Benchmark Results – Game Tests
Tomb Raider 2013 (720p Normal and 1080p High)
Tomb Raider 2013 is an older game now, but new enough to still look good. For lower-end PCs, this is the kind of game worth looking at. You get a good experience, and they’re often cheap. We’re testing using the built-in benchmark.
The Low detail setting looked pretty bad, but we found the drop to 720p helped performance a lot more than the Normal detail setting hurt it.
Overclocking everything took Tomb Raider 2013 from playable to good on the Athlon 3000G. 720p Normal is hardly the prettiest preset but looks reasonable considering the hardware.
We also tested on the prettier but “cinematic” 1080p High setting. Low FPS should be less of a concern in this game than some of the others we’ve looked at.
At stock 1080p High is pretty much unplayable. With an overclock, we have the average FPS over the magic 30 and minimum above 24. This is certainly a “cinematic” framerate but Tomb Raider 2013 is somewhat of a cinematic experience in general. Many will prefer high FPS, but this is a viable option with the overclock.
Grand Theft Auto V (720p Defaults)
GTA:V also dates back to 2013 but is still one of the most popular games on Steam. We tested at GTA:V’s default settings for the hardware, using the built-in benchmark.
We’ve excluded the first scene of the canned benchmark from our minimums. It produced very low FPS and was also quite inconsistent. The minimum from the other scenes is reported.
GTA:V on the Athlon 3000G is interesting because it gains a lot from the memory overclock. This is the only GPU test where a memory overclock did better than an iGPU overclock. After pushing everything, the average was nearly 60fps and – excluding the first scene – minimums were tolerable.
F1 2019 (DirectX 12, 720p Lowest)
F1 2019 is included as a modern DirectX 12 game that’s nonetheless well optimised and has a hope of being run by the 3000G. It’s also very interesting in the current situation because the F1 promoters have been running esports on F1 2019 in place of F1 races cancelled due to COVID-19. We used DirectX 12 on 720p Lowest settings, with TAA checkerboard anti-aliasing, and ran the built-in benchmark.
Overclocking the core on the Athlon 3000G made almost no difference in F1 2019, but iGPU overclocking gained well. A racing game at low FPS sounds frustrating, so we were glad to see our tuned 3000G hit 60fps.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (DirectX 11, 1080p Lowest, FXAA, Trilinear Filtering)
CS:GO is the single most popular game on Steam by a long way. At time of writing, over a million people are playing. CS:GO lacks a built-in benchmark, so we’ve used uLLeticaL’s benchmark map from the steam workshop.
Dense smoke in CS:GO makes the game really chug, and there’s a handy patch of it on the benchmark route. Our overclock was far from a cure, but took the edge off a little.
Rocket League (AA off, Performance render presets, 1080p)
Rocket League is a very popular esports game based on the Unreal engine. There’s no built-in benchmark, but the menu screen is rendered in-engine. In our experience menu FPS is fairly representative of ingame FPS, aside from chugging when the explosion for a goal goes off.
Rocket League has a lot of fast movement, and we’re sure players would appreciate staying above 60fps. Our sample manages this well, once everything has been overclocked.
Conclusion: Is It Worth Overclocking The Athlon 3000G?
Overclocking takes time and is inherently risky. You might be unstable and suffer a system crash, and even at conservative voltages it technically shortens the life of your components. However, it can be very rewarding.
Looking at our game tests especially, we saw huge gains. On our Athlon 3000G we saw games going from unplayable to playable and from merely playable to good.
If you have an Athlon 3000G, and you want to play games, we recommend overclocking wholeheartedly. The boost we saw is equivalent to a hardware upgrade. You don’t have to do memory overclocking to see gains, just the iGPU makes a big difference, but memory tuning can be rewarding.
You can download AMD’s Ryzen Master software here to get started.
One final tip before you go – if the worst happens and the system fails to boot, don’t panic! Often after a few restarts and some patience, it will recover on its own. But if it comes down to it, you can reset on a hardware level by removing the “CMOS battery”.
Motherboards need power from the CMOS battery to remember your settings, so by taking it out for a few minutes you can reset everything. This will also reset your system clock. The vast majority of panic situations when overclocking are fixed with this, as it were, one simple trick.
Happy overclocking!
<3
I’m amazed by the fact that you got to DDR4 3800 CAS 18 on this combination of RAM CPU and Motherboard. I wonder if even faster RAM (if even possible) would make it go further.
I’m interested in this chip not because I need a cheap PC, but cause I want a fun overclocking rig outside of my main PC.
Although it wouldn’t make much sense monetarily, I was thinking on paring it with a mid range board, mostly for the SOC VRMs which might not be as stable as a 2 phase and would probably get quickly overloaded with higher power targets, also cause I’d like to use it with a Zen 3 APU down the line.
I managed DDR4-4000 CL18 using an MSI B450I GAMING PLUS AC with Crucial Ballistix Sport rated for 3000 CL15 (Micron “E-die”). Normally older gen AMD CPUs top out around 3600 with good memory so I’d be (even more) surprised if it has more in it than that.
It’s a really fun CPU for overclocking and tweaking, but check compatibility carefully – sadly most X570 and B550 boards choose not to support the 3000G. This seems to be because it uses the older Zen 1 cores and is therefore classed as a “first generation” product – despite being numbered in the 3000 series!
Unfortunately this creates a bit of a quandary when it comes to the upgrade path. I’ve written a bit about the compatibility situation at https://play3r.net/news/articles/b450-zen-3-compatibility-amd-bow-to-community-pressure/ but generally, a B450/X470 board fully supporting the 3000G has a lot of caveats when it comes to future processors. Hopefully that doesn’t put you off though, because it really is a fun chip to play around with.
I’m forever grateful to this guide and review! You sir are an amazing tech guru for helping a novice like myself and I wish the best and the best for you.
Setup
ASUS B450M DRAGON 4400MHz(OC)
AMD Athlon 3000G
GSKILL 8GB 3000MHz CL16 DDR4 x2
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AMD Ryzen Master application is used
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CPU Clock Speed: 4.000 MHz
CPU Voltage: 1,3 Volt
APU GFX Clock Speed: 1.650 MHz
APU GFX Voltage: 1.3 Volt
CPU Max Temp: 62°C
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it works stably…
maybe an aio would help?