Ryzen 7 8700G & Ryzen 5 8600G Review: AMD Zen 4 With A Potent Radeon GPU
AMD Ryzen 5 8600G & Ryzen 7 8700G: CPU, System, And Web Application Benchmarks
When configuring our test systems for this article, we first made sure all firmwares were up to date, then we entered each system's respective BIOS / UEFI and set the board to its "Optimized" or "High performance" defaults. We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory frequency to the maximum officially supported speed for the given platform (without overclocking), unless otherwise noted. The SSDs were then formatted, and Windows 11 Pro was installed and fully updated.
When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers necessary for our components, disabled Auto-Updating and Windows Defender, and installed all of our benchmarking software. When that process was done, we performed a disk clean-up, cleared any temp and prefetch data, processed idle tasks, and optimized all of the SSDs using Windows' built-in utility. Finally, we enabled Windows Focus Assist to minimize any potential interruptions and let the systems reach an idle state before invoking any tests.
The new Ryzen 8000G series processors offer similar memory bandwidth to Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors, somewhere north of the 60GB/s - 70GB/s range depending on the test. The differences here are due to the use of a different platform for testing (B650 vs. X670E), the Radeon iGPU, and noise / variation between runs in this these tests.
That aforementioned contention on the memory controller to accomodate the Radeon iGPU is likely the reason for the somewhat higher memeory latency on the Ryzen 8000G series processors here. That said, they're still in the same ballpark as other Ryzen 7000 series processors.
Cache latency looks good across the board with the Ryzen 8000G series. Both of the chips are right in the mix with their siblings on the Ryzen 7000 series.
We're presenting a wide array of Intel and AMD processors in our benchmarks, including an assortment of much higher-end, higher-clocked (and more expensive) enthusiast-class chips with many more cores. As such, the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G land in the lower quadrant of the chart, but their performance is right in-line with expectations. The Ryzen 5 8600G falls somewhere in between the Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 5 7600X and the Ryzen 7 8600G approaches the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 7700X.
Note when looking at the chart above that we have four results with the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G. We wanted to see how overall system performance was affected by using only the Radeon iGPU, but also had to test with a discrete GPU to keep the playing field level with the other processors. As you can see, the Digital Content Creation score is significantly lower when using the iGPU, which brings the overall score down, but performance is still very good with the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G. Add the discrete GPU into the mix, and the chips jump up the charts and competitive with all of today's mainstream processors.
These benchmarks measure performance of an array of browser-based technologies used on modern, rich web applications. Scores in these benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing the web and running advanced web apps. All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Microsoft's Edge browser, with default browser settings, on a clean, fully-updated install of Windows 11.
Somewhat similar to what we saw in PCMark 10, the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G are competitive with all of the other mainstream / mid-range processors available today. That said, all of these processors are more than capable of running web applications, of course.
HotHardware's Test Systems:
AIDA64 Memory Bandwidth, Memory Latency & Cache Latency
AIDA64's CPU Cache and Memory benchmarks measure memory bandwidth during read, write and copy operations, in addition to memory latency, and cache bandwidth and latency. While the Ryzen 8000G series uses a similar memory interface to Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors, there is some contention across that interface to accomodate the more powerful integrated on-processo graphics.
That aforementioned contention on the memory controller to accomodate the Radeon iGPU is likely the reason for the somewhat higher memeory latency on the Ryzen 8000G series processors here. That said, they're still in the same ballpark as other Ryzen 7000 series processors.
Geekbench v5.4.1 CPU Benchmarks
In the GeekBench tests, we're stressing only the CPU cores in a system (not the graphics card or iGPU), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The tests are comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and other general purpose compute processing workloads.
We're presenting a wide array of Intel and AMD processors in our benchmarks, including an assortment of much higher-end, higher-clocked (and more expensive) enthusiast-class chips with many more cores. As such, the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G land in the lower quadrant of the chart, but their performance is right in-line with expectations. The Ryzen 5 8600G falls somewhere in between the Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 5 7600X and the Ryzen 7 8600G approaches the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 7700X.
UL PCMark 10 Benchmarks
Next, up we have some full-system testing with PCMark. We're reporting all test results from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, including the Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation and and total PCMark score. The Essentials test covers workloads like web browsing, video conferencing and app start-up times, while Productivity tests everyday office apps from spreadsheets to word processing. Finally, the Digital Content Creation test evaluates performance of a machine with respect to photo and video editing, as well as rendering and visualization.
Note when looking at the chart above that we have four results with the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G. We wanted to see how overall system performance was affected by using only the Radeon iGPU, but also had to test with a discrete GPU to keep the playing field level with the other processors. As you can see, the Digital Content Creation score is significantly lower when using the iGPU, which brings the overall score down, but performance is still very good with the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G. Add the discrete GPU into the mix, and the chips jump up the charts and competitive with all of today's mainstream processors.
Browser & Web App Benchmarks: Jetstream 2 And Speedometer 2
Next up, we have some numbers from the Speedometer 2.0 and Jetstream 2 tests available at browserbench.org. The Speedometer Benchmark Suite uses a wide array of latency and throughput benchmarks to evaluate web application performance and Jetstream evaluates Javascript and WebAssembly performance; both tests take all of their individual results and tabulate them into a final score.These benchmarks measure performance of an array of browser-based technologies used on modern, rich web applications. Scores in these benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing the web and running advanced web apps. All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Microsoft's Edge browser, with default browser settings, on a clean, fully-updated install of Windows 11.
7-Zip Data Decompression Tests
The 7-Zip benchmark measures compression and decompression performance using the LZMA method, which leverages the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm to perform lossless data compression. The benchmark produces a final rating in GIPS (giga instructions per second).
As we'd expect, the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G fall in-line with other Ryzen processors with similar core counts here. Single-thread performance is similar to thier counterparts, and multi-thread performance is on-par with similar core-count Ryzen processors as well.
