No GPU, no worries with AMD's Ryzen 5 5600G now under £200

AMD Ryzen 5 5600G box on a blue background

(Image credit: Future)

If you're struggling to find a graphics card in stock or at a reasonable price, then this AMD CPU with integrated graphics could be a game saver. The AMD Ryzen 5 5600G is a six-core CPU with AMD's up-to-date Zen 3 architecture, but more importantly, it offers Radeon Vega Graphics onboard that can deliver admirable gaming performance, especially for low-overhead competitive games.

You can pick up this all-in-one chip for £199 over at Amazon, which is a saving of around £40 off its usual going price. It's also available for around £200 at Scan, Curry's, Overclockers UK, and Box.

AMD Ryzen 5 5600G | six-core/12-thread CPU | Zen 3 | RX Vega 7 GPU | 3.9GHz base clock | 4.4GHz boost clock | 7nm | £239 £199 at Amazon (save ~£40)
This chip delivers both CPU and GPU in an affordable AM4-compatible package, which is great for gamers during a GPU shortage. It's not capable of the highest framerates ever, even at 1080p, but it makes PC gaming possible and might surprise you with just how capable it is. What it offers heaps of though is flexibility: you could fit a discrete GPU into a 5600G-powered PC later in life for a graphics boost, or even replace it entirely with another AM4 compatible chip.

In terms of GPU, the Ryzen 5 5600G isn't a match for a discrete GPU, but it is much more powerful than your average CPU iGPU. There are 7 Radeon Vega Graphics Compute Units inside the 5600G, clocked to 1.9GHz.

These graphics cores aren't quite a match for the RDNA 2-powered Aerith processor found in the Steam Deck but are a big improvement on previous generation APUs from AMD. The Ryzen 5 5600G delivers enough grunt for 720p performance in modern games and steady 1080p framerates in many others, especially in competitive titles like CS: GO.

If you want more power or read up on a very similar chip to the 5600G, you can check out the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G.

The CPU shares an architecture with the other chips in the Ryzen 5000-series: Zen 3. That's a powerful architecture that's great for more than gaming. That's true of the Ryzen 5 5600G, as well, as this chip offers six cores and 12 threads of Zen 3, a formidable match for even content creation and streaming.

That's also the benefit of the Ryzen 5 5600G. While it's tough to pick up a graphics card now, we're hoping for an improvement in supply later this year. If that comes to pass, you won't need to start from scratch with the Ryzen 5 5600G. You can still slot a graphics card into a machine built around this chip and expect top performance out of it. And if you do, you'll still have an AMD Zen 3-powered six-core CPU able to keep up.

Beyond that, this chip is built around the AM4 socket, which means you have a wide range of AM4 compatible motherboards to choose from and an upgrade path to a more powerful AMD processor down the line should you so wish.

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Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.