The CPU of choice for Chris Szewczyk and his tight budgets.
I f you’re considering putting together a new system on a tight budget, but don’t want to spend any of the money you do have on a current-generation graphics card, AMD’s Ryzen 5 8600G may well be the solution for you. The 8600G is an affordable six-core variant of AMD’s exciting Phoenix range of laptop, handheld and now desktop APUs. It doesn’t have the grunt of its more expensive sibling, the £320 Ryzen 7 8700G, but it’s still a capable 1080p gaming option that destroys everything else in its price range.
This is a six-core offering that’s based on the Zen 4 architecture, but it has several key differences compared to its Ryzen 7000-series counterparts. For instance, the 8600G uses a monolithic die and it’s built on a more advanced 4nm process. It’s also got half the cache of the six-core Ryzen 7000-series CPUs, at 16MB versus 32MB.
It comes with a base clock of 4.3GHz, a boost clock of 5.0GHz and a 65W TDP. That’s not dissimilar to the Ryzen 5 7600 – and, in fact, its base clock is a surprising 500MHz higher, though the 7600 has a 100MHz higher boost clock. Like the 8700G, the 8600G lacks PCIe 5.0 support and is configured with a PCIe 4.0 x8 connection for a graphics card.
AI, aye?
A welcome, if for now untapped, addition to the 8600G is AMD’s XDNA neural processing unit. As you’ve no doubt seen and read, AI is all the rage and local AI processing will potentially become more relevant as the software ecosystem matures. Who can say?
The integrated Radeon 760M is based on the RDNA 3 architecture. That puts it a full three generations ahead of the Vega graphics of the previous 5000G-series chips. On top of that, the 760M is clocked 800MHz higher than even the topof-the-range eight-CU AMD Ryzen 7 5700G. On paper, the 8600G is faster. Much faster.
Given that AMD stopped bundling coolers with its 7000-series chips, the inclusion of AMD’s Wraith Stealth CPU cooler is a nice little value add. It is on the small side, but the 8600G is not a particularly demanding chip.
Zen 4 chips are known to run hot. The 8600G never reached 80°C, which is a good result. We did use a 240mm cooler, w
