AMD Ryzen 5 8600G review

The benchmark scores of the Ryzen 5 8600G are that of your neighbour’s kid’s exam scores. It’s always great. It scored 7,035 in PC Mark and the 3D Mark results were performance-centric. The max boost clock of up to 5GHz with a base clock of 4.3GHz is good in benchmark results. In Cinebench CPU multicore performance was 795 and singlecore performance was 106. Most importantly, the AMD has some headroom for overclocking but we feel it’s already tweaked good enough for most applications. 

Gaming has been the most impressive here. There’s an 8-core AMD Radeon 760M squeezed in here running at 2800 MHz. It’s capable of running Ghost of Tsushima at a solid 30FPS on Medium settings on 1080p. This is extremely impressive from this integrated graphics. We didn’t even fiddle with the numerous unscaling and frame-boosting settings in the AMD software to get the most out of this. The Rogue Prince of Persia, although in Early Access, ran at an average of 75+ FPS on FullHD. Even Sifu runs incredibly well at 60FPS on the AMD. You can easily squeeze more out of this APU with Radeon Super Resolution and Fluid Motion Frames.

Out of the box, having AV1 encode decode possibility means you don’t need a dedicated GPU for video workloads. Our entire Adobe suite for magazine work runs effortlessly too. There’s barely any pinch. Even while running filters of the Fiji software, the AMD was swift. You get AMD Wraith Stealth bundled with the CPU but we used a Corsair AIO which may affect the performance of this processor in our review. The CPU doesn’t need such a beefy AIO because of its low power draw and the bundled fan should deliver similar results but expect a bit of thermal throttling during extended gaming sessions in tropical regions like India.

The good thing is that the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G support DDR5 RAM so the upgrade path is good for gamers on a budget. However, it only supports PCIe 4.0 x8 so it might severely bottleneck a dedicated GPU and Gen 5 SSDs. We recommend this only if you’re sticking to 1080p gaming or need it for running video editing software and other CPU-intensive tasks along with gaming.

It’s a nice budget processor for small creators and gamers looking to blow some steam. If anything serious you might want to consider a budget processor which will have better PCIe support for future upgrades.