AMD Ryzen 7 5700G: memory bandwidth analysis

Early Ryzen processors were extremely dependent on fast RAM to perform at their best, but subsequent generations with their larger cache sizes have proven a little more resistant, losing less performance with slower kits. Our standard test bed is equipped with DDR4-3600 CL16, so what happens when we knock down the frequency to 3000MT/s?

First up is Ashes of the Singularity, a DX12 strategy game that absolutely lives and dies on CPU performance, where fast RAM typically sees noticeable performance improvements. Unsurprisingly, the 5700G is faster than the 5600X, as it has more cores to work with. We're more interested in the performance drop when we switch to DDR4-3000, which for the 5700G is 96 percent as fast as our standard DDR4-3600 kit. That's similar to other Ryzen 5000 processors, with the Ryzen 5600X and 5800X getting 95 percent of the performance with DDR4-3000. Over in Intel land, the 11400F is much more sensitive to memory frequency, with DDR4-3000 resulting in just 87 percent of the DDR4-3600 performance.

Far Cry 5 next. This is a single-core-reliant title, so we expect to see a small but noticeable frame-rate disadvantage with slower RAM - and indeed, our DDR4-3000 result is 97.5 percent of what we get with DDR4-3600. Again, the 11400F loses out more with slower RAM, with just 93 percent performance at the lower MT/s rate.

Crysis is built very differently, using a much larger number of cores than Far Cry 5, which is perhaps why we see a relatively large performance deficit - five percent from DDR4-3600 to DDR4-3000. That's higher than we normally expect to see; most CPUs lose only two or three percent here.

So based on these results, you can make full use of cheaply available 3000MHz and 3200MHz kits rather than being reliant on fancier 3600MHz kits. That keeps full system build costs down, which has got to be a good thing for a budget-oriented APU like the 5700G. Now, let's see how this processor's integrated graphics perform.

AMD Ryzen 7 5700G analysis

• Introduction, hardware breakdown, test system
• Gaming benchmarks: Hitman 3, Total War Three Kingdoms
• Gaming benchmarks: CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege, Black Ops Cold War
• Gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 5, Crysis 3
• Gaming benchmarks: Memory bandwidth analysis [This Page]
• Gaming benchmarks: Integrated graphics
• AMD Ryzen 7 5700G: the Digital Foundry verdict