It’s no secret that there is a global shortage of graphics cards. Scalpers and cryptocurrency miners always tend to hoard the newest GPU as soon as it hits the market. Well, if you’re one amongst those who are unable to get their hands on a GPU, AMD may have a temporary, if underwhelming, solution.
The AMD Ryzen 5000 APUs have returned, this time on what appears to be an OEM component list, which points to the fact that these chips may arrive sooner rather than later. They may not exactly be a beefy RX 6900 XT, but we think its way better than the alternative: nothing.
According to the info scraped together by Twitter user momomo_us there appears to be three chips on the way. Specifically, these would be the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, Ryzen 5 5600G, and Ryzen 3 5300G. These options seem fairly familiar as they can be closely compared to the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips which were launched earlier this year. That means the top chip in this lineup can expect to have eight core worth of processing power.
This also means we are looking at a maximum graphics loadout of eight cores of integrated GPU power, built with the same architecture close to the Vega generation.
It may not sound like much, especially when compared to the true gaming GPUs from AMD, but these chips can push out decent 720p graphics in most games and offer solid 1080p performance in less demanding ones. And it’s definitely much better than paying twice the retail price of a gaming GPU, thanks to scalpers online. And these chips will perform much better than Intel’s iGPUs any day of the week.
The addition of an APU to your rig wouldn’t eliminate the possibility for a discrete GPU upgrade somewhere in the near future.
There is a catch though. In the past, AMD didn’t sell its Ryzen 4000-series APUs directly to the customer. They were made available only through OEMs in pre-built systems. The company has not yet stated whether they will be selling the APUs independently or not, so only time will tell if we’ll actually be able to use these chips in our own rigs. This would also be in line with the news that AMD is planning on creating processors aimed solely for cryptocurrency mining in an effort to reduce the demand of their gaming GPUs.
If the Ryzen 3 variant is very affordable, we may see a similar degree of shortage for this APU. However, the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 variants will not be considered by most cryptominers as a good bargain, so those may be your best bet, if and when they do become available.
We’re hoping that AMD brings back their DIY APUs. The Ryzen 5 3400G is a great option for those looking to make a GPU-less PC build. It would be a great boost to get eight cores of performance in 2021 though.
About Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
AMD develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. AMD’s main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations, personal computers and embedded system applications.
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