Skip to main content

AMD Ryzen 7 5700G: the Digital Foundry verdict

A strong gaming APU, but slower than full-fat Ryzen 5000.

Will Judd avatar
Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry
Updated on

The Ryzen 7 5700G APU is a capable performer, that much is clear, with processing performance normally between that of Ryzen 3000 and Ryzen 5000 CPUs and integrated graphics that can play modern games at lower frame-rates and quality settings. But is it worth its $359 asking price?

In my mind, there are a couple of scenarios where it makes sense. Firstly, its modest graphics capabilities mean that it is capable of serving as a powerful media server or content creation machine without the need for a dedicated GPU, thereby opening the door to smaller, cooler and quieter setups.

With eight cores and sixteen threads, it's able to crunch through content creation tasks like 3D rendering and video transcoding faster than the similarly-priced 5600X, and only a little behind the significantly more expensive 5800X. In terms of past Ryzen CPUs, it's faster than the Ryzen 3800XT while also consuming less power, thanks to its more modern design. Over in Intel land, it's as fast as the Core i9 9900K, yet uses far less power during HEVC encoding (266W peak vs 148W peak). The new 12600K is faster by a good margin, but also uses more power (233W in the same test).

Secondly, its integrated graphics are also fast enough that you could use it as a stop-gap gaming solution while you're searching for a fairly-priced graphics card. However, the cheaper Ryzen 5600X does perform better in games once a discrete GPU is in play, so if you're able to find even an old and decrepit graphics card like a GTX 1050 (2GB) or RX 560 (14CU), then going for the 5600X makes more sense. That's especially true when you consider that the 5600X and its higher-tier siblings have PCIe 4.0 support, which already unlocks slightly better GPU performance and significantly better NVMe SSD performance - and the latter may become more critical as games with support for Microsoft's DirectStorage API are released in the years to come.

Finally, a Ryzen 7 6700G was recently rumoured with an RDNA2 integrated graphics solution that performs in line with the GTX 1050 Ti, so we'll be fascinated to see how that APU compares to the 5700G in other aspects. In the here and now, the 5700G does make sense for some scenarios, but its 'Ryzen 5000 Lite' design doesn't quite live up to full-fat Ryzen 5000's sterling reputation.

AMD Ryzen 7 5700G analysis

Read this next