The new Ryzen 5 5600G may be a mid-tier processor, but it has some pretty big shoes to fill for AMD. The company says that it directly succeeds the Ryzen 5 3600, which in turn succeeded the Ryzen 5 2600 and Ryzen 5 1600. These have all been immensely popular chips for AMD around the $200-mark, and the company pushed some of the highest volumes among individual SKUs with these. Its sibling, the Ryzen 7 5700G had a similar job on its hands, which was to succeed the popular 3700X. So does the Ryzen 5 5600G come through for AMD? Well, yes, but there's more to it.

Armed with a 6-core/12-thread CPU based on the latest Zen 3 microarchitecture, the 5600G is sufficiently faster than the previous-generation Ryzen 5 3600 to qualify as a generational upgrade. It is consistently faster in low-bandwidth, less-parallelized, math-heavy tasks; take tests such as SuperPi and Cinebench R23 1T which highlight the IPC increment Zen 3 brings to the table. That's not all, as it is able to beat all Intel processors with "Skylake" derived CPU cores, including the 10th Gen Core i9-10900K. Even with multi-threaded compute-intensive tests, such as wPrime and Cinebench R23 nT, do we see the 5600G occupy a spot between the 8-core i9-9900K, Ryzen 5 5600X, its bigger sibling, and 8-core i7-10700K. These show us the importance of generational IPC uplifts, where Zen 3-based AMD chips are able to overcome the deficit of two cores (25% of number-crunching machinery) and go on to beat 8-core Intel chips.

How does IPC translate to gaming performance? In the academically important 720p resolution, which highlights CPU-level bottlenecks, the 5600G ends up beating all older Ryzen 3000 series parts we have in our bench. Interestingly, it falls behind the Core i5-10600K based on older cores, so we don't see a repeat of the math-heavy synthetic tests with gaming. At best, the 5600G matches the i5-10400F and is 3–4% faster than the i5-11400F, both of which are sub-$200 parts. These kind of results largely carry over to the Full HD (1080p) resolution where gaming begins. Here, the 5600G is trading blows with the i5-11400F. Its sibling, the 5700G, is 3% faster. The top Intel chips are significantly faster, with the i9-11900K registering 10% higher performance at 1080p and the i9-10900K being a whopping 15% faster. Near the top of our charts, we also find the non-APU Zen 3 Ryzens, which dominate thanks to their larger L3 cache size. The gaps narrow at 1440p, as the bottleneck begins to shift toward the GPU, although the relative performance outlook remains largely the same. At the top 4K UHD resolution, we're looking at wafer-thin 1–2% performance leads by the pricier Intel and Zen 3 X processors. This is because the performance bottleneck is firmly in the court of our GeForce RTX 3080.

Switching gears back to multi-threaded productivity, we see the Ryzen 5 5600G prove itself to be a smooth operator, trading blows with 8-core chips, such as the 3700X and i7-10700K, in code-compilation and game-development tests. It is almost as fast as the i5-11600K in web-browsing tests, and ahead of past-generation chips from both Intel and AMD. AI application performance is middle-of-the-market in our tests, where the 5600G is almost as fast as the i5-10600K or i5-11600K, but it's important to note that from 11th Gen onward, Intel is including DLBoost and GFNI acceleration on its desktop processors, so some of the newer AI applications may end up faster. There are tests where the sheer weight of eight CPU cores ends up blunting the IPC advantage of the 5600G, such as science simulation.

The Ryzen 5 5600G is a formidable chip for workhorse productivity apps, such as Office, Photoshop, After Effects, and 3DF Zephyr, where it strikes a balance between generational IPC uplift and low cost due to its 6-core thread count. The 5600G is all the silicon you'll ever need if you're building a machine to handle office work. Compression and encryption tasks are faster on the 5600G than older-generation chips with more cores, such as the 3800XT, and the 5600G catches up with 11th Gen Core i5 chips. Media encoding tests end up where you'd expect, however, since video encoding is bandwidth-heavy, not just compute-heavy, and older-generation 8-core chips are able to edge ahead because more cores also make for more paths for the data to move.

All of our game testing was done with an RTX 3080 discrete graphics, but since the iGPU is an important selling point, we also looked at its performance: We pitted the Radeon Vega iGPU against Intel's fastest desktop iGPU, the UHD 750 based on the Xe LP graphics architecture, on the top Core i9-11900K processor. Despite being based on 4-year old architecture (gosh, has it been that long since Vega?), the Radeon Vega iGPU in the 5600G ends up consistently faster than the UHD 750. There are many game tests in which the UHD 750 doesn't even get off the mark. With the lowest settings, we get just about playable framerates at 1080p with the 5600G. There are tests in which the 5700G ends up about 5% faster on account of an extra compute unit (64 additional SP) and 100 MHz higher engine clocks. In my opinion, AMD shouldn't have segmented the iGPU for the 5000G series and let the 5600G have all 8 compute units, running at the same engine clocks as the 5700G. It's a tiny lineup of just two SKUs, three if you consider the OEM-exclusive Ryzen 3 5300G, and AMD could have earned some goodwill letting them have all of the iGPU. Intel has in the past given all chips above Core i3 maxed out Gen 9.5 UHD 630 iGPUs.

In our iGPU performance testing, we also looked at what happens when you run with just a single memory module (single-channel DDR4). This effectively halves the available memory bandwidth, which directly affects IGP performance because system memory is the IGP's primary memory. With 30%, the performance hit is very significant. Considering that many games are barely just hitting the 30 FPS mark, losing 30% means 20 FPS instead of 30 FPS, which is definitely not worth saving a few bucks.

The only Achilles heel with both the Ryzen 5600G and 5700G is platform I/O. The Cezanne silicon lacks PCI-Express Gen 4 support, unlike other Ryzen 5000X series processors based on the "Vermeer" MCM, or even Ryzen 3000 "Matisse." Thankfully, the main PCI-Express graphics slot on your motherboard will get 16 lanes, unlike just 8 on the Ryzen 5 3400G APU, but these are Gen 3 lanes. The impact of this is less pronounced on today's graphics cards, but those looking to use the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs that benefit from PCIe Gen 4 bandwidth will be disappointed. Your drives will only work in Gen 3 mode even if installed on an AMD 500-series chipset motherboard.

AMD continues to reap rich rewards for using the TSMC 7 nm process, which lends the Cezanne silicon some stellar power-draw and efficiency figures. The 14 nm Core i5-11600K is simply outclassed in single-thread and multi-threaded power-draw tests, where the 5600G posts 20 W less power in single-threaded tests and a whopping 100 W (!) less power in multi-threaded than the i5-11600K. It's also more efficient in terms of energy consumed for work done. The 5600G runs slightly cooler than the 5600X since it's not carrying the bulk of a 12 nm cIOD and is a monolithic 7 nm silicon. A cheap $25 cooler is all you need to keep this processor running quietly, although if you don't want to spend any money, AMD has you covered with a cooler in the box—something the i5-11600K lacks. The 5600G comes with an unlocked multiplier, and we were able to dial the clocks up to a 4.50 GHz all-core overclock. We've added performance numbers for this OC across our review, where it ends up 3.8% faster in CPU tests and up to 1% faster at gaming.

So then, should you buy the Ryzen 5 5600G? If you're looking to upgrade from something like the Ryzen 5 2600 or 1600 while keeping your platform, the 5600G is a great option. There are many tests in which it's faster than 8-core parts from the previous generations, and the IPC uplift of its Zen 3 cores comes through in a big way, in many lightly parallelized tasks. Gaming performance is in the same league as 11th Gen Core i5 chips, and if you're coming from something like a Ryzen 5 1600, you could experience a gaming performance uplift akin to a GPU upgrade. However, the 5600G isn't cheap, with AMD pricing it at $260. This dulls many of the areas this chip is strong at since the Core i5-11600K can be had right around the corner, at $270. Despite its many flaws, the i5-11600K is consistently faster at gaming and most productivity tasks. Very strong competition also comes from the Intel Core i5-10400F and 11400F, which are priced very aggressively and often on sale, offering similar gaming performance. Saving $100+ here means you could use those funds to buy a better graphics card or a bigger SSD. Perhaps things would be different for AMD at $220, where the 5600G would have spelled trouble for the likes of the i5-11500 and even i5-11400. Overall, a brilliant piece of silicon from AMD, it is held back by pricing.