The glamour in PC gaming surrounds headliners like AMD’s 3950X, Intel’s 9900Ok, and Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti, however many individuals reside on the other finish of the spectrum in relation to their budgets. So for those who don’t have a lot to spend on a PC, AMD’s $50 Athlon 3000G might be simply as thrilling.
The 2-core, 4-thread 3000G APU launched in mid November 2019 and comes with Vega three graphics—so when paired with a finances motherboard, RAM, and storage, you possibly can roll a modest gaming PC for simply $300. (It’s doable to do it for even much less, if you really want to chop your finances nearer to the bone.) And now that GeForce Now has launched, you possibly can mix the sport streaming service with a low-end PC to play at the moment’s largest video games (a number of of them with ray-tracing!), one thing that beforehand required the highest-end {hardware}.
Given the chances, we determined to place collectively an Athlon 3000G system and put it to the take a look at. And we did it reside!
Overall, the construct itself was simple and uneventful. Once it got here all the way down to testing gaming efficiency over native video games and GeForce Now, although, it acquired a bit wild. In truth, making an attempt to reply the query of “Can it run Crysis?” led to an entire separate half 2 to our experiment.
Check out our movies if you wish to see all our discoveries in actual time, like how Crysis doesn’t play good with some 64-bit Windows 10 installations. And if you wish to construct an analogous PC of your personal, you should utilize the half record under as a information.
Our recommended elements record*:
*For our stream, we had a few half substitutions primarily based on what was accessible in our lab, however they had been just like these solutions above.
- CPU: AMD Athlon 3000G
- Motherboard: ASRock A320M-HDV R4.0
- Memory: Patriot Viper 4 Blackout 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4-3000
- Storage: PNY CS900 500GB 2.5-inch SSD
- Power Supply: Corsair CX 450W 80+ Bronze
- Case: Thermaltake Versa H15
Bonus add-on:
- GPU: ASRock Radeon RX 570 4GB Phantom Gaming D
