For the Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2019 shopping weekend, I bought the AMD Athlon 3000G processor, Microsoft Windows 10 (MD-100) certification practice test, and the AMD Ryzen 7 2600 processor to upgrade my editing PC. Why did I buy two very different AMD processors for the same PC, and a practice test for a certification I still haven’t taken?
AMD ATHLON 3000G
The first processor was the AMD Athlon 3000G budget processor for $50 USD that I pre-ordered at B&H. This processor wasn’t part of a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale. I found the B&H pre-order page, placed my order and posted a video before Thanksgiving Day. Amazon and Newegg still don’t have the 3000G listed for sale two weeks after AMD started shipping to retailers. The ship date on the B&H pre-order page is still “coming soon.”
Microsoft Windows 10 (MD-101) Practice Test
In late January I bought a Microsoft certification exam voucher with a free retake exam and a one-year expiration date. I still haven’t taken the Windows 10 (MD-100) exam, the voucher expires in less than two months, and the clock is ticking down. With that in mind, I bought the Vue Pearson official practice test for $66 with a 40% discount.
AMD RYZEN 7 2700
The second processor that I bought and already installed in my PC was the Ryzen 7 2700 for $140 USD. A $300 USD processor when it first came out two years ago. Since the Ryzen 3000-series processors came out earlier this year, the 2700 price varied from $170 USD to $190 USD. The price dropped to $140 USD at Amazon on Thanksgiving Day. I ordered it, got it on Saturday, and overclocked at 3.9GHz on Sunday.
Why did I pre-order the Athlon 3000G, a 2-core/4-thread processor, and then ordered the Ryzen 7 2700, an 8-core/16-thread processor, for my PC?
After six months with the Athlon 200GE overclocked to 3.8GHz, I needed a beefier processor to handle Davinci Resolve for editing 1080p video and perhaps 4K video in the future. Davinci Resolve was the only program I had that could push the 200GE to its limit. A limit that I’ve been noticing for several months since I switched over from Movavi. A five-minute video now renders in less than a minute with 16 threads instead of ten minutes with four threads.
As for the 3000G, I’m planning to test it against the 200GE in future YouTube videos. Most reviews for the 3000G noted a 10% performance increase over the 200GE at base clock speeds. Note that the 3000G clocks in 300MHz faster than the 200GE. What if both processors overclocked at the same speed? In my video covering the 3000G announcement, I predicted that the performance gain would be minimal at best.
Other than these three deals, I didn’t find much in the way of great deals on Amazon and Newegg. That’s almost as bad as going to Fry’s Electronics on Black Friday.