AMD BEHEMOTH
ALTHOUGH THE PHANTEKS P400A is a pretty slick-looking case, the build’s attention isn’t strictly focused on this or the machine’s looks for that matter. We’re sorry people, there is no off-the-wall flashy RGB here. The battle’s main focus is on which is the better chip to side with for an integrated graphics rig, AMD or Intel? Yes, it’s an age-old debate between AMD or Intel, much like the great PlayStation or Xbox wars of yesteryear.
We get it, it’s not always a clear-cut verdict either. There may be many pros and cons of both and that’s what we are hopefully going to explore with this build-off. We are hoping to show that you can get a decent gaming experience without the need for GPUs or hefty AIO coolers—and demonstrate the differences between an AMD or Intel build with this format applied. Of course, we aren’t expecting 4K with the sliders on full whack here, but we should get Full HD gameplay with steady decent frames.
The AMD Ryzen 7 5700G chip we have should put up a good fight in this battle, it’s probably one of the best choices for an AMD chip without the use of discrete graphics. This eight-core 16-thread chip is AMD’s first 7nm ‘Cezanne’ Zen 3 APU (accelerated processing unit). It comes with a 3.8GHz base and a 4.6GHz boost clock. Like all Zen3 chips, the interface steps up from DDR4-2933 to DDR4-3200. With the integrated GPU, this will help boost gaming performance. For AMD processors, RAM speed matters.
The best you can really get is 3733MHz sticks as the chip’s memory controller cut off at that speed, but they aren’t exactly the easiest to find at the moment. We have gone with two 8GB 3600MHz Crucial Ballistix RAM sticks, which will be more than good enough to get fast memory speeds for our machine.
Although a specific price wasn’t the MO for the builds, we have tried to keep things on the budget to a mid-range scale. The lack of GPUs should certainly help with this, although prices are slightly better than they were a few months ago. This should be an interesting challenge and we are excited for the outcome and what we can achieve through processors with integrated graphics.