Application Benchmarks
PCMark 10
We are running PCMark 10’s Application Test Benchmark. This tests Microsoft Office performance, for this one we are using Office 2019 updated to the latest build. The AMD Athlon 3000G scores 6903 and the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U scores 7094, which is very close. The Ryzen 5 3500U is only 3% faster, and that’s with double the cores and threads. Overclocking the AMD Athlon 3000G has really boosted performance in Office. Performance increases by 13% in this benchmark simply by overclocking the APU to 4GHz and now outperforms the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U as well. Office does seem to lean toward more single-thread or frequency advantages.
Geekbench 5
In Geekbench 5’s performance graph above we are looking at the Multi-Thread score first. There is no surprise that in the multi-thread test the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U takes off with performance, it has double the cores and threads. This is to be expected. Though, given that advantage, it doesn’t seem to be “twice” the performance of the Athlon 3000G at all. What you should take note of is that by simply overclocking the Athlon 3000G performance has gone up 14% in this multi-threaded test, that’s impressive.
In the graph above we are now testing Single-Thread performance. Now, this test is very interesting, focusing more on single-thread performance. We still see the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U overtake the AMD Athlon 3000G, but not by much. This is most likely due to the higher boost speed capable on the Ryzen 5 3500U which is 3.7GHz. The Athlon 3000G maxes out at 3.5GHz. That is until you overclock it. Then look at what happens, it overtakes the performance of the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U by quite a margin. Overclocking has improved performance on the Athlon 3000G by 20% in single-thread performance!
SiSoftware Sandra 2020
In this graph, we are comparing the SiSoftware Sandra Dhrystone performance which focuses on integer performance. It seems this test may also be sensitive to core and thread count, as the Ryzen 5 3500U offers a lot better performance here, 129.6 GFLOPS. The AMD Athlon 3000G offers 75 GFLOPS, and when overclocked that goes up to 85.6 which is a 14% increase.
Now we are looking at Whetstone performance which is floating-point. Whetstone is more of the same, just with floating-point. The AMD Ryzen 5 3500U is able to do a lot better because it has double the cores and threads. The AMD Athlon 3000G is at 39.1 GFLOPS and overclocked it rises to 49 GFLOPS which is a substantial 25% increase.
Aida64 CPU Queen
You can read more about what the CPU Queen benchmark tests here. The AMD Ryzen 5 3500U does a lot better in this test compared to the Athlon 3000G. The Athlon 3000G scores 25399 and when overclocked increases to 29181 which is a 15% performance increase.
Aida64 FPU Mandel
The Aida64 Mandel FPU test focuses more on floating-point performance, you can read what it tests here. Again the Ryzen 5 3500U is faster, for obvious reasons. The AMD Athlon 3000G is at 4758 and overclocked rises to 5446 which is a 14% performance increase.
Aida64 Memory Read
The memory test is where the two systems are going to stand apart. On our desktop PC with the AMD Athlon 3000G, we are able to use our own RAM and we can bump it up faster thanks to the chipset and motherboard. We are able to run it at DDR4-3200 at default, which provides 44.8GB/s of bandwidth. Then, when we overclock the APU and raise the memory up to DDR4-3333 we get a higher 45GB/s of bandwidth. The AMD Ryzen 5 3500U at DDR4-2400 only provides 33GB/s of bandwidth. This bandwidth directly ties in with the Radeon Vega Graphics performance.
Aida64 Memory Write
The same is true of write performance. The Athlon 3000G at DDR4-3200 provides 48GB/s bandwidth, while overclocked at DDR4-3333 provides 48.7GB/s. The laptop is stuck at a write speed of 33GB/s.