AMD has now launched the Ryzen 4000 series desktop APUs from Ryzen 3,5 and 7 series But here i am reviewing the old and mighty Ryzen 3 2200G.
Well i already has reviewed it but this is the review about the APU after some months, So the performance might have changed and I don't have a 4th Gen Ryzen APU till now because of unavailability.
AMD launched the Ryzen 3 2200G on February 12, 2018 and it was launched alongside the Ryzen 5 2400G. Both of these APUs were very good for overall performance over price ratio and the Ryzen 3 2200G was bought by most budget gamers and other people. Now when the 3rd gen and 4th gen Ryzen APUs have been launched, will it be worth to buy the ryzen 3 2200G in 2020?
The Ryzen 3 2200G is a entry level quad core CPU launched by AMD which comes with 4 threads/ no Hyper-Threading. It is fabricated on AMD's 14nm FinFET Technology and made on the first generation ZEN Micro-architecture. Even if it has the word 2000 in its name, it is a first Gen AMD APU. Note that there is another variant of ryzen 3 2200G which has just a higher Clock Speed and will perform little bit better.
It comes with a Base Clock of 3.5 GHz and can be overclocked on all 4 cores upto 3.7 GHz. It has a TDP of 65 W and 4 MB of L3 Cache. It supports the AM4 socket and these AM4 socket motherboards can be found for very cheap lately. It can support upto 64 GB 2933 MHz RAM (RAM capacity depends upon the motherboard).
A table in which the specs of ryzen 3 2200G are compared along with ryzen 3 1200.
As it is an APU, so it comes with an integrated graphics which is Radeon Vega 8 Graphics. The Vega 8 graphics have 8 Graphics Cores and Base Clock Frequency of 1.1 GHz which can be overclocked upto 1.6 GHz. Because it is an APU so you do not need to pair another GPU to get the display. The Vega 8 integrated graphics gets a pretty good performance boost after Overclocking.
Those were all the CPU and GPU specs of the great Ryzen 3 2200G and it is just an entry level APU. Of-course it is not made for heavy gaming and other heavy tasks. It will easily do light gaming and editing which is as expected of its price.
After all those talks this is the time for benchmarks as no review is a review as long as there are no benchmarks. For the Benchmarks I have have paired the Ryzen 3 2200G with a Radeon RX 570 (anything above will bottleneck on 1080p resolution) and also without a dedicated GPU along with 16 GB DDR4 3000 MHz dual channel RAM. Cinebench R15 is tested OC and 5 games are played at 1080p lowest settings.
These were the benchmarks of the Ryzen 3 2200G along with Radeon RX 570 and Vega 8 graphics. I played the games at the lowest settings so both the cards were able to game. Te RX 570 is a great budget Video Card so it was able to easily score 80+ FPS on lowest and you may even get 100+ FPS easily. The Vega 8 Graphics did pretty good and scored playable frames in all games except CS GO and even I don't know how I got so many FPS.
The Vega 8 Graphics is pretty good for you if want to play games at playable Frames even on lowest settings and you will get 60+ FPS if you lower the resolution to 720p. The Ryzen 3 2200G scored 144 points in Cinebench R15 Singlecore Tests which are good for its price and will be enough for medium 1080p gaming. It scored 576 scored in the Multicore Tests which are again ok and you would be able to do low to normal level editing and rendering. More demading softwares won't work that good with it.
You should not think about high level streaming and stuff with it. If you want to do so just get another better CPU like Ryzen 3 3100 or 3300X.
In the end I will suggest you guys that only if you have budget of $200 to $250 then buy it, it is truly a good APU for its price and will allow you to do normal level gaming and stuff with it. If you want to do further more high end gaming then you can pair a discrete Graphics Card like RX 570 with it. This APU which costs around $80 is still able to play games at playable Frames which I will say no APU does at the price.