AMD 4800S Desktop Kit review: playing PC games on the Xbox Series X CPU

Repurposed Xbox silicon powers a fascinating China-only PC motherboard.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Additional contributions by Will Judd

Published on July 30, 2023

Counter Strike: Global Offensive

This one is not exactly a modern game but CS:GO has thrived on Ryzen historically, thanks in some small part to the massive cache that the desktop chips deliver - but remember, neither the 4800S nor the 4750G from the Zen 2 generation have the area available for what AMD used to call 'Game Cache'. Even so, it looks like Counter Strike loves low latency as well as a big cache as the 4750G delivers a 33 percentage point lead, rising to a remarkable 66 points against the Ryzen 5 3600.

Every processor here can run this game at very high frame-rates and at the top end, we're talking about real world differences in the millisecond range, but there's a very clear gap between the older generation (which includes the Xbox Series X CPU) and even the more value-conscious chips from the current line-up.

CS:GO: DX9, Very High, AF off

Cyberpunk 2077

This one's interesting because there seems to be a problem with Ryzen 7 processors that feature eight cores - you'll note that six core Ryzen 5s from the 5000 and 7000 lines are virtually identical in performance terms to eight-core counterparts, despite this being a highly multithreaded engine. Even so, the mammoth gap between our Zen 2 line-up, including the 4800S, and Zen 3 onwards can't be ignored.

Zeroing in the Xbox Series X-powered AMD 4800S Desktop Kit and its Zen 2 counterparts in our line-up, the 4750G is around 15 percentage points to the better, rising to almost 38 percent up against the Ryzen 5 3600. I am tempted to run the SMT mod to see how much better the 4800S could be with access to all cores.

Cyberpunk 2077: DX12, RT

Microsoft Flight Simulator

There's more trouble for the 4800S here in Microsoft Flight Simulator, where once again the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G is sandwiched between Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G and the Ryzen 5 3600, but the performance differentials are - again - rather wide. The very similar 4750G is 20 percent clear of the 4800S despite basically being the same core CPU design with the same cache structure, while the 3600 moves 44 points clear of the console processor. It should be noted that the game can very, very similar indeed to the Series X version when the 30fps cap is enabled in-game, to match the limited console frame-rate.

Skip ahead a couple of generations and a Ryzen 7 7700X paired with fast memory can effectively double the performance of the 4800S Desktop Kit. In this benchmark, we also get some idea of how game-changing the 3D V-Cache Ryzens are. Again, with fast memory, the performance boost is extreme - an almost 3x multiplier. It's concrete evidence of how important fast RAM is in many games, something the 4800S only has in bandwidth terms, not latency.

Flight Simulator 2020: DX11, Ultra, TAA

Far Cry 6

Far Cry 6 basically follows the same pattern as Flight Simulator when we're looking at our Zen 2 head-to-heads. The Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G and the 4800S might be very similar chips, but the surrounding memory set-ups are very different, leading to the 4750G delivering a 25 percentage point lead, rising to nigh-on 45 percent with the Ryzen 5 3600. This game's known to be limited by single-core speed, but clearly, fast memory has a key role to play as we've seen in our DDR5 vs DDR4 testing.

The performance leaps to later processors still look impressive from the 4800S's point of view, but mouse over the Ryzen 5 3600 and compare from there and you'll see that today's processors don't possess quite the performance lead as found elsewhere - again, likely because of the Dunia's engine reliance on single-core speed.

Far Cry 6: Ultra, TAA

Hitman 3

We'll end with Hitman 3's Dartmoor level running on default settings, which does have the high-end CPU simulation toggle activated. I should point out that the console versions of this game use a much lower simulation preset, actually pretty much on par with the last-gen consoles. The Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G is 21 percentage points to the better against the 4800S, with that delta rising to 38.5 percent up against the Ryzen 5 3600.

Clearly, there are huge advantages for today's modern processors but what intrigued me the most was a 1.8x to 2.2x from the AMD 4800S Desktop Kit to the Core i5 12400F and the Ryzen 5 7600. In just a few years, the landscape for CPU performance has changed drastically - making the consoles' Zen 2 CPU clusters look rather old.

Hitman 3: DX12, Default, TAA

Even focusing just on the Zen 2 results, it's rare to see such a wide range of differences between various CPUs of the same family - but it actually seems that the bandwidth of the GDDR6 set-up used by the AMD 4800S desktop kit fails to deliver any kind of actual advantage against the same CPU architecture running at pretty much the same clocks when compared against the Ryzen 7 4750G - at best it's within spitting distance of matching it, but at worse, the high latency of the G6 memory leaves it trailing.

Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 3600 again seems to max at around the same 4.0GHz as the other Zen 2 chips we tested, has two fewer physical cores but is at worst on par and at best over 60 percent faster than the console CPU. Ultimately, it seems to me that while we've got the Zen 2 architecture in our consoles, overall performance when compared apples-to-apples with PC processors is more in higher end Zen 1 territory.

However, I'd just like to stress again that we're pulling the CPU here out of its natural environment, where it sits on the same chip as the GPU and where developers will optimise specifically for this piece of kit. To reiterate - we're looking at PC games running on peculiarly console-based set-up, and comparisons with the console versions will be limited.