AMD Ryzen 7 5700G Review: Fastest Integrated Graphics Ever

[harlan4096]

Your best choice, if you don't use discrete graphics.

The eight-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 5700G marks the arrival of AMD's first 7nm 'Cezanne' Zen 3 APUs for desktop PCs, and today we're taking an early look at the chips. AMD plans to use the Cezanne chips to plug big price gaps in its Ryzen 5000 lineup that dominates our Best CPU list and CPU Benchmark hierarchy, but they're limited to the OEM market until the full retail launch on August 5, 2021. Anticipation is high, though, so we grabbed an off-the-shelf system from HP to take the Ryzen 7 5700G for a spin.

Cezanne will be the first AMD APUs available at retail since the quad-core Zen+ "Picasso" models landed back in 2019. AMD actually replaced its Picasso chips with the eight-core Zen 2-powered Ryzen Pro "Renoir" series in 2020, but in a disappointing development, it reserved those chips for OEMs. Unfortunately, that means APUs with the aging Zen+ architecture are the best you can find at retail, even though AMD has already progressed through three chip generations in the interim (Zen 2, XT, Zen 3). 

AMD Ryzen 5000 G-Series 65W Cezanne APUs
CPU Arch. Price Cores/ Threads Base/ Boost Freq. GPU Cores GPU Freq. (MHz) TDP L3 (MB)

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Ryzen 7 5700G Zen 3 $359 8 / 16 3.8 / 4.6 RX Vega 8 2000 65W 16
Ryzen 5 5600G Zen 3 $259 6 / 12 3.9 / 4.4 RX Vega 7 1900 65W 16
Ryzen 3 5300G Zen 3 N/a 4 / 8 4.0 / 4.2 RX Vega 6 1700 65W 8

AMD's decision to keep those chips off the retail market couldn't have come at a worse time. The pandemic triggered an unprecedented PC upgrade cycle right as supply chain disruptions and component shortages rocked the globe and cryptomining reemerged, all conspiring to create the most severe GPU shortage in history. With discrete GPUs nowhere to be found, the Renoir chips and their serviceable integrated GPUs would have been a godsend for gamers looking to wait out the GPU shortage, but the shortage found even AMD's last-gen Picasso chips disappearing entirely from shelves.

AMD launched its Ryzen 5000 chips in the interim, but the company's pivot to premium pricing exposed two weaknesses in its product stack, including a steep $300 minimum price of entry to the Zen 3 family and a big $150 gap between its Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 families. Unfortunately for AMD, Intel's Rocket Lake blasted in a few months ago and plugged those pricing gaps, catching AMD uncharacteristically flat-footed.

The Cezanne APUs, which come with Zen 3 execution cores paired with the Radeon Vega graphics engine, look to solve several problems at once. Instead of its traditional separation of the CPU and APU lines, AMD slots the Cezanne chips right into its Ryzen 5000 stack — AMD says they fill the role of the standard "non-X" models that traditionally offer more attractive price points at a given core count by sacrificing peak clock speed for a lower TDP. That means the 5700G should essentially slot in as a Ryzen 7 5800, which doesn't make a lot of sense given that AMD actually has a Ryzen 7 5800 that is OEM-only. We'll dive into that a bit more later.

According to AMD, Cezanne is the cure for all of Ryzen 5000's pricing ills, with the $359 eight-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 5700G plugging the gulf between the Ryzen 7 and 5 lineups, while the $259 six-core Ryzen 5 5600G reduces the steep price of entry to the Zen 3 lineup. Both chips also come with a bundled Wraith Stealth cooler, sweetening the deal.

AMD is still holding back several of its lower-end APUs from the retail market, but given the ongoing graphics card shortages, the Cezanne APUs could be a welcome sight for the gaming market. That is if the GPU shortage persists into August, and if these chips actually slot in between the performance of their Ryzen counterparts. That's a tall order given that the tradeoffs associated with their monolithic die design, which differs significantly from the chiplet-based Ryzen 5000 chips. Let's see how it all works out. 

AMD Ryzen 7 5700G Specifications and Pricing

The Ryzen 5000G family spans from four to eight cores and has the Zen 3 architecture that provides a 19% IPC uplift over the Zen 2 architecture used in the previous-gen Ryzen 4000G models.

AMD is only bringing the eight-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 5700G and six-core 12-thread Ryzen 5 5600G to retail, at least for now. In addition, AMD currently hasn't announced when it will bring the four-core eight-thread Ryzen 3 5300G or the 35W GE-Series models to retail, meaning we won't see any significant change to our list of Best Cheap CPUs any time soon. 
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