If you’re willing to accept lower fidelity and a limited selection of titles, AMD’s Ryzen 7 5700G brings unbeatable 1080p and excellent 1280×720 gaming to iGPUs. However, its less expensive sibling, the Ryzen 5 5600G, is a better value.
The eight-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 5700G marks the arrival of AMD’s first 7nm ‘Cezanne’ Zen 3 APUs for desktop PCs. 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 were previously limited to the OEM market until the full retail launch on August 5, 2021. Anticipation was high, though, so we grabbed an off-the-shelf system from HP to take the Ryzen 7 5700G for a spin for an early look at performance. Now we’re back to fill in the final gaps with some additional testing, including overclocking.
The Cezanne chips are 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 were the best you could find at retail, even though AMD has already progressed through three chip generations in the interim (Zen 2, XT, Zen 3).
