Ryzen 8000G review: An integrated GPU that can beat a graphics card, for a price

Put me on the short list of people who can get excited about the humble, much-derided integrated GPU.

Yes, most of them are afterthoughts, designed for office desktops and laptops that will spend most of their lives rendering 2D images to a single monitor. But when integrated graphics push forward, it can open up possibilities for people who want to play games but can only afford a cheap desktop (or who have to make do with whatever their parents will pay for, which was the big limiter on my PC gaming experience as a kid).

That, plus an unrelated but accordant interest in building small mini-ITX-based desktops, has kept me interested in AMD’s G-series Ryzen desktop chips (which it sometimes calls “APUs,” to distinguish them from the Ryzen CPUs). And the Ryzen 8000G chips are a big upgrade from the 5000G series that immediately preceded them (this makes sense, because as we all know the number 8 immediately follows the number 5).

We’re jumping up an entire processor socket, one CPU architecture, three GPU architectures, and up to a new generation of much faster memory; especially for graphics, it’s a pretty dramatic leap. It’s an integrated GPU that can credibly beat the lowest tier of currently available graphics cards, replacing a $100–$200 part with something a lot more energy-efficient.

As with so many current-gen Ryzen chips, still-elevated pricing for the socket AM5 platform and the DDR5 memory it requires limit the 8000G series’ appeal, at least for now.

From laptop to desktop

AMD’s first Ryzen 8000 desktop processors are what the company used to call “APUs,” a combination of a fast integrated GPU and a reasonably capable CPU.

Credit: AMD

The 8000G chips use the same Zen 4 CPU architecture as the Ryzen 7000 desktop chips, but the way the rest of the chip is put together is pretty different. Like past APUs, these are actually laptop silicon (in this case, the Ryzen 7040/8040 series, codenamed Phoenix and Phoenix 2) repackaged for a desktop processor socket.

Generally, the real-world impact of this is pretty mild; in most ways, the 8700G and 8600G will perform a lot like any other Zen 4 CPU with the same number of cores (our benchmarks mostly bear this out). But to the extent that there is a difference, the Phoenix silicon will consistently perform just a little worse, because it has half as much L3 cache. AMD’s Ryzen X3D chips revolve around the performance benefits of tons of cache, so you can see why having less would be detrimental.

The other missing feature from the Ryzen 7000 desktop chips is PCI Express 5.0 support—Ryzen 8000G tops out at PCIe 4.0. This might, maybe, one day in the distant future, eventually lead to some kind of user-observable performance difference. Some recent GPUs use an 8-lane PCIe 4.0 interface instead of the typical 16 lanes, which limits performance slightly. But PCIe 5.0 SSDs remain rare (and PCIe 4.0 peripherals remain extremely fast), so it probably shouldn’t top your list of concerns.

The Ryzen 5 8500G is a lot different from the 8700G and 8600G, since some of the CPU cores in the Phoenix 2 chips are based on Zen 4c rather than Zen 4. These cores have all the same capabilities as regular Zen 4 ones—unlike Intel’s E-cores—but they’re optimized to take up less space rather than hit high clock speeds. They were initially made for servers, where cramming lots of cores into a small amount of space is more important than having a smaller number of faster cores, but AMD is also using them to make some of its low-end consumer chips physically smaller and presumably cheaper to produce. AMD didn’t send us a Ryzen 8500G for review, so we can’t see exactly how Phoenix 2 stacks up in a desktop.

The 8700G and 8600G chips are also the only ones that come with AMD’s “Ryzen AI” feature, the brand AMD is using to refer to processors with a neural processing unit (NPU) included. Sort of like GPUs or video encoding/decoding blocks, these are additional bits built into the chip that handle things that CPUs can’t do very efficiently—in this case, machine learning and AI workloads.

Most PCs still don’t have NPUs, and as such they are only barely used in current versions of Windows (Windows 11 offers some webcam effects that will take advantage of NPU acceleration, but for now that’s mostly it). But expect this to change as they become more common and as more AI-accelerated text, image, and video creating and editing capabilities are built into modern operating systems.

The last major difference is the GPU. Ryzen 7000 includes a pair of RDNA2 compute units that perform more or less like Intel’s desktop integrated graphics: good enough to render your desktop on a monitor or two, but not much else. The Ryzen 8000G chips include up to 12 RDNA3 CUs, which—as we’ve already seen in laptops and portable gaming systems like the Asus ROG Ally that use the same silicon—is enough to run most games, if just barely in some cases.

That gives AMD’s desktop APUs a unique niche. You can use them in cases where you can’t afford a dedicated GPU—for a time during the big graphics card shortage in 2020 and 2021, a Ryzen 5700G was actually one of the only ways to build a budget gaming PC. Or you can use them in cases where a dedicated GPU won’t fit, like super-small mini ITX-based desktops.

The main argument that AMD makes is the affordability one, comparing the price of a Ryzen 8700G to the price of an Intel Core i5-13400F and a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU (this card is nearly five years old, but it remains Nvidia’s newest and best GPU available for less than $200).

Let’s check on performance first, and then we’ll revisit pricing.

CPU performance and power

The processor performance isn’t the most exciting thing about the 8000G series this far into Zen 4’s life cycle, but the jump from Zen 3 to Zen 4 still brings noteworthy performance improvements if you’re comparing it to the 5000G series.

A combination of architectural improvements, RAM speed increases, and clock speed boosts make the 8700G 20 or 30 percent faster than the 5700G at single-threaded tasks, depending on the benchmark you look at, and between 30 and 66 percent faster in multi-threaded workloads.

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As expected, this does make it a shade slower than the Ryzen 7700 (or 7700X) and quite a bit slower than the comparably priced Core i5-14600K, which rides a gob of E-cores to impressive multithreaded performance scores. People who intend to use the CPU with a dedicated graphics card right away should buy one of those chips instead.

But on the flip side, if you plan to use the integrated GPU for a while and step up to a dedicated GPU eventually, or if the 8700G happens to be available for a lot less money, performance is still good enough that it shouldn’t hold most current-gen graphics cards back.

As a last thing to note, AMD’s generation-over-generation performance improvements are good enough that the 6-core Ryzen 5 8600G can match or beat the 8-core Ryzen 7 5700G’s multi-core performance scores while significantly outrunning its single-core scores, so it’s still an upgrade even if you opt for the cheaper chip.

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Both chips are reasonably power-efficient in our Handbrake video encoding test, though the 8700G ends up completing the work in less time and so ends up being more efficient than the 8600G in this particular task. I tested the 8700G at both its default 65 W TDP setting and a higher 105 W TDP setting, and the performance difference was measurable but not especially noteworthy. Just stick with the 65 W default and enjoy a slightly cooler chip that uses less power—or use AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive and/or Curve Optimizer features to do a bit of automated performance tuning—rather than just bumping up the TDP.

Graphics performance

AMD compares the Radeon 780M mostly favorably to 2019’s GeForce GTX 1650, currently Steam’s second-most-popular GPU. I don’t have one of those on hand, but I do have a GPU you might consider buying instead: Intel’s Arc A380, which retails for as little as $120, typically manages to outrun the 1650 by a smidge and supports more modern amenities like AV1 video encoding and ray-tracing support (not that GPUs this slow can do much with it). Yes, Arc still has weaknesses, but with a year-plus of driver updates under its belt, it’s not bad for what it is.

I also decided to compare the integrated GPUs to the Radeon RX 7600, which, at $269, is the cheapest current-generation GPU in AMD or Nvidia’s lineups (both dedicated GPUs are paired here with the 8600G as their CPU because it was convenient, but you could substitute in any reasonably modern processor with six or more cores; it won’t hold back a midrange GPU). You could consider anything from the $200-ish Radeon RX 6600 to the $300 RTX 4060 here, too—the point was just to choose a modern 1080p-targeted graphics card to help put the Ryzen 8000G chips’ value in context.

(I have largely spared Intel the embarrassment of including its UHD 770 integrated GPU here, which is not competitive but also not really trying to be; same for the basic GPU included with the Ryzen 7000 processors.)

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To the Radeon 780M’s credit, it usually manages to match or slightly beat the A380 in most of the tests we ran, or at least keep it close. It’s definitely a plausible substitute for a low-end dedicated graphics card. The Radeon 760M in the 8600G is on the other side of the A380, losing to it consistently but again, usually keeping it close. The 780M is about 15 percent faster than the 760M in most games, though the synthetic 3DMark benches showed it running even closer, and it did a lot worse in Returnal for some reason—generally, though, not bad given that the 760M only has two-thirds as many GPU cores.

Compared to the previous-generation 5700G, the 8700G is moving from 8 CUs to 12, jumping three architecture generations, and (maybe most importantly of all) getting boosted memory bandwidth thanks to DDR5. Anything short of a stunning performance increase would, frankly, be a bit of a disappointment.

And the Radeon 780M really shines in comparison. In these games, the 8700G is three or sometimes even four times faster than the 5700G, and the 8600G is between two and three times faster. You probably wouldn’t actually try to play the games we’re testing here at 1080p ultra on either GPU, but the 780M at least puts playable performance within reach. The 8700G typically performs better at 1080p than the 5700G does at 720p, to put its performance in context.

Adjusting the 8700G’s TDP from the default 65 W up to 105 W had no statistically significant effect on speeds. Again, doing some overclocking (either automated or manually) could help with this, and it was frequently possible to squeeze a couple hundred extra MHz out of the older Vega-integrated GPUs. But it’s not something we had time to experiment with.

The affordability argument

AMD compares the 8700G’s cost and performance favorably to a Core i5-13400F paired with a GTX 1650 GPU. It’s not untrue, but it’s not the whole story.

Credit: AMD

There are two holes in AMD’s affordability argument. The first is that if you want the best GPU, you have to pay for the most expensive CPU to go along with it, since only the Ryzen 8700G features a fully enabled Radeon 780M GPU. The second is that the Ryzen 8000G chips are yoked to AMD’s AM5 platform, which, over a year after its release, remains expensive enough that AMD is still creating new AM4 processors to help it compete with Intel’s low-end and midrange offerings.

The main problem here is DDR5, which remains more expensive than DDR4 and gets even more so once you step up to the DDR5-6400 you’d need to see the same performance we did. The 32GB kit AMD sent us for testing costs about $125 as of this writing, a frankly ridiculous amount to spend on RAM for what is being pitched as an entry-level gaming system; there are no 16GB kits that run at DDR5-6400 speeds, either. For most budget gaming builds, you’re typically trying to shave as much of the cost from the CPU and RAM that you can so you can spend more on the GPU; in an Intel or socket AM4 budget build, I’d spend $40 or less on a pair of cheap 8GB sticks and call it a day.

So here’s some very rough math for three hypothetical PCs: an i5-13400F/GTX 1650 build like the one AMD uses in its comparisons, a complete Ryzen 7 8700G build, and an RX 7600 build where everything else is cut to the bone to make more room in the budget for a GPU.

For simplicity’s sake, assume that the case and other common components (SSD, keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc.) cost the same amount for each of these builds. For the AMD sample i5-13400F build, I used the exact components listed in the company’s CES slide deck, even though I would never actually make these choices when building a system around a GTX 1650.

Due mostly to RAM and motherboard costs, the 8700G build ends up costing enough that the RX 7600-based build is the better deal if you’re strictly trying to get as many frames per second as you can for as little money as you can—a lot better graphics performance for a little less money, thanks to a cheap AM4 platform and the ability to choose 16GB of DDR4 rather than being stuck with 32GB of DDR5.

It’s just hard to find places to save money for the 8700G build, even with lower-wattage power supply requirements, or even if you went with 16GB of DDR5-6000 ($78) instead of the 32GB kit, or if you went with an A620 motherboard instead of the B650. There’s even room to go up a little with our custom budget build—you could buy a slightly better processor or 32GB of RAM and still come in around the same price as the 8700G system. The one point in the 8700G build’s favor is that the CPU is going to be much faster than a Ryzen 5500, which could be a factor if you plan to use the PC for performance-intensive activities other than gaming.

As for the i5-13400F and GTX 1650 comparison, the 8700G build is cheaper, but this scenario is a bit contrived because of AMD’s use of a DDR5-equipped motherboard. Go with an ASRock B660M Pro RS board from the same series as the B650 Pro RS ($95) and 32GB of DDR4-3600 RAM ($60), and suddenly, this Intel system ends up a little cheaper than the 8700G build, too.

All of this can and will change as RAM prices and AM5 motherboard prices gradually come down and if/when the 8700G’s price comes down a bit from its MSRP. An 8600G build would also be a bit more reasonably priced at the cost of some CPU and GPU performance. But long story short, with the market as it is, there are better budget builds you can scrape together if maximizing game performance is the goal.

Conclusions

I still think the 8700G and 8600G are an interesting fit for GPU-less, energy-efficient mini-ITX-based desktops. The chip needs way less power and space than a system with a low-end dedicated card, and the 8700G, in particular, could be the heart of a space-efficient entry-level gaming PC or workstation. The local NPU will also be nice to have if and when more software starts taking advantage of it, and it’ll be at least a year or so before there’s any other way to get one in a self-built desktop system.

I also don’t doubt that some of these chips will make it into cheap home and office desktops, where their graphics performance may occasionally come as a pleasant surprise to young gamers who are making the best of what they’ve got.

That said, I think that platform pricing makes this particular generation a bit less appealing than previous G-series chips. Pricing for the 8700G, in particular, is pretty high for a system that will rely on integrated graphics. Buying the RAM you need to get optimal performance is doing a lot to wreck the value proposition, though this won’t be the case forever.