Tech may improve at a fast pace, but rarely do we see noteworthy leaps in the realm of low-end computer components. This snoozy pace usually prevails with Intel’s Celeron and Pentium processors, but some of the company’s 10th Generation Celeron chips, based on the same LGA1200 mainstream CPU socket used by the flagship Core i9-10900K, show some proper perk-ups versus their predecessors. Though the Celeron G5920 ($52) doesn’t differ that much from the Celeron G4920 (its strict predecessor, from the 8th Generation "Coffee Lake" line), this newer "Comet Lake" desktop Celeron has a 300MHz increase in base clock speed (and a platform with a future) that makes it the clearly better solution. Its primacy over equivalent AMD Athlon silicon, however, depends on the pricing on the day you look.
The Celeron G5920: The Basics
Intel’s Celeron G5920 comes equipped with two CPU cores that are clocked at 3.5GHz. It also has 2MB of L3 cache, and it can support DDR4 RAM clocked at up to 2,666MHz. The chip doesn’t have support for thread-doubling Hyper-Threading or TurboBoost, which means it can run only one processing thread through each of its cores at a time, and it can’t increase its clock speed above the 3.5GHz base rate.
Compared with its direct predecessor, the Celeron G4920, which was clocked at 3.2GHz, the Celeron G5920 on paper should be right around 9% faster. The maximum supported RAM speed has also been increased, from 2,400MHz to 2,666MHz, which leads to an 11% increase in bandwidth. This may have a negligible impact on CPU performance, but it’s likely to be more noticeable when we run graphics tests, as graphics hardware is more sensitive to changes in memory bandwidth. Note that we did not test the Celeron G4930, part of Intel's limited "Coffee Lake Refresh" line of 9th Generation processors; it would likely score much the same as the G4920, with the same base clock, core count, memory limitation, and on-chip graphics.
Speaking of graphics, this section of the processor remains entirely unchanged. Both the G4920 and the new G5920 are equipped with Intel’s UHD Graphics 610 integrated graphics processor (IGP) silicon, which has a dozen EUs clocked at 1.05GHz. Realistically, this isn’t a solution you would want to use for gaming, and it should work perfectly fine for non-gaming basic display tasks and productivity work on a monitor or two. But it wouldn’t be any fun to test this chip if we didn’t try running games on it anyway, so let’s see how well it performed in both CPU and GPU workouts.
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The Test Setup: Some Nuances With Celeron
The main competition for the Celeron G5920 will be its direct predecessor (the G4920 mentioned earlier), as well as AMD’s Athlon 200GE. (AMD has also released Athlon 220GE and 240GE versions of those chips, but we haven’t had the opportunity to test them; they are also quite hard to find in retail here in early 2021, unlike the Celeron.) You can see test results from a few more powerful processors included in the list (Core i3 and i5, and Ryzen 3 and 5, chips), but realistically the Celeron G5920 doesn’t stand much of a chance of beating any of them.
Now, don’t take this as me simply calling the Celeron G5920 a bad or uncompetitive component. The Celeron was never designed to compete with solutions double or triple its price on any meaningful level. It’s also priced well below the competition, with the exception of the identically priced last-generation Celeron G4920 and the lower-list-price ($39.99) AMD Athlon 200GE. The higher-end chips in our test charts below are included more for the purpose of showing you how much better the costlier solutions are, so that you can make a more informed decision when shopping for a CPU. The context illustrates what a $100-to-$200 CPU will gain you by comparison.
We tested the Celeron G5920 using Asrock’s B460 Steel Legend motherboard. As this is a budget-oriented CPU, it didn’t make sense to test the CPU on our otherwise standard Intel LGA1200 testbed, which features high-end parts like a Z490 flagship motherboard and a liquid cooler. Instead, we opted for Intel’s stock fan cooler to show exactly how well the chip would perform right out of the box. That's the situation in which it would most realistically be used.
In total, I used two 8GB DDR4 RAM DIMMs clocked at 2,666MHz with timings of 15-16-16-36. It should be noted that the AMD CPUs that were tested below all had RAM clocked higher, at 3,000MHz. This may sound like an unfair advantage and bias towards AMD (especially in memory-sensitive graphics tests), but it’s actually a limitation built right into the CPU and motherboard. AMD gives you more freedom to adjust the RAM clock speed on its lower-end motherboards, but Intel caps you at a set limit that’s listed on the CPU’s specs page. For the Celeron G5920, this is 2,666MHz.
Technically, we could have overcome this limitation by using a Z490 motherboard for testing, but if you’re looking to buy an under-$100 processor, it’s just not sensible that you are going to pay out a few hundred bucks for a Z490 board. As most users will end up using something more like a B460 motherboard, I determined this the best option for testing, as it will provide the most accurate real-world test results.
Testing the Celeron G5920: Our CPU Benchmarks
So, for starters, here’s a summary of the results we saw in our standard suite of CPU-stressing benchmark tests. As mentioned earlier, also in the mix below is a host of recent-generation Core i3, Core i5, Ryzen 3, and Ryzen 5 chips, for perspective on what you can get in an upticked CPU between $100 and $200...
The test results from Cinebench R15 give you a strong premonition of how all of the other CPU benchmarks will turn out. In the multi-core test, the Celeron G5920 loses hands down to all of the competition with the exception of the Celeron G4920. This is largely due to the presence of just two cores and the lack of Hyper-Threading or SMT support on these chips, which is present on all of the others save the Radeon-IGP-equipped Ryzen 3 3200G, with four CPU cores. Things change a bit when just one core is tested (in the single-core versions of the Cinebench R15 and POV-Ray tests, and the legacy iTunes trial), with the Celeron G5920 now pulling ahead of the Athlon 200GE but still well behind everything else.
Discounting the G4920, Intel’s Celeron G5920 remains at the bottom of the list in our Handbrake test, with the chip taking almost 34 minutes to render the test sample. AMD’s Athlon 200GE holds a strong lead over the G5920, but the most important takeaway from this test is how much better the Celeron G5920 is performing than the G4920. The G5920 managed to shave more than 7 minutes off the G4920’s time and comes much closer to rivaling the Athlon 200GE.
POV-Ray is arguably the test that the Celeron G5920 performed best in. Its multi-core score wasn’t particularly impressive, but it still showed a large improvement over the G4920. The single-core test, however, saw the Celeron match AMD’s Ryzen 3 3200G and almost match a last-generation Pentium Gold chip.
As noted, our legacy iTunes file-conversion test also showed the Celeron G5920 performing quite well, taking just 2:04 to finish the workload. The G5920 was actually able to beat the Pentium Gold G6400 in this test and almost matched the AMD Ryzen 3 3200G. Most of us are not running decidedly old, single-threaded software like this vintage iTunes installation, but when the field gets leveled a bit by limited applications like that, the Celeron can shine.
The Celeron G5920 performed far better than its predecessor in our Blender test, too. It wasn’t quite able to match the Athlon 200GE, but with just a second of difference in rendering time, it came close enough to make the difference not really noticeable.
More Tests: Our Graphics Benchmarks
With the light-hitting Intel UHD Graphics 610 IGP silicon on this Celeron chip, it should come as no surprise that the Celeron G5920 performed poorly in most of our graphics tests.
Both the Celeron G4920 and the Pentium Gold G6400 make use of the same IGP and tallied similar scores, but most games ran too slowly to be playable. The only game that managed to stay above 30 frames per second (fps) while testing was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), but it was necessary to drop the resolution to 1,280 by 720 pixels and detail to Medium to achieve this.
This chip is clearly not meant for gaming, especially when using the IGP, but it is worth noting the small improvements that the Celeron G5920 holds over its G4920 predecessor. Several games show single-digit performance bumps, and we were able to successfully test the G5920 with Rainbow Six: Siege to the benchmark run’s completion. We weren’t able to do this with the G4920. The test wouldn’t run either due to that chip simply being too slow, or due to changes in the graphics driver since we last tried to run that test on the older Celeron.
Verdict: Better to Plump for a Pentium?
Celeron CPUs seldom surprise, and the Celeron G5920 doesn’t do much to break that pattern. As a two-core/two-thread basic CPU, it isn’t a particularly impressive performer with modern software, and it is slower in many tests than the (in theory) lower-priced AMD Athlon 200GE. Our numbers make it clear that the Athlon 200GE is a far better option if you need a peak-muscle processor on an extremely tight budget.
Or, at least this would be the situation if the pricing of most PC components in early 2021 obeyed the MSRP. Currently, the market is facing massive shortages of certain chips that have driven the price of the Athlon 200GE, in some e-tail spots we’ve seen, up to a bonkers $125, up from a $40 launch price. The Celeron G5920 hasn’t seen nearly that much inflation, but its availability is spotty from most major retailers. I was able to find it for sale at this early March 2021 writing from TigerDirect for $60 plus $4 shipping, but that may be transient. Factoring in these prices makes the Celeron the more desirable option, as the Athlon isn’t so much better as to justify nearly double the price of the Celeron, and triple its own list pricing.
A far better option than either of these, at the prevailing prices in early 2021, would be Intel’s Pentium Gold G6400, which is currently selling at MSRP and hasn’t seen its price inflated, which makes it by far the best choice of the three in a vacuum. Of course, with any 10th Generation Intel CPU, you’re on the hook to pair it with an LGA1200 motherboard, which, if you don’t own one, needs to be factored into the equation. Given the platform switchover with Intel’s 10th Generation desktop chips in mid-2020, from LGA1151 to LGA1200, you’re more likely to already own an AMD Socket AM4-capable mainboard that can take an Athlon chip like the 200GE than an LGA1200 board. (Basic LGA1200 boards start at around $90 for options based on the B560 and H510 chipsets, much more than the cost of this Celeron.)
And though the Celeron G5920 wasn’t able to overtake the AMD competition, it’s still important to take note of the improvements inherent in the G5920 over the G4920. The G5920 is unquestionably a significantly better processor than that predecessor, and if you are set on building an Intel PC on a tight budget, then the G5920 is the better option of the two, with an upgrade path for at least one generation, unlike the known dead end that is the last generation’s LGA1151 socket.
Intel’s Celeron G5920 is a step above its predecessor with a sizable increase in performance, but it’s still slower in most tests than AMD’s lower-list-priced Athlon 200GE—if you can find one.
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