Last month, AMD sent new AMD Ryzen 8000G processors to the market, all of these processors are for the new AM5 socket and are based on mobile silicon (Phoenix), which entails certain limitations, such as a smaller number of PCIe lanes.
In the first wave, I had the opportunity to test the higher models AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and AMD Ryzen 5 8500G, but within this new series there are also lower models Ryzen 5 8500G and Ryzen 3 8300G. And it is these two lower models that are technologically more interesting to a certain extent than the higher ones.
AMD is officially starting a paradigm shift with these models. But it is not quite a paradigm shift like with Intel, because the processors combine large Zen4 cores and smaller Zen4c cores. The forum is that the Zen4c cores offer the same instruction set and equipment as the large Zen4 cores. They differ mainly in clock frequencies, in AMD these cores were modified for lower consumption and clock frequencies at the silicon level.
In practice, this means that we have at our disposal the same generations of processor cores, but some achieve lower performance due to lower clock frequencies.
The six-core AMD Ryzen 5 8500G tested today has a configuration with two large Zen4 cores that tick between 3.5 and 5GHz. In addition, the processor has four economical Zen4c cores, which tick at a maximum of 3.7 GHz.
Similar to the other Phoenix processors for socket AM5, the Ryzen 5 8500G has an integrated graphics core, it is a cut-down Radeon 740M, it has only 4 CUs available, i.e. 256 shaders, while the highest Radeon 780M has a total of 12 CUs and 768 shaders. That sounds like a drastic cut, but the iGPU can tick up to 2.8GHz and to my surprise, the Radeon 740M’s performance is better than I expected given the low shader count.
The AMD Ryzen 5 8500G has further trimmed PCIe lines, the other higher Ryzen 8000Gs have a total of twenty PCIe Gen4 lines, of which eight are available for the primary PCIe slot, four for connection to the chipset and four for the two M.2 slots. The lower Ryzen 5 8500G and Ryzen 3 8300G unfortunately have even fewer PCIe lanes, only fourteen in total, which means four for the main PCIe slot, four for connection to the chipset, four for one M.2 slot and two for the second M.2 slot.
So a powerful graphics card will rather suffer, but I don’t expect anyone to combine a very fast GPU with a Ryzen 5 8500G or 8300G.
The AMD Ryzen 5 8500G also lacks an AI NPU unit, only the higher end models offer this component, I’d say it’s not something that would bother a lot of users at the moment.
The AMD Ryzen 5 8500G is currently sold for around 4800 CZK including VAT, in my opinion it will have a hard time on the market compared to the competition from its own stable, namely the six-core AMD Ryzen 5 7600. It does have an iGPU with two RDNA2 CUs, but it has six full-fledged Zen4 cores, PCIe fifth generation support, higher clock frequencies and, above all, a higher number of PCIe lines.
The AMD Ryzen 5 8500G makes more sense in some small energy-saving boxes, but if it is an office computer, I think that even the weaker Radeon 610M in the Ryzen 5 7600 is quite sufficient. If the processor was a little cheaper, it would probably be more interesting, but in the current situation it is rather difficult to recommend it.
I received the processor for the test from ASUS together with the ASUS TUF GAMING A620M-PLUS WIFI motherboard, which is rather a higher model with the A620 chipset, the price of this board is close to some cheaper boards with the B650 chipset.
As this is a sales model of the processor from a normal e-shop, it arrived in its sales box. In addition to the Ryzen 5 8500G itself, we also find glue and a low Wraith Stealth cooler inside, although it looks lower than the normal Wraith Stealth to my eye (but that will probably be a hallucination, because I recently cleaned up various coolers and I have a bunch of older higher Wraith coolers ).
Now let’s look at the ASUS TUF GAMING A620M-PLUS WIFI motherboard in a little more detail. The motherboard is a microATX format and has the lowest version of the AMD A620 chipset available. The board is currently sold for around 3,100 to 3,500 CZK including VAT and thus belongs to the more expensive motherboards with the A620 chipset, however, it offers quite decent equipment.
In addition to the board itself, the package includes some basic accessories, namely WiFi antennas, two SATA 6Gb/s cables, screws for M.2 slots and a rear I/O shield, which this board does not have integrated.
The board itself has reasonable port equipment considering its class, we can find four DDR5 slots for memory, ASUS mentions support for up to 6400 MT/s throughput, I only tested 6000 MT/s.
The back panel of the board offers quite reasonable port equipment, we can find two large DisplayPorts 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1 output, so it is possible to connect three monitors natively to the board, provided, of course, that we install a processor with an iGPU. In addition to the monitor outputs, there is also a BIOS Flashback button, which I used, as the board had an older BIOS version that does not support the new Ryzen 8000G.
Furthermore, there are six USB-A ports, four are version 2.0 and two support only 5Gbps throughput, which is rather weak. There is also a PS/2 port supporting Y cables, an RJ45 connected to a 2.5GbE Realtek chipset, a WiFi 6 card from Realtek and a Realtek ALC897 sound codec, which is a fairly basic model.
I am glad that the board has 2.5GbE, but the equipment of USB ports is somewhat weaker, however, this is due to the weaker A620 chipset. As for USB ports, the board also has an internal USB-C 5Gb/s port and a 19-pin pinout for the two front 5Gb/s USB ports, so we can completely forget about 10-20-40 Gb/s USB connectivity.
The board has a total of three PCIe slots available, the primary x16 supports PCIe of the fourth generation and is connected directly to the processor, but in the case of the tested Ryzen 5 8500G, it offers us only four PCIe lines of the fourth generation.
The remaining two PCIe x1 Gen3 ports are connected to the chipset and are suitable for some inexpensive PCIe x1 add-on cards.
There are also two M.2 slots on the board, both of which are connected to the processor and offer four PCIe lanes of the fourth generation, however, the second M.2 slot in the case of the Ryzen 5 8500G offers only two PCIe lanes. I installed a test WD PC SN740 1TB M.2 2242 SSD in the primary slot with a post.
On the board we can also find other different pin locations, a total of three RGB LED pin locations, four USB 2.0 ports, four SATA 6 Gb/s ports, a serial port, a pin location for the front audio cabinets and a total of three four-pin connectors for connecting fans.
The board’s power cascade also has a decent-looking heatsink, however ASUS doesn’t explicitly brag about what components are under the heatsink, only mentioning the Digi+ VRM.
The BIOS of the motherboard is classic ASUS, so we can find most of the tuning options here, as on other boards. Of course, due to the lower position of the A620 platform, these options are limited and I personally would not try any overclocking.
So I installed the Ryzen 5 8500G itself on the board, the included Wraith Stealth cooler, the Kingston Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-6000 2x16GB memory kit, while I used the EXPO profile with a throughput of 6000 MT/s to help the integrated Radeon 740M a little.
As an operating system, I used Windows 11 Pro version 23H2 with the latest drivers, as for the graphics part, I used version 24.1.1 drivers, while the iGPU was allocated 4GB of VRAM.
2024-02-29 17:06:47
#REVIEW #ASUS #TUF #A620MPLUS #WIFI #paradigm #shift #AMD
