Almost every CPU on the market today comes equipped with some variety of integrated graphics processor (IGP); those that don't are the exception. The performance you get from these IGPs varies greatly by model, but with the right balance between performance and price, a CPU with a potent IGP can be appealing for niches like casual PC gaming, multi-display productivity work, and compact desktop builds. To that end, AMD designed its Ryzen 5 8500G as a popularly priced processor with better-than-average built-in graphics.

With a budget-friendly $179 list price and selling for as much as $40 less at this writing, the 8500G can be an alluring option under the right circumstances, thanks to its punchy IGP. For a better-balanced budget desktop chip that's faster at crunching CPU tasks, go for the Intel Core Ultra 250K Plus, our latest Editors' Choice award winner. But upgraders or PC builders committed to the AMD AM5 platform will find the 8500G an able pick if a graphics card just isn't in the cards, but potent graphics performance is not optional.

Chip Design and Specs: A Rare AMD big.LITTLE-Style Processor

The AMD Ryzen 5 8500G stands out among the company's AM5-socket processors: It is technically a monolithic chip design manufactured under TSMC's 4-nanometer process, fused with a form of big.LITTLE design, while most AMD CPUs use a modular "chiplet" approach. Chiplet designs offer advantages in cost and scalability. The 8500G is also one of the few chips to feature AMD’s take on the big.LITTLE hybrid processor design.

The big.LITTLE processor design concept, first introduced by Arm, calls for combining two types of CPU cores in a single processor. Most big.LITTLE designs employ a high-performance CPU architecture alongside a less-powerful but more energy-efficient one. The high-performance CPU cores in a design like this are typically referred to as the "big" cores, as they tend to have more transistors and they are physically larger than the high-efficiency cores. The big.LITTLE term itself is specific to Arm, but the design concept has inspired Intel to develop a similar hybrid processor architecture, which Intel has used with its "Alder Lake," "Raptor Lake," and "Arrow Lake" desktop processors, as well as some mobile processor designs.

AMD's take on the 8500G's big.LITTLE design concept is somewhat different. The processor has a total of six CPU cores: two on AMD's "Zen 4" architecture and four on a modified "Zen 4c" architecture.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

In truth, I can't see a ton of difference between the standard Zen 4 CPU cores and Zen 4c cores; both share many of the same features, including simultaneous multithreading support.

The most significant differences come down to clock speed and cache. The 8500G's two Zen 4 CPU cores operate normally at 4.1GHz and can boost to 5GHz. The four Zen 4c cores top out at a much slower 3.2GHz, and they can turbo only up to 3.7GHz, at best. As for the cache difference, the Zen 4c cores have just 2MB of L3 cache per core, half as much as the traditional Zen 4 cores' 4MB cache.

The use of these Zen 4c cores is an important distinction that sets the 8500G apart from the higher-end parts in AMD's Ryzen 8000G series, the Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G, both of which rely entirely on Zen 4 CPU cores. Those processors offer faster CPU performance and have more capable IGPs. They are worth looking at in greater detail if you are looking for a processor with a powerful IGP. (Hit the links for full reviews of each.)

AMD set the Ryzen 5 8500G's thermal design power to 65 watts. This TDP is the same as that of the higher-end Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G, but the 8500G runs considerably slower than those speedier chips.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The 8500G's marquee feature is its Radeon 740M IGP. Equipped with four RDNA 3 graphics cores, the 740M features 256 shaders, 16 texture mapping units, eight raster operation processors, and four ray accelerators. The IGP maxes out at a 2.8GHz clock speed, making the 8500G's graphics 27% faster, with a newer, more efficient graphics architecture, than the IGPs on AMD's Ryzen 7000- or 9000-series CPUs; those IGPs run on RDNA 2 cores and are all clocked at 2.2GHz.

As noted earlier, the Ryzen 5 8500G is compatible with AMD's AM5 platform and should work with all AM5 chipsets. A BIOS update may be required to get the 8500G working on some AM5 motherboards, and you should check the motherboard's list of supported CPUs to ensure out-of-the-box compatibility. The 8500G is rated to support DDR5 memory clocked at up to 5,200MHz in a dual-channel configuration. Faster RAM might work with the 8500G and would likely improve performance, particularly the IGP performance, as graphical workloads tend to be more data-hungry. Using RAM clocked above 5,200MHz with the 8500G is technically overclocking, however, and your success with doing so will vary.

AMD provides a stock cooler with the 8500G, which should be sufficient to run the processor without buying a third-party thermal solution. It might be beneficial to buy a more robust CPU cooler if you intend to overclock, but one is not strictly necessary.

Test Setup and Competition

I tested the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G on our AMD AM5 CPU test bed, built around a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard and two 16GB DDR5 RAM sticks. The memory speed matches the processor’s maximum officially supported RAM speed for each processor (5,200MHz, in the case of the 8500G). For graphics, I use an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 on all tests except those focused on the IGP (which will obviously be important for this chip). The system also has a 1TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD and a 1,650-watt SilverStone Hela 1650R Platinum power supply. I use a Corsair iCue Link Titan 360 RX LCD liquid CPU cooler to keep each processor from overheating. (See how we test CPUs.)

I compared the Ryzen 5 8500G with the following CPUs...

AMD Ryzen 5 8500G: CPU Performance Tests

First up: benchmark-testing the raw CPU power. These tests place a heavy load on the processor, enabling us to see how much work each chip can complete while operating near 100% usage. The tests we use are all content-creation-based, as media-creation work is often highly threaded and very demanding on the host processor.

The Ryzen 5 8500G lagged well behind the midrange and high-end CPUs in these tests. It fared better against budget-processor options like the Core i5-14400 and the Core Ultra 5 225, but the 8500G still brought up the rear in most of these CPU tests. The newer Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, meanwhile, basically held court here among the budget options.

AMD Ryzen 5 8500G: Gaming Tests, Low Settings

Running PC games at low graphical settings can help you to achieve a high refresh rate. Our objective in testing with these settings (and our mighty GeForce RTX 5090 card) is to show the performance difference between processors and how the CPU affects peak frame rates. Typically, faster processors can support a higher overall frame rate when tested with low graphics settings and a fast enough graphics card, but this is a somewhat oversimplified view. Other factors can play into these results, such as the speed and size of the system RAM, the processor's cache, and the graphics card. As we have standardized our test systems to minimize these variables, most of the difference you see in these tests will be down to the processor's speed and architectural intricacies.

We didn't expect the 8500G to shine in tests using a graphics card (the main point of this chip is to use it without one), and no surprises there. The test results speak for themselves: AMD's Ryzen 5 8500G placed last in all the gaming benchmarks we ran at low graphics settings, with wide performance gaps between it and even the competing budget Intel chips. At times, as with Cyberpunk 2077 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the Ryzen 5 was close enough to the Core i5-14400 that you might struggle to tell the difference with the naked eye.

It’s not surprising that the Ryzen 5 8500G turned in lackluster results with the RTX 5090. The RTX 5090 is the best graphics card you can buy these days, and lower-end chips like the Ryzen 5 8500G can become a performance bottleneck in high-frame-rate scenarios, comparatively speaking. (These are all more-than-playable frame rates, but the 8500G is definitely cramping the card's style.) AMD's Ryzen 5 8500G would probably be better paired with a midrange card, such as an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT.

AMD Ryzen 5 8500G: Gaming Tests, High Settings

Testing graphics cards with high in-game graphical settings shows how these processors perform under duress. Most in-game settings that boost image quality increase the graphics card's workload, but some also increase the processor's workload. The frame rate drops due to the increase in the graphical workload, but the frame rate can drop further if the processor is unable to keep up with the change in the workload, too. Testing in this configuration allows us to see how well the processors can cope.

The Ryzen 5 8500G performed just as weakly with the RTX 5090 when we cranked up the graphics settings to their max, huffing and puffing far behind the other processors here once again.

The Black Myth: Wukong test marked something of a high point for the 8500G, where the RTX GPU's support for DLSS helped muscle over the less-powerful CPU. The 8500G still trailed its rivals, albeit by far less than it lagged the high-end chips. This processor simply isn't a good partner for a high-end graphics card.

AMD Ryzen 5 8500G: Integrated Graphics Testing

With many desktop CPUs, the integrated graphics processor (IGP) goes unused and untested in favor of a discrete graphics card. The IGP can be a highly useful tool for troubleshooting issues, driving a second display, or performing some multimedia tasks. I do not test the IGP extensively, but the limited in-game testing I conduct gives us some idea of how these IGPs perform relative to each other (and, heck, to the mighty Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090).

And here, finally, the Ryzen 5 8500G’s Radeon 740M IGP got a chance to shine. The 8500G outpaced most of the budget competition here, but it faced a fierce challenge from Intel's "Arrow Lake" processors. AMD's Radeon IGP on the 8500G traded blows with Intel's Core Ultra 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K, and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus in the two game tests I ran.

You'll find the same Intel IGP, simply referred to by the architecture name of Xe-LPG Graphics, in almost all desktop Intel Arrow Lake 200S processors, including Intel's newest budget chip, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. The 250K Plus represents the best of both worlds, as its $199 list price makes it eminently affordable with no sacrifice in integrated graphics speeds. In contrast, the Intel Core Ultra 5 225 is one of Intel's few Core Ultra 200S processors to feature a weaker IGP, which explains its comparatively lackluster showing in these tests.

If you mostly play casual PC games or older games, you might be satisfied with the 8500G. It maintained a playable frame rate at 1080p in both benchmarks, and you might even be able to increase the settings a bit more, particularly if you overclock the CPU, IGP, and/or RAM. However, you can draw more IGP performance from similar processors like AMD’s Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G.

AMD Ryzen 5 8500G: Power Consumption and Thermal Tests

To measure each processor's power consumption, I used a Kill-A-Watt power meter during our Blender and Cinebench tests. This gives us the full power consumption of the test system, rather than just the processors. This makes comparing numbers between AMD- and Intel-based processors in this section somewhat tricky, as the power draw of the motherboard and other components is included. The test systems use as many of the same parts as is logically possible, however, and because this difference in platform power consumption is unavoidable, these numbers can still be informative.

The Ryzen 5 8500G performed relatively well in these power-consumption tests. It used the least power during the Blender and Cinebench 2024 tests, by a wide margin. It isn't the most efficient processor that I tested, though. All of the competing CPUs delivered better actual performance in these tests than the 8500G, so even with a higher power draw, some of these other processors were unquestionably more efficient. For example, the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus used 104% more power than the 8500G during the Cinebench 2024 test, yet achieved a score 173% higher than the 8500G, more than offsetting the increase in power consumption.

In different terms: The 8500G scored roughly 4.7 points per watt in the Cinebench 2024 multi-threaded test, while the 250K Plus served up roughly 6.3 points per watt in the same test. This means the 250K Plus was roughly 34% more efficient in this test. Nonetheless, the 8500G certainly is energy-friendly, and its low power draw can enable it to operate well in systems with low-power power supplies that some of these other, hungrier processors might overtax.

Thermally, the Ryzen 5 8500G also performed reasonably, in that it didn't heat up too much, remaining quite cool compared with the high-end chips. Against the other budget CPUs here, however, it didn't stack up as well. The Core Ultra 5 225 and Core i5-14400 kept cooler than the 8500G by a few degrees under the same liquid CPU cooler.