Setting aside AMD's 2d-gen Ryzen CPUs, we're finally fix to examination one of the new Coffee Lake-based parts that Intel announced last month. Amid the fries revealed at the time were 3 standard power Pentium Aureate desktop processors: the G5400, G5500 and G5600.

For those that missed information technology, late last yr Intel announced new 'Silver' and 'Aureate'-branded Celeron and Pentium processors. On the desktop, these were Kaby Lake parts with a refreshed named. Standard desktop Pentium CPUs are now known every bit Pentium Gilt and since this started with the Kaby Lake generation you got Hyper-Threading support over previous Pentium models.

Pentium Silverish is for chips found in mobile and low-powered devices using the BGA mounting method. Why Intel plant it necessary to further segment its already heavily segmented product lines is anyone'southward estimate, only it just makes a situation that is already very disruptive even more confusing for shoppers.

Anyway, there are now several Coffee Lake-based Pentium Golden chips, including the G5400, G5500 and G5600. Of annotation, these models will only work with H310, B360, H370 and Z370 motherboards. The G5400 comes in at an MSRP of merely $64 -- xv% cheaper than the $82 G5500 -- yet information technology tin can't be more than than 2.5% slower. It'due south also 25% cheaper than the G5600 ($95) and tin't be more than 5% slower, so the G5400 is clearly the best value part.

That existence the example, I've decided to pit it against AMD'due south all-time value CPU, the Ryzen 3 2200G. At $100, the 2200G is considerably more expensive than the G5400, so at over fifty% more expensive yous take to wonder if information technology's actually worth buying.

On paper, the Ryzen 3 processor has a few obvious advantages. Kickoff, it's a truthful quad-cadre CPU whereas the G5400 is a dual-core with HyperThreading for four threads. It has more cache and operates at a similar frequency out of the box, and I say out of the box because the 2200G is an unlocked CPU and therefore it tin can exist overclocked for fifty-fifty greater performance.

It also supports college memory frequencies and maybe the greatest advantage of all is the integrated GPU. Whereas the G5400 packs the pathetic HD Graphics 610 the 2200G is armed with the far more than impressive Vega viii GPU. Withal, that's not going to be the focus of today's comparison, although I will briefly bear witness graphics performance before wrapping things up.

I want to focus on CPU performance for this comparing, then most of the gaming benchmarks will be conducted with a detached graphics card. But rather than use a GTX 1050 or something slower, I'm testing with a GTX 1070 to remove the GPU bottleneck while besides remaining somewhat realistic.

Recall, terminal generations flagship GPUs are only the equivalent to the current generation mid-range graphics cards, so unless you upgrade your CPU every time you buy a new graphics carte, knowing how these CPUs perform when non GPU limited is important. Plus, GPU limited testing is pointless.

In addition to the GTX 1070, the Pentium G5400 was tested using the MSI H310M Pro-VD and as the proper name suggests this is an Intel H310 lath -- one of the cheapest you lot can get in fact and so we have been forced to utilize the standard DDR4-2400 memory spec.

The Ryzen 3 2200G system was tested on the MSI B350 Mortar using DDR4-3200 retention with the standard XMP loaded and then for a 2d test configuration I upgraded from the Wraith Stealth box cooler to the DeepCool Gammaxx 200T and overclocked all cores to 3.9GHz. On to the results...

Benchmarks

First upward we take the sustained retention bandwidth results and here the Ryzen iii 2200G enjoys 26% more bandwidth. Both CPUs feature a dual-channel memory controller, the main divergence being that the 2200G is able to take advantage of DDR4-3200 memory while the G5400 is limited to DDR4-2400 on anything only a Z370 motherboard.

Here nosotros run across when running Cinebench R15 that the G5400 is 9% faster than the stock 2200G for single thread workloads. However, because the 2200G is a true quad-core when it comes to multi-threaded performance, information technology'southward virtually fifty% faster. Once we overclock, the 2200G isn't even 2% faster for the single thread test withal a whopping 56% faster for the multi-threaded test, so a true showing of potency from the Ryzen 3 processor in this benchmark.

Next upwards, we're going to look at a few of the PCMark 10 tests. In fact, we'll be looking at four of them and the starting time one is application startup functioning. Hither we can see that the G5400 and its single thread functioning does well in this examination, though it'south not until nosotros overclock the 2200G that it pulls ahead. That said, at stock the 2200G was but 5% slower so not exactly a huge margin.

The video conferencing exam is a lot more demanding on the CPU and here we see the stock 2200G outpacing the G5400 by a reasonably big x% margin. Then once overclocked the 2200G is 15% faster and that's a fairly commanding atomic number 82 for the Ryzen iii processor.

The web browsing exam isn't particularly core heavy then this fourth dimension the G5400 is able to hang in there with the 2200G, allowing both CPUs to deliver a similar score.

Photograph editing is a bit more taxing on the CPU and this allows the stock 2200G to beat the Pentium processor by an 8% margin and then a 15% margin once overclocked. And so overall AMD does very well in PCMark 10 for this comparison.