Finally! AMD is bringing their new Zen 3 APUs to the retail DIY market. While Cezanne has been available in laptops since January and prebuilt OEM systems using these APUs were released in spring, we had to wait a bit longer—hopefully for AMD to stockpile CPUs so that demand can be met. With the Ryzen 7 5700G, AMD is bringing their modern Zen 3 processor architecture to the APU space. The integrated processor graphics have been upgraded in terms of graphics cores, but remain based on Vega, so basically lagging two generations behind what's available in AMD's discrete graphics cards. A side-effect of sticking with Vega seems to be that the tight coupling of SOC and iGPU circuitry results in PCI-Express capability being limited to the aging PCIe 3.0 interface. This not only affects the bandwidth for the IGP and chipset, but also that of external PCIe graphics cards and, more importantly, the M.2 NVMe slot. While the performance difference between PCIe 3.0 x16 and PCIe 4.0 x16 is only around 1%, the latest M.2 SSDs achieve quite significant gains over the drives using PCIe 3.0.

Averaged over our 38-test-strong 2021 CPU test suite, we find the Ryzen 7 5700G to perform very well across the board. Thanks to Zen 3, low-threaded applications really fly compared to Zen 2—in most of those tests, the 5700G beats last generation's Ryzen 9 3900X flagship by quite a margin. Multi-threaded workloads run very well, too; the 5700G slots in right between the 5600X and the 5800X here—gone are the days when AMD integrated graphics were for low-end CPUs only. Taking a closer look at individual tests, we see a few outliers. For example, Machine Learning, Physics Simulation, and Premiere Pro show surprisingly low results that end up behind the 6-core 5600X. Our theory is that due to the reduced cache size on Cezanne (16 MB vs. 32 MB on Vermeer), these tasks that juggle a lot of data around get handicapped a bit. Still, Ryzen 7 5700G offers plenty of horsepower for all productivity tasks.

Gaming performance with a discrete graphics card is very good, too. We see 5700G trade blows with the Intel Rocket Lake lineup, falling roughly between the 11400F and 11600K. This means that "pure" IGP-free Zen 3 CPUs like the Ryzen 5 5600X do offer better gaming performance. One reason is certainly the smaller L3 cache size on Cezanne. The second limitation is that the PCI-Express interface is only Gen 3—at least AMD is giving us 16 lanes to not further limit the interface speeds. Compared to the previous-generation Zen 2 processors, Ryzen 5 5700G offers considerably better gaming performance. As you increase the resolution and go beyond 1080p, the differences between processors get smaller and smaller because the bottleneck shifts from the CPU to the GPU, though.

The selling point of Ryzen 7 5700G is its integrated graphics. As mentioned before, the graphics cores are based on Vega, which is "good enough," but definitely not "cutting edge." A total of 512 graphics cores is available on the 5700G, clocked at an impressive 2 GHz—classic Vega couldn't handle such clocks, so AMD definitely added some magic here. We ran through 13 game titles, most of them AAA titles, but we also put Dota 2 and CS: GO in there. Even at the lowest settings, framerates aren't exactly high. 1280x720 is "playable," reaching between 30 and 60 FPS in most titles. Once we switched to 1920x1080, many titles just had requirements that are too high, even at the absolute lowest settings. Still, compared to Intel's pathetic integrated graphics, the 5700G is a revelation, running roughly twice as fast. What makes things worse for the blue camp is that two of our games didn't even start and crashed right away. I also included a GeForce GT 1030 and GTX 1060 in our benchmarks to put some perspective on these numbers. The GTX 1060 is roughly twice as fast as AMD's integrated graphics, so buying something like a RX 580, GTX 970, or GTX 1060 could be a reasonable alternative to integrated graphics if you have the physical space to install a dedicated graphics card. Overall, gaming on Cezanne is a good match for MOBA-style gaming and older titles.

I also tested overclocking the IGP, and 20% higher GPU frequency was easy to achieve, yielding an additional 6% in performance. Since the integrated graphics don't have any VRAM on their own, the system's main memory is used to store the framebuffer, geometry, and textures. This means memory speed is linked directly to FPS rates. That's why I ran another round of benchmarks, this time with DDR4-3200 instead of DDR4-3800. The result is a 6% performance loss, which isn't nothing, but I would not call it massive, either. This should provide some perspective on whether it would be reasonable to buy cheaper memory to keep overall build cost down without compromising performance too much.

We've seen impressive power consumption numbers on Zen 3 before, and Cezanne is no exception. The chips run SO much more energy-efficiently than anything Intel offers. This not only affects power consumption, but also heat output, which is important when shopping for a heatsink or setting up ventilation in your case. As long as you have a half-decent CPU cooler, you'll have no problems keeping the 5700G cool. This makes AMD's new APUs an excellent choice for compact small form factor ITX systems.

Overclocking the Ryzen 7 5700G worked well thanks to an unlocked multiplier, just like on the other AMD Ryzen CPUs. Our maximum overclock of 4.6 GHz on all cores yielded a 5% performance improvement in applications and around 1% in gaming. Manual OC has become less and less important over the years because manufacturers have been focusing on inventing ways to eke out the last bits of performance automagically out of the box. The 5700G is rated for a base clock of 3.8 GHz, with a Boost of "up to" 4.6 GHz. Previously, "up to" often meant "almost never" on both Intel and AMD. On the 5700G, it pretty much means "almost always"—really nice work here, AMD! For loads of up to around eight threads active, we measured the 5700G to clock between 4.6 and 4.65 GHz, which is even 50 MHz higher than the rated maximum—out of the box without touching any setting. Even when fully loaded with a realistic AVX load, the processor ran at 4.5 GHz.

All this sounds great? Yeah, AMD thinks so, too, that's why they've priced the Ryzen 7 5700G at $360, making it the most expensive APU to date. Previous APUs were priced at below $200 to make them interesting to entry-level builders who don't need a fancy graphics card for their productivity tasks. Today's Ryzen 7 5700G does offer much higher performance on both CPU and graphics cores, of course, but be prepared to pay for that. The problem is that for 1080p gaming, the integrated graphics simply are not powerful enough, not even at the lowest possible setting. For pure gaming, you'll be better off with a several-year-old graphics card that supports DirectX 12 paired with a value-champ CPU like the Core i5-11400F, Ryzen 3 3300X, or 10400F, in that order. These CPUs go for around $170, which frees up $200 for a graphics card. Content creators with basic 3D or slightly GPU-accelerated workloads are probably the better match for the 5700G. These can enjoy the massive performance of an 8c/16t CPU, which helps little for gaming. On the other hand, many creators don't have high GPU power requirements, which shrinks the perceived difference between the Ryzen IGP and Intel IGP. Strong competitors here are Intel's Core i5 and i7 models from both the Comet Lake and Rocket Lake lineup. If you're planning to build a small-form-factor system that packs a punch, the Ryzen 7 5700G is the perfect choice. It offers plenty of performance, both on graphics and GPU, and is gentle in its power and cooling requirements. What we really need is for AMD to bring down pricing of the 5700G a bit, much closer to $300, where it will become an interesting alternative to Ryzen 5600X and the various Intel offerings in this segment. I'm also looking forward to testing the Ryzen 5 5600G, which comes in at a tempting $260, making it the most affordable Zen 3 CPU announced so far.