And the Winner Is...

And so nosotros've looked at enough of benchmarks and it's pretty clear the Ryzen 3 2200G wipes the floor with the Pentium G5400, but is information technology better value? Well, if you're planning on gaming without a discrete graphics card then yes, information technology'south world's better value and at that place'due south only no comparison to exist made here. Gaming with the integrated GPU establish in the G5400 is virtually impossible and extremely limited at best. The 2200G on the other hand can mimic the performance of an entry-level discrete GPU.

Practice yous program on purchasing something like a GTX 1050, RX 560 or perhaps something more powerful or you too desire to use your budget build to get into video editing or any other kind of productivity work then which CPU should you get?

Well, outset allow'southward factor in the platform costs. The MSI H310M Pro-VD which nosotros used to support the Pentium G5400 costs roughly $62 and 8GB of DDR4-2400 retentiveness will ready y'all back $75. Add those prices to the $64 yous can expect to pay for the Pentium G5400 and you have a platform bill of $191, allow's say $190 for a overnice round figure.

The Ryzen 3 2200G comes in at $100 and you can look to pay about $70 for a B350 motherboard. The MSI B350 Mortar that we used comes in at $90 but information technology'south significantly amend than the H310 lath in terms of quality and features, and then permit's put down $70 for a board that is closer to being equal. And so for DDR4-3200 memory, 8GB kits become for effectually $100, putting the 2200G combo that we tested at effectually $270, a footling over 40% more costly than the Intel build.

Of form, if yous factor in the cost of a graphics menu such every bit the GTX 1050, then that margin comes down to just over xx%. You lot can also get away with slower memory when using the 2200G with a graphics card and that'll help reduce the overall cost.

In any case, without a graphics carte, the 2200G as I said before is without question worth the premium. A 40% increase from $190 to $270 is well worth the 250% increase in iGPU performance for gamers, not to mention you can actually play all the latest games.

If you're not interested in 3D functioning and just want a PC for general usage than the Pentium G5400 is tough to shell. That said, if you're non interested in 3D operation but want to tackle heavy tasks similar rendering, encoding and and so on and so again the extra investment is still well worth it as the 2200G was often upward to 40% faster. And don't effort to tell me no one does these tasks on quad-core CPUs, because I know they practice.

In summary, the new Pentium G5400 only makes sense if you want a dirt cheap PC for web browsing, consuming media content and firing off the odd email. Anything more than than that and investing the extra $80 in the Ryzen three 2200G platform is going to net you significantly more performance and a much meliorate upgrade path in the future.

Shopping Shortcuts:

  • Ryzen three 2200G on Amazon, Newegg
  • Ryzen combo: B350 motherboard / MSI B350 Mortar & DDR4-3200 RAM
  • Pentium Gold G5400 on Amazon, Newegg
  • Pentium philharmonic: MSI H310M Pro-VD & 8GB DDR4-2400 RAM
  • Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 on Amazon, Newegg