AMD 4700S Desktop APU Is Slightly Faster Than The Xbox Series X Chip, Features 16 GB GDDR6 Onboard Memory, 8 Cores & Up To 4.0 GHz Clocks

AMD seems to have a surplus stock of poor Xbox Series X & Series S chips which weren't feasible for the consoles and ended up as the 4700S APU for the DIY segment. The AMD 4700S is a Zen 2 based chip that is being sold as a complete unit with its motherboard and memory in the Asian markets and features specifications similar to the current-gen Xbox consoles which makes it one interesting product.

Listed over at T-Mall by a 3rd party seller, the AMD 4700S is being sold as a complete unit within a Mini-ITX Gaming PC. The retailer has listed pricing of 4599 - 5599 Chinese Yuan which converts to around $700-$800 US which is a pretty hefty price but it does make some sense considering specs of this PC include not just the chip but the PSU, the case, storage, and an external discrete graphics card. Chinese retailers were also the first to offer the original Xbox One SOC on a DIY unit last year, as we reported here.

So looking at the specifications, we first have the AMD 4700S which is an 8 core and 16 thread chip based on the Zen 2 core architecture. The CPU clocks up to 4.0 GHz and features a 12 MB cache. Do note that the frequency alone puts the chip faster than the APU on the Xbox Series X which clocks up to 3.8 GHz.

On the other side, this chip has the iGPU disabled which is the whole reason the chip ended up like this in the PC DIY segment. The Xbox Series X makes use of a custom RDNA 2 GPU with 12 TFLOPs of compute power, 52 Compute units running at 1.82 GHz, and is fed by 16 GB of GDDR6 memory.

Here's the interesting part, the AMD Cardinal motherboard being used to house the AMD 4700S chip does retain the 16 GB onboard GDDR6 memory. This means that there are no standard DIMM slots on the board and the system memory is fused directly to the motherboard. The motherboard has a standard spiral aluminum-fin-based heatsink and the PCH is also covered by a heat shrink.

The motherboard however is not identical to the Xbox Series X design and features some changes. The most prominent are the PCIe slot and the I/O. Since the iGPU is disabled on the chip, you are required to use an external graphics card. For this purpose, the DIY builder has the AMD 4700S PC equipped with a Radeon RX 550 graphics card which is a very old Polaris-based option that doesn't require any external power source. Power is also important for this PC as it houses a 200W PSU & GPU upgrade options are going to be very limited.

Other specifications include a 500 GB SSD & HDD with up to 5 TB capacity support while I/O ports include 4 USB 2.0, 3 USB 3.2 Gen 2, 1 USB 3.2 Gen 1, Gigabit LAN, and a 3-channel audio jack. The casing itself is pretty cool, featuring a mini-ITX design with two fans on the top and rear to blow air of the case. You can also see some performance numbers above where the AMD 4700S is being compared to the Intel Core i7-9750H 6 core mobility and Ryzen 7 4750G CPUs Overall, this is a very decent chip but availability will only be limited to China for now.

News Source: HXL