AMD Ryzen 7 5700G

APUs make a more than welcome return

- CHRIS SZEWCZYK

STRUGGLING TO FIND a graphics card in these silicon-starved times? AMD suggests that, with the new Ryzen 7 5700G, you might not need one. The Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs have been well received, though, like every other manufacturer of processors and graphics cards, AMD has been affected by wider semiconductor market issues. Limited supply meant that production priority was given to the high-end chips in both the red team’s CPU and GPU stacks. That means we haven’t seen any really affordable Zen 3-based processors at all, at least not in the retail market.

That doesn’t necessarily change with the introduction of the ‘Cezanne’ family of APUs. The series is led by this beauty, the eight-core Ryzen 7 5700G ($359), which is joined by the hexacore Ryzen 5 5600G ($229) and the quad-core Ryzen 3 5300G. That’s a little under the current pricing for the GPU-less Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X, and arguably, you get more for your money, too.