A little more than a year since AMD launched Zen 4 and the Ryzen 7000 Series, we're finally looking at the Ryzen 7 8700G, one of four APUs launched earlier
A little more than a year since AMD launched Zen 4 and the Ryzen 7000 Series, we're finally looking at the Ryzen 7 8700G, one of four APUs launched earlier this year, and one of two SKUs to be fitted with Ryzen AI. Couple that with an RDNA3 Radeon integrated GPU, there's a lot to talk about with regards to this APU, both in favour and against it.
Specs-wise and as with all Ryzen 7 series processors, the 8700G features an 8-cores, 16-threads configuration, and comes with a base and boost clock of 4.2GHz and 5.1GHz, respectively. There are, however, some drawbacks to this APU, chief among which being its rather pitiful 16MB L3 Cache size, which is half the size of the L3 Cache in the 7700X. Additionally, the CPU also supports up to PCIe 4.0 only, and not PCIe 5.0.
As for the gaming side of it, I'll be frank: the RTX 4090 notwithstanding, I've certainly seen better performance averages from other 8-cores, 16-threads CPUs. On the plus side, it is reassuring to see that the CPU a more-than-100 fps average with all three games that I've chosen, putting it more or less on par with the Intel Core i5-14600K.