AMD's new Ryzen 5700G APU (that's CPU plus integrated graphics) is going cheap in the UK
£294.99 for an eight core, sixteen thread processor with integrated graphics.
The AMD Ryzen 7 5700G was released earlier this year for £330, but supply issues made it hard to find this processor with integrated graphics at all. Now, Ebuyer are selling the chip for £295, a £40 reduction from its recommended retail price of £330. That's a good deal for a CPU that outperforms AMD's already excellent Ryzen 3700X while also providing fast enough graphics performance for 1080p gaming. Oh, and it comes with a free, quite decent AMD Wraith CPU cooler - awesome.
So why is this a good deal? Well, the Ryzen 7 5700G is the first chip with integrated graphics to appear in AMD's incredibly powerful Ryzen 5000 family. This basically combines the processing performance of Ryzen's 5800X CPU with the graphics performance of something in the ballpark of an AMD RX 570 GPU. That means it's more than capable of handling 1080p gaming all by itself, no discrete graphics card required, but it's also fast enough to be paired with a proper GPU later on.
With graphics card prices being what they are right now - and no end in sight to price hikes and chip shortages for at least another year - the 5700G is an all-in-one solution that will get you gaming now on the cheap. At £330, the 5700G was already a decent deal, but at £295 it becomes even more alluring.
I've had a Ryzen 7 5700G in for testing over at Digital Foundry, and my early results show performance in between the Ryzen 5600X and 5800X in most games and content creation tasks, although this CPU doesn't include the giant amounts of L3 cache found in other Ryzen 5000 CPUs. That means some games that benefit greatly from this cache run slower on the 5700G than on the 5600X, but performance is still in line with the Ryzen 3000 series which is already fast enough for most purposes.
If you can find an old graphics card at a cheap price, then a good alternative to the 5700G would be pairing that old graphics card with a Ryzen 5600X. If you can't though, then this is a much cleaner solution that still provides reasonable performance, and that gets a big thumbs up from me.
If you prefer Amazon, they've price-matched the deal too here.
Another AMD Ryzen deal that caught my eye was this Ryzen7 3800XT from Currys. It's £250 when you use code FNDDGAMING at the checkout, reduced from £330. That's another strong deal, although the difference in performance between this and the earlier Ryzen 7 3800X are incredibly slim. It's slower than the 5700G above and doesn't come with any integrated graphics, but it's also cheaper - so it's an alternative worth knowing about. Personally, I'd go for the 5700G, but you do you!
I hope this was helpful, and feel free to share any questions or comments below. The RPS guide to the best CPUs might also be helpful! Thanks and we'll see you on the next one!