AMD Ryzen 7 5700G Review

As AMD's powerhouse Zen desktop CPU architecture keeps evolving, the rising tide boosting the Ryzen 5000 Series has finally reached AMD's most value-minded CPUs: the Ryzen G Series, equipped with integrated graphics processors (IGPs). Most of AMD's Ryzen processors lack on-chip graphics, a key consideration in these days of wildly inflated video-card prices and campouts to buy a GPU. With the launch of the $359 Ryzen 7 5700G and the $259 Ryzen 5 5600G processors, AMD cracks open its silicon treasure chest to address an urgent need: robust graphics for gaming and more without a GPU, plus eight cores of CPU grunt. And the 5700G is, indeed, a gem.

The Return of the APUs

AMD no longer refers to its IGP-enabled CPUs by its own old, familiar term, APUs (for "accelerated processing units," to distinguish them from its IGP-less chips). But the name has stuck around the industry throughout the years. Now, these new APUs aren't 100% strictly new, on a technicality. Today is just the launch day, and on August 5, the general public gets the option to buy either of these APUs on the open market. The chips, however, have been available to own in a handful of OEM desktops (among them, versions of HP's Omen gaming towers) since their mid-2021 unveiling.

With AMD's Ryzen 5000 Series already impressing us up and down the stack, it's not a shock to see the Ryzen 7 5700G once again resetting our expectations of what a processor in its category can do in 2021. As GPUs remain scarce, your average PC builder might be looking at APUs for the first time in a while. (Indeed, this is the first new Ryzen APU the company has issued for retail sale since the fall of 2019.) And casual esports gamers should seriously consider what they value most in their setups after they get a look at what the 5700G can do in games like Rainbow Six: Siege.

The eight-core Ryzen 7 5700G can feel excessive at times, but the pricing is reasonable versus other eight-core options. And the stellar performance quickly puts that worry to rest if you are speed-minded. Whether you're building your first gaming PC on a budget that excludes a graphics card, or just need a content-creation engine that cuts out that pesky GPU requirement, AMD's Ryzen 7 5700G easily earns its Editors' Choice award as one of the fastest and most value-conscious IGP-equipped desktop chips on shelves today.

AMD Ryzen 7 5700G Specs: The Best of Both Worlds

As the flagship entry of the new AMD Ryzen 5000G Series, the eight-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 5700G processor, part of AMD's desktop CPU class dubbed "Cezanne," almost seems to punch a little too strong for its station…

On the first tab above are the two new APUs, the closest equivalent Ryzen chip with an IGP and its predecessor (the 5800X and 3800X), and AMD's last, best APU you could buy (the Ryzen 5 3400G, more about which in a moment). Right off the bat, the non-CPU-obsessed might be wondering: Did AMD pull an Apple (and a Samsung, and a Microsoft, and a…), and skip a naming generation? Where's the 4000G Series?

The Ryzen 7 5700G is indeed succeeding a Ryzen 7 4700G, and there are other 4000G Series CPUs in the world. However, that chip, along with all other desktop APUs in the Ryzen 4000G Series ("Renoir") family, were sold only as a part of complete OEM PCs, when they quietly launched in mid-2020. They're still out there. But you couldn't buy those chips on their own via normal channels.

Here, however, are the specs of the closest Ryzen 4000G OEM chips to the new ones...

All along the way, you can see the inspiration of Renoir in Cezanne, with both sharing the same RX Vega 8 eight-core IGP, 7nm lithography, and overall architectural layout. That's mostly where the similarities end, with the Ryzen 7 5700G offering up slight bumps over the 4700G in clock speeds and L3 cache size. (That and the not-so-small detail of moving from Zen 2 cores in the 4000G Series, up to Zen 3 cores in AMD's Cezanne-based entries.)

Last, there's the all-important fact that you can actually buy a 5000G Series chip without a whole PC attached to it, unlike the Ryzen 4000G options out there. We never got a chance to test a 4000G Series CPU for ourselves, so you'll notice in our detailed benchmarks below that this specific comparison point is missing. It was also missing from the benchmarks in the reviewer's guidance we were given prior to the launch, with AMD opting instead to compare the Ryzen 7 5700G's performance to a pick from the last generation of APUs that was available for individual purchase: the "Picasso"-based AMD Ryzen 5 3400G, itself an Editors' Choice pick.

Now we're onto Cezanne, though, and one has to wonder: How many CPU cores does an APU owner really need? A system-on-a-chip (SoC) has a lot of different applications, and previous-generation APUs like the $149 Ryzen 5 3400G have proven popular among OEMs and system builders alike as a reasonably priced all-in-one option. That chip had just four cores, while the Ryzen 7 5700G sports double that (eight), along with increased base and boost clocks, and much more cache memory. What kind of eight-core tasks could an APU buyer get up to on a daily basis, really?

It's worth looking at that in light of the Ryzen 7 5700G's price. AMD's last buyable flagship APU, the Ryzen 5 3400G, at list price came in at less than half the introductory price of the 5700G. That puts the Ryzen 7 5700G in an interesting niche in the mainstream CPU market. Eight cores isn't a bad thing to have at this price point, of course, but when considering the most popular use cases for these types of chips, six-core options like the Ryzen 5 5600G may make sense for that broader audience.

Every Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G comes bundled with a Wraith Stealth cooler, which changes the value conversation, albeit only slightly. AMD has been spotty with its out-of-the-box inclusion of these coolers over the past two generations, not always including a boxed cooler with the higher-end Ryzen chips, including eight-core comparative processors like the $449 AMD Ryzen 7 5800X.

Speaking of which, there are a few critical differences between the underlying specs of the $359 Ryzen 7 5700G and AMD's other eight-core Ryzen 5000 Series processor, the 5800X, which lacks an IGP. First is the cache size, halved from 32MB in the Ryzen 7 5800X to 16MB in the Ryzen 7 5700G. Second is a reduced boost clock, down from 4.7GHz in the Ryzen 5800X to 4.6GHz in the 5700G.

Overall, the Ryzen 7 5700G on paper looks like a step up in performance across the board versus the Ryzen 7 4700G. But there's also a large step up in price from AMD's older APUs like the Ryzen 5 3400G, and specs that might border on the gratuitous for some shoppers. So, what does all that extra horsepower get you? Time to quantify.

Testing the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G: APU Excellence

We tested the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G on an MSI Mortar B550 motherboard, with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance memory clocked to 3,200MHz (the new ceiling for Cezanne-based APUs), and an Addlink S70 NVMe M.2 PCI Express 3.0 solid-state boot drive paired with a Samsung SSD 860 QVO SATA secondary drive.

All this was packed in a Be Quiet Pure Base 500 case fitted with an 850-watt Corsair RM1000X power supply. For our gaming tests, we used an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, at Founders Edition clocks, as we have on all recent mainstream and high-end CPU reviews.

We test CPUs using a variety of synthetic benchmarks that offer proprietary scores, as well as real-world tests using consumer apps like 7-Zip, and 3D games such as Far Cry 5. Included in the charts below is a variety of like-priced competing and sibling AMD and Intel CPUs.

An important benchmarking-results and performance note: This is a different testbed than we used with other AMD Ryzens we've reviewed to date, as, according to AMD, the Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G are compatible with only four motherboards at launch:

The processor was cooled using the Wraith Stealth air cooler included in the box instead of on our usual 240mm closed-loop liquid cooler, to better represent this chip's real-world use case. This new setup means that our Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G performance numbers are not 100% level-field comparable with results from previous AMD processors. (The majority have been tested on an MSI MEG X570 Godlike or an MSI MEG X570 Ace motherboard.)

However, as you'll see once we dive in, these chips don't exactly need the help of an expensive mobo or a massive cooling system to put up some serious numbers. With those disclaimers out of the way, let's dive into our testing...

Over the last couple of years, Intel's midrange options have struggled against AMD's in productivity tasks. That's because with the 9th Generation Core line, Intel nixed thread-doubling Hyper-Threading Technology below the Core i9 level. The company restored it with 10th Gen and it's here again with 11th Gen "Rocket Lake."

As an eight-core processor with an IGP on board, the 5700G finds itself in contention with the Core i7-11700K on the Intel side, and the Ryzen 7 5800X from its own bench.

In most cases, the Ryzen 7 5700G continues the trend set by the rest of the Ryzen 5000 Series, beating Intel in both multicore productivity and content-creation tasks by healthy margins. However, Intel still retains some wins in its single-core performance.

If the 5700G were priced the same as the 5800X, AMD would be undercutting itself here, but the drop to $359 in the former from the latter's $449 makes a strong case for the 5700G's overall value proposition. The chip is 20% less expensive, but it averages only around 10% slower in most of our test runs...and you get integrated graphics on the chip.

Ignoring the IGP aspect of the chip for the moment, concentrating purely on CPU: If you can't find a Ryzen 7 5800X on shelves, or you just want something like that chip, a good bit cheaper, with slightly less content-creation performance, the Ryzen 7 5700G is a perfectly acceptable substitute for the job. (Assuming it doesn't see GPU-style price inflation and shortages after launch!)

Now, some folks might actually ignore the IGP and pair the Ryzen 7 5700G with a dedicated video card. Here's what we saw in our bank of gaming tests with our GeForce RTX 2080 Ti card running the show. This top-end consumer GPU is driving the performance car in the tests at 4K with all of the CPUs that we have laid out below. At 1080p resolution, however, the card gets out of the way a bit more and lets the CPU differences shine.

Due to the lowered boost clocks and lesser cache, the one instance where the Ryzen 7 5700G doesn't make fiscal or performance-based sense over options like the 5800X (or even lower-core-count options like the Ryzen 5 5600X) is in gaming with a dedicated GPU. In almost every instance there was a faster Ryzen out there for the job, and Intel wasn't out of the race in this respect either.

Both the Intel Core i7-11700K and Core i5-11600K remain competitive with the 5700G when there's a discrete graphics card involved. However, they had better enjoy that slight lead while they have it, because things are about to get nasty...

We run lower-end CPUs that have IGPs through a series of games tuned to either near-lowest, or the lowest, settings at a 1,280-by-720-pixel resolution (720p), as well as at 1,920 by 1,080 pixels (1080p). Here is what we saw with this lot. (The chart below has been reduced just to the CPUs with on-chip graphics.)

Well now! Try as Intel might, the company just can't seem to catch a break this year (or last). On IGP gaming performance, the Radeon RX Vega 8, paired with Ryzen 7 eight-core muscle and its new, faster memory platform, proves itself to be an enticingly powerful gaming engine for its price, breaking old IGP-gaming records and setting new ones left and right. Intel's Xe Graphics engine, which is present in many of Intel's 11th Generation of desktop CPUs (and represented above in the Core i5-11600K), barely puts up a fight. The only remotely near previous-generation competitor is the last, best APU you could buy, the Ryzen 5 3400G.

This set of bar graphs says it all. This is the APU to buy if you want the best SoC graphics performance out there today. Both its AAA and multiplayer performance make it a viable option for any upstart PC gamer, and with the ability to push games like Rainbow Six: Siege just up to the 100Hz/100fps refresh-rate boundary in medium settings at 1080p, getting an esports-ready rig off the ground is now both easier and cheaper than ever.

That said, a few settings tweaks in your games of choice could make the cheaper Ryzen 5 5600G a more enticing option in certain value cases. Performance between these two chips was often so close that the $100 difference in MSRP between the two started to make the Ryzen 7 5700G look worse by comparison, if you look at things solely from a gaming frames point of view.

If your main aim in looking at these APUs is simply to get a budget gaming desktop running for as little as possible (and hope to divert the $100 difference into other components like a gaming monitor, more RAM, or a bigger SSD), the Ryzen 5 5600G is close enough in most instances to warrant a long second look.

A Brief Look at Overclocking and Thermals

Before we jump in, a reminder: These numbers live in a vacuum, since the temperatures were recorded using the included Wraith Stealth cooler rather than the standard 240mm liquid-cooled loop we run on other testbeds. These represent the thermals you can expect while using that specific cooler, and you can expect them to drop even further if you have another $100 or so to spend on a liquid system (not that that is a likely good use of money with a chip like this).

Onward to testing. Even with that supposed disadvantage, the 65-watt Ryzen 7 5700G never topped out at more than 68 degrees C in our stress testing, which included a lengthy run on 3DMark's Night Raid, pushing both the IGP and CPU cores in tandem for 10 minutes straight. This is an exceptional result for any CPU, made all the more impressive that it was recorded on air cooling. For comparison's sake, the 125-watt Intel Core i5-11600K hit 86 degrees C in the same test, and that was on a Deepcool GamerStorm Captain 240 EX 240mm liquid cooler.

The hits kept coming once it came time to test out the overclocking potential of the Ryzen 7 5700G, which, using AMD's Ryzen Master utility, was able to keep a stable overclock of 135MHz on the CPU, and 40MHz on the IGP. Now, I don't recommend overclocking much on a stock air cooler. Still, using that profile I actually saw a moderate uptick of around 6% in a stable run of that same 3DMark Night Raid benchmark. Not much, but not nothing, either!

Verdict: The Best Alternative to a Low-End GPU?

One after another, AMD's CPUs continue to set performance records in their respective arenas. That train keeps rolling with the launch of the Ryzen 7 5700G.

Its victory lap comes a few caveats this time around. If you're only running content-creation tasks that don't require a GPU (think video conversion, video editing, rendering tasks, things like that), and you want to spend that GPU money instead on hardware such as more RAM or a more color-accurate 4K monitor, the Ryzen 7 5700G is a solid pick for that niche use case.

However, if you rely on both a GPU and CPU working in tandem to bring your content to life most effectively, the Editors' Choice-winning Ryzen 7 5800X continues to take on (and slay) all comers in its respective price tier.

Where the Ryzen 7 5700G rocks: You want to build a powerful PC on the (relative) cheap and want to game exclusively on your IGP? There's no contest to be had: The Intel Core i5-11600K is effectively doubled in frame rate by the Ryzen 7 5700G's IGP, and not just in select instances. The Radeon RX Vega 8 and AMD's speedier memory platform shows its true strength here, pushing both single-player and multiplayer titles better than AMD IGPs of the past.

The Ryzen 5 5600G has one of those Radeon solutions, though, too, and if saving $100 for near-identical gaming performance is your thing, that chip might be a better alternative for your next build instead.

Either way, both are stellar new entries in AMD's lineup of dominant desktop chips. The one that's right for you ultimately comes down to what you want to do with your PC the most. Whatever your flavor, AMD's got you covered.

AMD's exceptionally fast Ryzen 7 5700G is a integrated-graphics-equipped, eight-core workhorse CPU of major proportions, slaying gaming records with its Radeon silicon alone.

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