THE BATTLE OF THE BUILDS DEDICATED VS INTEGRATED GPUs

We put AMD's latest Ryzen 5 8600G to the test

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PC GAMING has come a long way in the last 20-30 years. Let’s be fair —it has never been a cheap hobby. Consoles have and always will be cheaper than any PC you can buy or build, no matter what generation. In fact, over the years we’ve tried numerous times to forge the ultimate budget rig, only for it to still be more expensive than its console counterparts, and lacking performance somewhat as well (although admittedly that’s because PCs have better graphical fidelity as standard).

It’s a tale as old as time. But lately, with the cost of hardware climbing upward, it feels like getting your foot in the door for a decent PC gaming experience is starting to become almost impossible. Once upon a time, our budget builds were $400-500. Now, they average close to $1,000, if not more when including a dedicated GPU. Take a look back at the GTX 900 series— the 980 debuted at an RRP of $550, and the latest RTX 4080 hit the market at $1,200. That’s a 118 percent increase in the flagship GPU price in just eight years.

Is it all lost, then? Is humble PC gaming now out of reach for a large majority? Well, it got us thinking, and with AMD launching its latest batch of Ryzen 8000 series CPUs, complete with radically impressive integrated graphics performance, we decided to put its most entry-level chip to the test in a somewhat budget $700-800 gaming PC grudge match.