money, it’s cooking along nicely—especially when compared to Intel HD 630 graphics.
Sometimes the best products aren't the most cutting-edge parts, or even the fastest parts. The best computer processor for example is the one that fits your needs, at a price you can afford. AMD has frequently been the darling of budget PC builders, and while it often requires sacrificing some performance, for the price it's tough to complain. Last year's Ryzen 3 1200 and 1300X were reasonably priced, and ultimately forced Intel to come out with the Core i3-8100—a major upgrade in CPU performance relative to the previous generation i3-7100. The one potential drawback with the Ryzen 3 CPUs was that they required a dedicated graphics card. AMD finally addresses that shortcoming with its Ryzen 3 2200G APU, and it even comes in at a slightly lower price than the outgoing parts.
Test System Hardware
AMD AM4 APU Testbed
MSI B350I Pro AC
16GB G.Skill Flare X DDR4-3200 CL14
16GB G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-2400 CL15
Samsung 960 Evo 500GB
Enermax Steelwing
Enermax Revolution SFX 650W
AMD AM4 CPU Testbed
Gigabyte Aorus X370 Gaming 5
16GB GeIL Evo X DDR4-3200 CL16
Samsung 960 Evo 500GB
Enermax Ostrog Lite
Enermax Platimax 750W
Enermax LiqMax II 240
Intel LGA1151 Testbeds
Gigabyte Aorus Z370 Gaming 7
MSI Z270 Gaming M7
16GB G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 CL14
Samsung 960 Evo 500GB
Corsair Carbide Air 740
Corsair HX750i 750W
Corsair H115i
I reviewed the Ryzen 5 2400G earlier this week, and I included results for the Ryzen 3 2200G as well. My biggest complaint with the 2400G is that it ends up being priced a bit too high to really hit the sweet spot I was hoping for. It's a bit slower on the CPU side than a Core i3-8100, and the graphics are a bit slower than a GT 1030 (give or take depending on the game). Combined with the need for higher performance DDR4 memory to reach its full potential, I don't think it's the budget APU most users will want. The Ryzen 3 2200G has no such problems, however, with a price of only $100 and performance that's more than acceptable for light gaming and other workloads.
I covered the main design aspects of the Ryzen APUs in the 2400G article, so I'm mostly going to focus on the performance and value proposition of the 2200G here. The stock specs include a 3.5 to 3.7GHz 4-core/4-thread CPU (losing the SMT functionality), 4MB of L3 cache, and integrated Vega 8 graphics—that's eight CUs, or 512 streaming processors. It ends up a bit slower than the 2400G across nearly all tests, but then it also costs about a third less. That's a great tradeoff for an extreme budget build.
As with the other Ryzen processors, the Ryzen 3 2200G comes fully unlocked, for both the CPU and GPU. I haven't had a chance to fully push the GPU yet, but initial results suggest that with faster RAM and a 20-25 percent overclock, it can basically match the stock performance of the 2400G's Vega 11 solution. On the CPU, I hit a stable 3.9GHz, which is also the same limit I hit with the 2400G—going any further would require a better cooler than the stock AMD Spire, and that's not something I'd recommend putting money into for a budget PC.
The other CPUs were tested with the hardware shown in the box on the right. Everything used DDR4-3200 CL14 memory, though I did test the 2400G with a more affordable DDR4-2400 CL15 kit to see how that impacts performance. While it doesn't change the CPU performance much, it causes about a 15-20 percent drop in gaming performance, and that should also be true of the 2200G when paired with budget RAM. You'll definitely want to spend a bit more to get faster DDR4 if possible (eg, this kit of Patriot CL16 DDR4-3200 only costs $10 more than the DDR4-2400 kit I used for testing). Of course, given current RAM prices, 16GB is almost certainly overkill—8GB is far more practical, and I'll give a sample build near the end of the article to show what can be done.
I've left the extreme Core i9 and Threadripper processors out of the charts, and the Core i7 and Ryzen 7 are also in a different league. The 2200G is a budget processor, priced to move, and it delivers the goods. Combined with a mini-ITX or micro-ATX motherboard, you can build a complete PC for about the same price as a Core i7-8700K (especially once you add in a CPU cooler). On the graphics side, I've included the GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, RX 560, and Intel's HD 630—I'll see about running some additional tests on AMD's previous generation A10-7870K in the near future, but didn't have time for this initial review. It's no surprise that all the dedicated GPUs I've tested are faster, since they also cost more than the 2200G (especially at the currently inflated GPU prices).
Ryzen 3 2200G gaming performance
On the gaming side of things, the 2200G with high-end RAM is slightly faster than a 2400G with budget RAM. Again, definitely don't go with the cheapest RAM you can find if you're hoping to get the most of the integrated GPU. The 2200G is also more than twice as fast as Intel's latest HD Graphics 630. Neither solution is going to handle the latest games at higher quality settings and 1080p or higher resolutions, but I did some additional 1080p low testing and the 2200G gets above 30fps in the majority of games. Lighter fare is even better, so CS:GO for example easily runs at more than 60fps average (though periodic stutters and dips below 30fps are still present for some reason).
The difficulty with integrated graphics isn't something that's going to go away in the immediate future, at least not without increasing the cost. The chief problem is the need to share both power and memory bandwidth with the CPU. While it's theoretically possible to have an APU with two or three times the GPU cores as the 2200G (Ryzen 7 2700G with Vega 24, anyone?), graphics processing tends to be extremely bandwidth hungry. Dual-channel DDR4-3200 can manage about 64GB/s, a chunk of which goes to the CPU, whereas even a modest GTX 1050 has about twice that much dedicated bandwidth.
Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake-G with Vega M graphics is certainly one way of doing things, with a 4GB HBM2 stack on the package, but the cost for those chips is likely going to be over three times the price of the 2200G. Long-term, as process technology continues to shrink and we get even more transistors to work with, we'll probably on-die or on-package memory, and prices for such things will eventually come down. But until then, APUs like the 2200G will work best as entry-level gaming solutions—or as something for HTPC use, where the low power use and high integration are great to have.
Ryzen 3 2200G application performance
In non-gaming tasks, there's not much to say that I haven't already said. Performance is equal (and even slightly ahead of) the Ryzen 3 1300X, and a larger jump relative to the Ryzen 3 1200. If you have one of those already with a dedicated graphics card, no problem, but going forward there's very little reason to even think of the CPU-only Ryzen 3 parts. Unless prices drop below that of the 2200G, I suppose. The change from a dual-CCX (CPU Complex) layout with up to eight cores, to a native four-core solution with Vega graphics, is far more sensible in the budget market.
If you're wondering where the Intel competition sits, the previous generation i5-7600K is similar to the new i3-8100 (both are 4-core/4-thread designs), except the 7600K runs at up to 4.2GHz stock and can be overclocked. Knock off about 10-15 percent from the 7600K results in the above charts and you'd have the i3-8100. In other words, Intel's latest generation 4-core parts are a bit faster than the 2200G, but then the 2200G still has the advantage in graphics performance.
If all of this sounds great and you want to put together your very own compact Ryzen 3 2200G system, the above is one option. This build includes an M.2 NVMe SSD, 8GB DDR4-3200 memory, and a mini-ITX case and motherboard. You might be able to save a bit of money by opting for a larger case and motherboard, or a non-M.2 SSD, but I really like the idea of using the 2200G in a tiny HTPC. Of course, the 550W power supply is complete overkill, but there aren't many (any?) lower wattage PSUs that cost less and are still worth getting. You could also go with an even smaller case, if you're not interested in the potential for a dedicated graphics card or extra storage, though it's often easier to work with slightly larger builds. The total is around $400 for a complete PC with still reasonable performance—and you can add in a secondary HDD as needed.
One thing you'll want to be careful with is Ryzen APU support. Most AM4 motherboards should support the new chips, but older boards will require a BIOS update, and while some boards can be updated without a CPU (eg, using Asus's BIOS FlashBack feature and a USB drive), others will first need a Ryzen CPU and a dedicated GPU to update to the current BIOS. AMD has a support page describing the problem, and is even offering a Boot Kit as a solution if you don't have access to a Ryzen CPU. This sort of teething problem is common with new processors on existing motherboards, but it might be easier to buy a board locally if you don't want to wait for a Boot Kit.
Looking at the Ryzen 5 2400G and the Ryzen 3 2200G, while the 2400G is faster, for the target audience I think the 2200G is the being a better overall choice. If you don't want to buy a dedicated graphics card and you're just looking for an entry-level gaming PC, saving the $70 is the way to go. Once you start looking at a 2400G, it opens the doors to a lot of other potential upgrades (eg, Core i3-8100, dedicated GPUs, and more) that could quickly spiral your build from a budget system into a midrange or higher PC that costs substantially more. AMD's Ryzen APUs should also make for some potentially interesting light gaming laptops, though that's a whole different conversation.
The Ryzen 3 2200G takes everything that AMD has learned from the past seven years of building APUs and puts it to good use. The Zen architecture is a substantial upgrade over the previous Steamroller and similar CPU cores, fixing the weakest link in AMD's APU portfolio. Intel may still lead in per-core performance, but most applications don't even utilize the full potential of modern CPUs, while many games will utterly fail to run acceptably without decent graphics. If you're after a processor that's good enough, with graphics that are better than the current Intel solutions, the Ryzen 3 2200G is the solution you've been waiting for.