We have massively assessed the accuracy of various approximate methodologies in yielding accurate geometries of atmospheric molecular clusters compared to a reference DF-MP2/augcc-pVQZ level of theory. Out of the tested semi-empirical methods (PM6, PM7, GFN1-xTB, GFN2-xTB and AMC-xTB) we find that the newly parameterized Atmospheric Molecular Cluster (AMC) extended tight-binding method is vastly superior. Hence, we can recommend that AMC-xTB is used for pre-optimization during configurational sampling of atmospheric molecular clusters.