New MSI BIOS Unlocks Overclocking on AMD’s $55 Athlon 200GE CPU
Overclocking has always appealed to two broad groups of customers: Enthusiasts, looking to squeeze more performance out of already top-end chips, and poorer enthusiasts trying to squeeze more performance out of affordable, lower-clocked CPUs. The march of history hasn’t been kind to either group. While grognards like myself wax poetic about the days of 50 percent Celeron overclocks, 1GHz+ Durons, and the old Pentium 4 Northwood, the amount of headroom available at the top of the market has decreased dramatically, as both Intel and AMD tend to absorb their top frequency ranges for themselves. AMD’s Ryzen, in particular, isn’t known for having much frequency headroom at all, at least not at the top end.
Things are better at the lower end of the market, but both Intel and AMD tend to multiplier lock their lowest-end SKUs to prevent enthusiasts from buying these products and then cranking up the clock speed in lieu of buying more expensive parts. This particular move has a rich, long heritage in computing, dating back to that one time Intel discovered it had accidentally allowed anyone to build a multi-CPU system out of Celerons as opposed to the significantly more expensive Pentium II. RIP Abit BP6. But thanks to a UEFI screwup by MSI, anyone today can buy an Athlon 200GE with two cores, 4 threads, a base clock of 3.2GHz, and three onboard GPU cores (192 GPU cores total), and crank it up as fast as their heart desires (or at least as fast as silicon will take them).
Cinebench shows us an Athlon 200GE that sits just behind the Core i3-7100, and a bit ahead of the Pentium G5400. Gaming performance is a bit different, with the 200GE and Pentium G5400 generally trading shots when tested with an RTX 2080 Ti. Which CPU is faster in these circumstances came down to a game-by-game scenario. The ‘trading shots’ label, however, only applied to the overclocked Athlon 200GE — the stock-clocked version of the chip was significantly behind the Pentium G5400 in every test. The G5500 (the replacement chip for the G5400) is a $95 CPU at Newegg, however, compared with just $55 for the Athlon 200GE.
But the flip side to this situation is that sometimes you either want to build a machine for as little money as possible or you simply don’t need all that much performance. From the cost-conscious perspective, the Athlon 200GE looks pretty reasonable, especially if you’re willing to overclock a bit. The closest comparison to the Athlon 200GE on price is the Celeron G4900, a 3.1GHz chip only compatible with 300-series motherboards that lacks Hyper-Threading. That’s going to give the Athlon 200GE a likely performance advantage over its Celeron rivals, particularly once overclocked. For certain low-impact systems, the Athlon 200GE may be a reasonable option, with this overclocking performance ladled on top for a bit of extra gravy.
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