In our look at AMD's Ryzen 8000G series processors,
we are gonna be laser focused on the two SKUs that AMD actually wants anybody talking about,
the 8700G and the 8600G.
And the reason for that is the other ones are really a lot less exciting.
AMD didn't mention this to me when we covered these chips
at their announcement at CES this year, but the two lower end chips not only use Zenfors C cores,
the more compact ones, they also have fewer PCIe lanes,
which could be a problem for the future expandability of your system.
If you kind of see our conclusion on these chips, you're gonna see why we think is a pretty big problem.
For now though, let's focus on the 8600G and 8700G.
They come packaged about like you'd expect from AMD. Got your little sticker in there.
And as with any of their AM5 socket processors,
there are no pins on the back. Instead, it uses an LGA or pad style mounting mechanism
with the pins being inside the CPU socket. They don't come with much in the way of accessories,
but unlike AMD's X series chips, they do at least come with a cooler.
It's a simple aluminum heatsink with what appears to be a 92 millimeter fan.
Of course, if you step up to the Ryzen 7 variant, you get a simple aluminum heatsink
with a 90 millimeter fan, but taller.
Which it doesn't need to be. Its height was fine as it was the way before.
No, and I'll seriousness, being taller is better in this case,
more heat dissipation.
In all seriousness, the main claim to fame of these chips is not that they have better CPU performance.
They use the same Zen 4, or in the case of the lower end ones,
Zen 4C chips that we've seen in AMD's previous processors,
but they're a new model year. So they get a new number
because that's apparently how AMD does things now. And they have onboard graphics
that is now on par with what AMD has been shipping in their mobile solutions.
So just like we've seen in mobile consoles,
like the ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go,
we can run AAA games.
Okay, not high details, 120 FPS, but 1080p low,
30 to 60 FPS, does that seem realistic? Maybe even a little faster,
because we're running in a desktop form factor now, which means we can unlock a little bit more power budget.
Although my understanding is that most of this has gone
to enabling higher base clocks on the CPU portion of the chip rather than the GPU.
Though it should be noted that only the 8,700G actually gets the higher base clocks.
The 8,600G is on par with its mobile equivalent.
I've got a bunch of benchmarks from the Labs team, which we will take a look at very soon,
because AMD claims that these things are in a similar performance class
as an Intel CPU paired with a dedicated NVIDIA GPU
at around the same price, which is a pretty bold claim indeed,
230 to $330.
That is a lot to spend on a CPU in a system
where the budget didn't account for a dedicated graphics card.
However, if we think of this as a CPU and a graphics card,
well, all of a sudden it starts to become more reasonable. Now it should be noted that there are CPU-GPU combos
that would net you a better value than this today,
like if you were to go for AMD's own AM4 platform
and then an RX 6,600GPU. But as long as this is close,
I think it's a lot more compelling. And the reason for that is that
you're not buying into a dead platform.
And I'm an upgrade, right? Like I think of every PC as a PC of Theseus.
So if there's something that I'm going to be able to add to over time, having Zenfone cores,
having a more modern platform, that's something that's gonna appeal to me a lot.
Immediately, I'm noticing that loading times are about what I would expect for a modern platform,
which makes sense. You get anywhere from six to eight Zenfone cores
with the two chips we're looking at today. And golly gee whizzikers,
I don't have an FPS counterup, but this is Cyberpunk 2077,
running at 1080p low.
And if I had to guess, I'd say this is running at anywhere from 30 to 40 frames per second.
Maybe even 40, 45. That is super cool.
How about this cop?
Look at that, I won. The power of AMD compels me.
Now obviously AMD's being a little bit optimistic
in their marketing materials for these chips. I mean, when they say 60 FPS,
they mean with FSR, their upscaling technology.
But if you can get 30 without upscaling technology,
you will be experiencing Cyberpunk, gosh darn it, and without a GPU.
All those years ago, AMD was all AMD fusion, man.
We're gonna put CPUs with GPUs in the same chip, man.
It's gonna be so cool. And here we are, what, 10, 11 years later,
and they're finally doing it. And there's even workloads that really will take advantage
of both of those elements of the chip. Okay, we didn't really test an event with the GPU,
but we could have, and this really highlights what I was mentioning before
about how much better it is to have a modern platform with modern cores compared to going AM4.
A Ryzen 5,500, 600G falls way behind these chips.
Also in Blender, they put up very competitive CPU numbers
with in particular the 8,700G outclassing anything else
in this kind of price range. If on the Intel side, you had to account
for that you need a dedicated GPU because they do not have anything even near
this kind of performance in onboard graphics. And as for 7-Zip, it's pretty much the same story.
These are powerful CPUs with really decent GPUs on them.
And some workloads like stable diffusion will make a lot of sense to run on the GPU.
Actually, for that matter, they could make sense to run on the AI course,
but much like AMD's promises 10 years ago with Fusion,
we haven't seen too many consumer applications for these AI cores just yet.
We're just kind of hoping that by the time we would use them every day, this chip is not completely irrelevant.
Oh, what were the cyberpunk numbers? I never actually confirmed. We're pretty close.
Oh man, I'm good. 46, 37 FPS, 1% lows, average 46, dang.
I don't even need frame view, man. If we move on to something like Rocket League,
I mean, this is 100 FPS easy.
And it's not just the smoothness of the animations. A big part of what makes higher frame rates feel better
is that there's less latency. So I can really feel that my inputs
are being registered on the screen much more quickly. Having a look at the rest of our results,
it's clear that whether you choose the 8700G or the 8600G,
no, you're not going to be on par necessarily
with an entry-level GeForce card. But what you will be is able to game now
with the potential to upgrade to a real graphics card in the future,
like one that comes on a card, while still retaining these high performance
ZenFour CPU cores. Is this going to be the right path for everybody?
No, I don't think so at all. If you are looking for the absolute best bang for your buck,
I'm always going to advocate for going for what gives you the most FPS per dollar today.
And a lot of the times that's going to be something that's not going to have as much of an upgrade path
or it's going to be something that comes secondhand. In terms of something that could be reasonably future-proof,
I love this as much as I did when AMD first announced it.
Finally, something for the entry-level gamers out there,
a viable option that isn't just, well, why don't you buy our old stuff?
Which isn't to say that I don't have some annoyances with AMD about this launch.
One of the things they glossed over when they did my briefing was the number
of PCIe lanes on these chips. The 86 and 8700G do not have enough PCIe connectivity
to connect a graphics card at the full Buy 16 link width.
So you're limited to a Buy 8 link to your GPU.
With PCIe being as fast as it is these days, it's probably not going to impact things too much
unless you were putting a much older GPU on it, which you wouldn't because it has a powerful GPU on it
already, but especially on the lower-end chips
where they only get a Buy 4 link to a GPU,
they're really shooting themselves in the foot if part of the value of these chips
is supposed to be that PCIe upgrade story
because I would not want to use a Buy 4 link to my GPU.
Unless I was on a laptop using Thunderbolt or something like that.
So still room for improvement, but overall, I'm happy to have an entry-level desktop option
because that just hasn't made sense to me for so long that they have these great integrated GPUs on mobile,
but we have to slum it on the desktop with these super cut-down versions.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why don't you check out our unboxing of the RX7600XT, a new GPU from AMD that is an option.
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