AMD's Unlocked Athlon 3000G APU Starts Shipping at $49

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AMD announced today that it's started shipping its latest APU, the Athlon 3000G today for $49. The chip is the first Zen architecture-based product from AMD's Athlon line to to be unlocked.

ust like its predecessor, the Athlon 200GE based on the Zen 1.0 architecture, Athlon 3000G continues to use the same dual-core/quad-thread configuration and is integrated with Radeon Vega 3 graphics. It also features the same 1MB of L2 and 4MB of L3 cache. Even the power envelope has remained 35W. The chip is also compatible with AM4 motherboards.

However, there have been some improvements as well. The new chip is built on the improved Zen+ architecture. It's also manufactured with a 12nm process, which has led to an increase in base clock frequency from 3.2 GHz to 3.5 GHz for the CPU and an extra 100 MHz for the GPU.

The other major difference is that Athlon 3000G can also be unlocked, something budget gamers will definitely appreciate. Its predecessor was locked, but some AMD partners offered ways to overclock it. However, these were eventually disabled via BIOS updates.

AMD-provided benchmarks claims that the Athlon 3000G offers a significantly better 720p budget gaming experience compared to Intel’s popular (and more expensive) $73 Pentium G5400, scoring about a 55% boost in frames per second in the tested games.

AMD said that the Athlon 3000G will start showing up on Internet retailers in the coming days for the “suggested” price of $49. That means it could be either slightly cheaper or slightly more expensive, depending on the retailers. But you may want to be on the lookout for a Black Friday deal for this processor too.
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