If you’re struggling to find a graphics card in stock or at a reasonable price, then this AMD CPU with integrated graphics could be a game saver. The AMD Ryzen 5 5600G is a six-core CPU with AMD’s up-to-date Zen 3 architecture, but more importantly, it offers Radeon Vega Graphics onboard that can deliver admirable gaming performance, especially for low-overhead competitive games.
You can pick up this all-in-one chip for £199 over at Amazon, which is a saving of around £40 off its usual going price. It’s also available for around £200 at Scan, Curry’s, Overclockers UK, and Box.
For that price, you get to knock three components from your PC parts list in one go: CPU, GPU, and cooler (which is also included).
In terms of GPU, the Ryzen 5 5600G isn’t a match for a discrete GPU, but it is much more powerful than your average CPU iGPU. There are 7 Radeon Vega Graphics Compute Units inside the 5600G, clocked to 1.9GHz.
These graphics cores aren’t quite a match for the RDNA 2-powered Aerith processor found in the Steam Deck but are a big improvement on previous generation APUs from AMD. The Ryzen 5 5600G delivers enough grunt for 720p performance in modern games and steady 1080p framerates in many others, especially in competitive titles like CS: GO.
If you want more power or read up on a very similar chip to the 5600G, you can check out the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G.
The CPU shares an architecture with the other chips in the Ryzen 5000-series: Zen 3. That’s a powerful architecture that’s great for more than gaming. That’s true of the Ryzen 5 5600G, as well, as this chip offers six cores and 12 threads of Zen 3, a formidable match for even content creation and streaming.
That’s also the benefit of the Ryzen 5 5600G. While it’s tough to pick up a graphics card now, we’re hoping for an improvement in supply later this year. If that comes to pass, you won’t need to start from scratch with the Ryzen 5 5600G. You can still slot a graphics card into a machine built around this chip and expect top performance out of it. And if you do, you’ll still have an AMD Zen 3-powered six-core CPU able to keep up.
Beyond that, this chip is built around the AM4 socket, which means you have a wide range of AM4 compatible motherboards to choose from and an upgrade path to a more powerful AMD processor down the line should you so wish.
