AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
The AMD APU makes a more-than-welcome return for Chris Szewczyk.
The AMD APU makes a more-thanwelcome return for Chris Szewczyk.
AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs has been well received, though, like every other manufacturer of CPUs and graphics cards, AMD has been affected by wider semiconductor market issues. Limited supply meant that production priority was given to the high-end chips in both the red team’s CPU and GPU stacks. That means we haven’t seen any affordable Zen 3-based CPUs – at least not in the retail market.
This doesn’t necessarily change today with the introduction of the ‘Cezanne’ family of APUs, which combines its strong Zen 3 architecture with capable Vega-based integrated graphics, and are the first in the retail market since the release of the Zen+ based 3200G and 3400G in mid-2019.
Here we have a Zen 3-based processor with a 7nm, 180mm2 10.7 billion transistor monolithic die, with eight cores and 16 threads. And by monolithic we mean that it doesn’t match the chiplet design of the other Ryzen 5000-series CPUs, instead squeezing everything into one traditional package design.
Sacrifices have been made
The 5700G has a base frequency of 3.8GHz and a boost frequency of 4.6GHz, yet it still has a desirable 65W TDP. But to meet this 65W target, some sacrifices had to be made; it’s not simply a down-clocked 5800X with integrated graphics bolted on. You lose half of the L3 cache (16MB versus the 32MB of the 5800X) and you also lose PCIe 4.0 support, meaning you don’t get access to the best SSDs around today.
The integrated graphics does count as best-in-class, even though it’s still based on the ageing, albeit reworked and well-optimised, Vega architecture. The 5700G’s graphics performance is class leading, but as usual, integrated graphics can’t provide the horsepower of even a low-end discrete GPU.
Productivity and gaming tasks all take a big step forward over the popular Zen 2 Ryzen 7 3700X. The exception being sequential SSD performance, where the lack of PCIe 4.0 counts against it when put up against the rest of the Ryzen 5000 clique. The 5800X, with its higher boost clock, extra TDP headroom, and increased cache is the better performer. That’s as you’d expect, and under CPUlimited gaming loads, the extra cache is helpful in terms of gaining higher frame rates.
When it comes to integrated graphics performance, however, there’s the 5700G and then there’s clear daylight to the competition. This means games from a few years ago, or lessdemanding eSport titles are perfectly playable. Intel’s Xe is a step forward over older UHD graphics, but the EU counts are simply too low in its 14nm Rocket Lake processors to be competitive.
Zen 3 processors deliver awesome power efficiency and the 5700G follows that trait. While looping benchmarks, we saw a peak power consumption of 77W, which is impressive. Don’t forget that something like a Core i7 11700K can use three times that figure.
If you’re looking for a powerful HTPC or small formfactor machine, a PC for heavy multitasking, or you need something with integrated graphics to tide you over until the GPU market returns to normality, then the 5700G is an awesome APU. It’s also going to be a big upgrade for someone coming from a PC that’s a few years old. Add a high-end GPU, even a GeForce RTX 3090 or Radeon RX 6900 XT with all the eye candy turned up, and you’d barely lose any real-world performance compared to any other processor we could mention.
You get the strong IPC and multi-threaded prowess that Zen 3 brings to the table, paired with top-end integrated graphics. You can run a monitor or two and enjoy some basic gaming, or even better than that: true gaming with older or eSport titles, all while keeping around a 65W TDP.