Brand New Zen4 RDNA3 APUs, The Ryzen 5 8600G And Ryzen 7 8700G

For When Integrated Graphics Is Just Enough?

The new 8000G series is interesting, as it combines both Zen4 and RDNA3 into a single relatively inexpensive chip.  The Ryzen 5 8600G, has six multithreaded Zen4 cores running at a 4.3GHz base, 5.0GHz Turbo and a Radeon 760M with 8CUs and hitting 2.8GHz for a cost of $229.   The more powerful Ryzen 7 8700G has eight multithreaded cores that run at 4.2/5.1GHz, the same Radeon 760M but with 12 CUs and can hit 2.9GHz costs an extra hundred bucks at $329.  These two desktop versions of mobile chips both run at 65W, which is very important if these are going to be used in tiny systems.

We are already quite familiar with the performance of Zen 4 and the 8000G series performs as you would expect, indeed the Ryzen 7 8700G outperforms the Ryzen 7 5800X.  That sentence was somewhat painful to write on a rig powered by that same chip.  The graphics are the big question for potential APU users, and Guru of 3D tested both the Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G in a number of tests.

In Far Cry 6 the Ryzen 5 8600G is not great as the older Ryzen 9 7950X completely trashes it, while the Ryzen 7 5800X … provides essentially the same results.  Assassins Creed: Mirage is a little kinder to the 5800X but that is the only exception.  It seems that in general the extra CUs and slight frequency bump do not translate into better performance.  You are better off relying on a RX 6500 XT 4GB with either chip.

If you aren’t gaming though, these are brilliant APUs for light browsing and watching videos, but you will be disappointed if you were hoping to play Crysis.