AMD Ryzen 5 8600G review — the new value iGPU gaming champion

AMD Hyper-RX

The Ryzen 5 8600G's RDNA 3 iGPU brings support for new technologies that weren't available with its older 5000G-series models. The 5700G supports the Hyper-RX suite, which includes the in-driver Radeon Super Resolution upscaling tech (built on FSR 1 spatial upscaling), Anti-Lag+, Radeon Boost, and frame generation with AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF). Simply clicking the "Hyper-RX" option in AMD's management software enables all four features.

We tested with all features of Hyper-RX enabled to remain consistent with our prior testing, but you can add or remove features separately. We tested with upscaling from 720p to 1080p with this round of tests, as our previous experiments with upscaling from 990p didn't yield substantial improvements in all titles. We did see noticeable blurriness with fast-moving motion and text in several titles with 720p upscaling, but this is a tunable parameter, so you can adjust as needed. We also encountered occasional odd behavior in some titles and intermittent hiccups in Cyberpunk 2077.

Hyper-RX does require compromising on image quality. However, the amount and intensity of the reduced quality can vary by title — and even by scene. Whether or not the tradeoff is acceptable is largely subjective, so keep that in mind when you view our benchmarks. Our measurement utility doesn't capture the additional frames generated by AFMF — the only way to measure those extra frames is through AMD's driver overlay.

AMD Ryzen 5 8600G Power Consumption and Efficiency 

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AMD's APUs have always had exceptional power efficiency — the prior-gen 5700G and 5600G are among the most power-efficient chips we've ever tested. Much of this has to do with the process node advantage and monolithic die; AMD's chiplet-based processors not only have one large central die on a less efficient node, but they also have to spend some of their power budget transferring data between the dies. AMD has dominated power efficiency metrics for several chip generations, but Intel's competing processors are closing the gap.

The Ryzen 5 8600G pulls 78W under a full multi-threaded AVX 512 workload in the y-cruncher benchmark, which is a mere 1% less than the Ryzen 7 8700G, which has two more cores. That's still 37% and 61% less than the other eight-core Zen 4 chips, the 7600X and 7700X, respectively. Overall, the 8600G draws a very similar amount of power as the 8700G, but it has two fewer cores, leading to slower performance in our workloads. As such, it falls behind the 8700G in our renders-per-day-per-watt efficiency tests. 

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The final image takes a slightly different look at power consumption by calculating the cumulative energy required to execute an x264 and x265 HandBrake workload. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart.

These workloads are comprised of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the time required to finish the job (bottom axis), thus generating a really useful power chart. Bear in mind that faster compute times and lower task energy requirements are ideal. That means processors that fall the closest to the bottom left corner of the chart are the best.

Due to its similar power consumption and two additional cores over the Ryzen 5 8600G, the Ryzen 7 8700G again proves to be best in this measure of efficiency, with the 8600G not far behind.

AMD Ryzen 5 8600G Overclocking, and Test Setup

AMD's original BIOS revisions for our Ryzen 7 87000G review had an issue with STAPM (Skin Temperature Aware Power Management) that resulted in lower performance in a subset of heavy multi-threaded workloads. We retested with a newer revision of the BIOS that corrected that issue for this review, and have now updated the results in our original 8700G review. Overall, the impact was minor in gaming — it only impacted F1 2023 when testing with a discrete GPU, which is a niche use case for this chip. We saw a more pronounced impact with multi-threaded workloads with the 8700G, which gained 3.7% more performance in our cumulative metric. In contrast, the 8600G only gained 1.25% more performance. The largest impacts were seen in Cinebench 2024 and extended Blender workloads.

We tested the processors following our usual policy of adhering to the warrantied memory configuration for our stock testing. For AMD, this is DDR5-5200. AMD presents its benchmarks with overclocked DDR5-6400 and also encourages reviewers to test at this speed, but the company does not warranty that level of performance. Officially, AMD deems this to be overclocking, and voltage settings can vary by vendor when you employ the EXPO one-click overclocking profiles.

We used the DDR5-6400 EXPO profile for our memory kit for the configurations marked with "PBO EXPO" in our charts. We also used Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) with the 'motherboard' power presets for our overclocked configuration. We then enabled a 10X scalar, 200 MHz extra boost for both CPU and GPU, -20 undervolt using the Curve Optimizer for the CPU cores, and a -10 UV for the GPU cores. We applied these settings to both the overclocked 8700G and the 8600G configurations.

Microsoft has advised gamers to disable several security features to boost gaming performance. As such, we disabled secure boot, virtualization support, and fTPM/PTT on all systems for maximum performance. You can find further hardware details in the table below.