Uncategorized

AMD Ryzen 5 5600G Review: Cezanne Comes to Retail w/ Vega Graphics (Yet Again)

AMD is all set to launch the Ryzen 5000G APUs (codenamed Cezanne) for the retail market, with major retailers expected to get stock by the 5th of August. The review embargo for these 7nm APUs has just lifted, and you should start seeing reviews of the 5600G and the 5700G just about everywhere. In this particular post, we’ll be having a look at the Ryzen 5 5600G which is a budget-centric offering, targeted at DIYers who’d usually opt for the Core i5-11600. While the raw CPU performance should be on par (or a tad bit lower) with the latter, it’s the accompanying Vega 7 iGPU that’s the main highlight.

The 5600G is rather unique, as it lets us analyze the impact of the L3 cache on performance, as well as the viability of integrated graphics in a sub-$300 processor.

In terms of the insides, the 5600G is pretty much identical to the mobile-grade Ryzen 5 5600H, featuring six Zen 3 cores running at a boost clock of 4.4GHz (vs 4.6GHz on the 5600X), 16MB of L3 cache (32MB on the 5600X), paired with a Vega 7 iGPU @ 1.9GHz and a TDP of 65W. Unlike the 5600X, it lacks support for PCIe Gen 4 and instead comes with 24 Gen3 lanes.

Thanks to a lack of competition, the APU market has been largely neglected by AMD over the past few years. The prominent contemporary APUs include the Ryzen 5 3400G and 3200G, both based on the Zen+ core and yes, 12nm Vega graphics. As such, the Ryzen 5000G processors should bring a substantial boost over their predecessors in terms of CPU performance.

However, on the GPU side, not so much, as we’re essentially looking at a node shrink of the same Vega architecture, and that too with fewer compute units (11 vs 7).

Before heading onto the benchmarks, let’s have a look at the cache latency and bandwidth of Cezanne and Vermeer, and see if there’s a tangible difference between the two. Keep in mind that while the former features half as much L3 cache as the latter, the bandwidth, and latency of the lower-level caches should be more or less identical:

Using the same test setup and memory, the 5600G is surprisingly a tad bit faster than the 5600X across all loads. While this delta is quite small, it’s consistent across most tests (and workloads) and likely boils down to the IMC of the APU (which is the same as the mobile Cezanne parts).

With respect to the cache latency, the results are reversed. The Ryzen 5 5600G (red) falls behind the 5600X (blue) as the load size increases over 8MB (its L3 cache=16MB; 5600X has 32MB), catching up as the data becomes too large for the cache and is fetched from the main memory.

Test Bench

  • Motherboard: MSI B550M Mortar WiFi
  • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3070 FE
  • Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GBx2 @ 3600 MT/s CL18
  • Cooler: NZXT Kraken X72 w/ NZXT H710i
  • PSU: Corsair H1000i
  • Please note both CPUs were set to 4.6GHz, but as we’ve seen the 5600X generally boosts slightly higher than spec.

Content Creation Benchmarks

Even with the core frequencies nearly equalized, the Ryzen 5 5600X manages to edge past the 5600G in Cinebench R20 and R23, although the gains are hardly worth mentioning.

FPS

The performance of the two processors across other rendering applications is more or less similar, although, in Corona 1.3, the 5600G falls behind by a larger margin. In Blender and POV, the differences aren’t quite substantial

Seconds

Encoding and Compression/Decompression

Higher is better

7-zip’s LZMA compression and decompression algorithms seem to benefit from the extra cache on the 5600X, but encoding performance (both H264 and H265) in Handbrake is largely the same on both the Zen 3 parts.

Gaming Performance w/ dGPUs

The difference in the gaming performance of the two processors is much smaller than I expected. In titles like The Division 2 and Strange Brigade, the two chips are within a few FPS of one another. Here, the extra (twice as much) L3 cache on the 5600X isn’t really helping. However, other titles like Far Cry 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider do see a notable gain with the 5600X, 14% in the former, and 10% in the latter. This just goes on to show that the battle between Intel’s Alder Lake and Zen 3D will be long and drawn out, with the former winning mostly in content creation and transcoding/compression/decompression and the latter mostly in gaming.

Integrated Vega 7 Graphics: Gaming Benchmarks

The integrated Vega 7 GPU is able to run most older games at 720p high or 1080p low. Even more recent titles such as Godfall are able to push close to 20 FPS at the Epic Quality preset with FSR set to Balanced. As you can see, the 5600G is a rather decent APU for low-end and entry-level gaming. However, if you’re planning to buy a dGPU sometime in the future, it’s recommended to opt for the 5600X instead, as you’re essentially getting 10-15% additional gaming performance for just $30 more.

Areej Syed

Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Divinity, Torment, Baldur's Gate and so much more... Contact: areejs12@hardwaretimes.com.
Back to top button