AMD launches unlocked Athlon 3000G 3.5GHz CPU for just $49

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AMD has thrown a new content into the extreme low-budget ring with the launch of the ultra low-end AMD Athlon 3000G 2-Core 3.5GHz. Priced at just $49, this CPU is about as budget it as it gets, quite comfortably the most affordable modern CPU which AMD is offering.

Naturally, with such a price tag comes revised expectations. AMD’s Athlon 3000G is going to offer you nowhere near the performance of its bigger and better Ryzen brethren. However, for your 49 bucks you will get your hands on a dual-core, four-thread processor clocked at a respectable 3.5 GHz. It’s got 4MB total L3 Cache, 1MB L2 cache, and 192KB L1 cache, as well as an integrated Vega 3 graphics processor clocked at 1000 MHz.

Being such a low-end chip, it only sips on 35W TDP, making it fairly power efficient.

Surprisingly, the AMD Athlon 3000G is also unlocked for overclocking, so you’re free to go a bit wild with it if you want.It’s the first Zen-based AMD Athlon processor to ship unlocked. At $50 it’s a pretty cheap way to mess about with a CPU for those who want to tinker with some extreme overclocking.

While a low-end processor such as this isn’t going to trouble the premium processors of this world, and it’ll certainly struggle with select modern AAA titles with favour multi-threading, for $49 this is a CPU which should comfortably be enough run lower-end titles and a heck of a lot of AAA titles to boot.

For those looking for great value for money, this is going to be an obvious choice. There will be performance sacrifices, of course, but for $49 this appears to be a great little entry-level processor. Performance-wise, it runs around 15-20% slower than an AMD Ryzen R 1200, which gives you some idea of where it sits in relation to the rest of AMD’s CPU family.

There are no specifics on when you can get your mitts on this one yet but AMD has promised general availability for the AMD Athlon 3000G by the end of November.