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Not the best value, but still a better value than the flagship

AMD's Ryzen 5000G series were a fixture on our Best CPUs for Gaming list for three years due to their convincing and clear value prop for budget gamers on the lowest end of the performance spectrum. Unfortunately, the long-awaited APU refresh, which comes in the form of the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G, moves forward to the AM5 platform, which incurs extra cost for the motherboards and memory. That limits them to an even smaller niche audience and makes it difficult to recommend them over other alternatives. However, if you're determined to build a system around the Ryzen 8000G series of chips, the Ryzen 5 8600G is the model to get.

The charts below outline three areas of performance: The geometric mean of our suite of integrated graphics tests at both 1920x1080 (FHD) and 1280x720 resolutions, the geometric mean of performance with a discrete GPU, and performance in single- and multi-threaded workloads.

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Ryzen 5 5600G — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

AMD's APUs are geared specifically for budget gaming rigs that don't use a discrete GPU, so the primary focus is on the iGPU benchmarks.

The current-gen flagship APU, the Ryzen 7 8700G, is 10% faster than the 8600G, but it costs $100 (44%) more, making the 8600G the clear value winner for this generation of APUs.

The Ryzen 5 8600G delivers impressive gen-on-gen gains due to the step forward to Zen 4 and RDNA 3 — overall, the chip is a massive 72% faster than its predecessor, the Ryzen 5 5600G, in 1080p gaming. Moving to 720p, the 8600G is 112% faster.

There's a fly in the ointment, though. The competing Core i3-13100 and GTX 1650 combo is much faster, and you could pair a previous-gen version of that chip, or an AMD chip, with an even lower-end GPU (like the RX 6600) and still come out ahead on performance while shrinking the pricing gap. The CPU+GPU combos also don't require quality-sapping upscaling to be competitive.

You also have to consider the higher costs associated with the AM5 platform. AMD has said that it will continue to bring new value processors to the AM4 platform due to the continued high pricing for DDR5, hinting that AM5's high pricing will persist for some time. You'll also need DDR5 memory, and while DDR5 pricing has fallen from the stratospheric heights we saw at launch, it remains significantly more expensive than DDR4.

The power use of an Intel CPU with an Nvidia GPU is substantially higher than the AMD APUs alone. AMD has a 65W TDP that accommodates a peak of 88W. The Nvidia GTX 1650 GDDR6 can use 75W alone, sometimes a bit more depending on the model, and the CPU adds another 65W. That means the AMD system will consume far less power, which is ideal for SFF and passively cooled systems.

The Ryzen 5 8600G does have impressive overclocking potential, especially in titles that benefit from increased memory bandwidth. Like the 8700G, the 8600G benefits from increased bandwidth more than low timings, so you don't have to splurge on the priciest EXPO kits. However, DDR5 pricing again rears its head when you're looking for the fastest overclockable memory kits.

AMD does have the distinction of being the first to offer a dedicated AI accelerator for the desktop PC, but that's a bit of a shallow win for now. AMD finds itself in a chicken-and-egg scenario here, as precious few applications currently leverage the unit. That will change in the future, but the AI engine will go largely unused for now.

AMD's desktop APUs may serve a small market, but the company rules the niche without any competition. Adding Hyper-RX with RSR and AFMF is a boon for budget gamers who are more willing to compromise on quality, but the performance of the competing CPU+GPU combos takes away some of that shine.

Yes, APUs serve an increasingly niche audience seeking high-performance systems without a discrete graphics card, such as some SFF and passively cooled system builds. We think AMD's pricing misses the mark on this generation of APUs, but if you were to select an 8000G model for your next build, the Ryzen 5 8600G is a far better value than the Ryzen 7 8700G, making it the go-to APU for this generation.