Work the room
PC | £759 from PCSpecialist www.snipca.com/49711
The AMD Ryzen 5 8600G processor was only announced in January at the CES 2024 tech show, but PCSpecialist has already built an affordable desktop PC around it. The 8600G isn’t at the top of the range of AMD’s new processors, but it’s not far behind. It offers a sensible balance between price and performance and we expect to see it appearing in many more PCs in the near future.
This model uses the processor’s built-in Radeon 760M graphics hardware, so doesn’t come with a separate graphics card. However, there is a spare PCIe x16 slot that’s designed to hold a graphics card if you think you might need one at a later date.
As it stands, it’s interesting to compare this brand new processor to the one in our current favourite desktop PC – Palicomp’s AMD Cobra, which we reviewed in Issue 643 (see page 30). The Cobra costs just £400, significantly less than the Fusion Elite P, but is a similar offering, using the built-in graphics power of its processor, rather than a standalone card.
The Cobra’s processor is an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, so is getting on a bit now – being three generations behind this latest model. However, given the £359 difference, it still compares remarkably well.
For example, in benchmark tests that challenge the raw power of the processor, single-core performance is pretty much in line with the price difference, with the Cobra running 43-per-cent slower than the Fusion Elite P. Start working multiple cores, however, and the difference in speed shrinks to 30 per cent.
In Windows tests the performance gap narrows even further, with the Cobra running seven-per-cent slower than the Elite P. For a much cheaper PC, that’s an impressive outcome.
If you want to run games, you’ll need to stick to a 1080p resolution and refrain from turning the graphical settings up too high. When tested this, we saw frame rates averaging 41 frames per second (fps), which is a significant improvement on the 26fps we saw on the Cobra, b
