AMD Recommeds Dual-Channel DDR5-6000 Memory As “Sweet Spot” For Ryzen 8000G AM5 Desktop APUs

AMD's Ryzen 8000G AM5 Desktop APUs are right around the corner and you better get some nice dual-channel DDR5-6000 memory to make sure you are ready for them.

At CES 2024, AMD finally announced its Ryzen 8000G "Hawk Point" AM5 Desktop APUs which are a combination of Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 GPU cores. These chips also come equipped with the latest Ryzen AI "XDNA" NPUs (8700G & 8600G) and are aimed at budget/mainstream audiences who are likely going to play casual or AAA games without having to upgrade to discrete graphics solutions, saving costs of building a PC.

As with the past generation of APUs, AMD says that Ryzen 8000G will benefit massively from the memory configuration that is featured on AM5 PC builds. The company recommends that users have at least a dual-channel DDR5 setup and grab a 6000 MT/s kit. With the drop in memory price, PC builders can find a decent DDR5-6000 memory kit with 32 GB capacity for less than $100 US. A range of retailers have options listed from $70-$90 US which is very decent plus AM5 boards such as the B650 series start around $119 US so that's a $200 US upgrade path plus what you will pay for the APU of your choice. The Ryzen 5 8500G starts at $179 US and the Ryzen 5 8600G with NPU starts at $229 US.

Knowing that a majority of gamers won't require an NPU or don't find it purposeful, the 8500G is a very competitive product with 6 cores though it does lack the higher compute units of the 8600G & 8700G.

But having an AM5 platform will benefit you with two things, first of all, it will last you long & AMD has reaffirmed its commitment to the platform for the next few years so you are going to get at least two future generations of Ryzen CPUs for the platform. Plus, these APUs feature the Zen 4 cores which can easily be paired with a high-end Radeon discrete graphics card such as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and still deliver great performance without worrying about CPU bottlenecks in games.

So when you have an integrated GPU, you are relying entirely on the memory subsystem in the platform, that means your system RAM is gonna be what's powering your GPU as well and so two things are really important.

So first thing is dual-channel RAM, absolute must, that's a huge bandwidth advantage. Do not skip, you gotta have dual-channel. 6000 is pretty cheap nowadays, If you can do dual-channel 6000, you are gonna hit those great frame rates and really playable performance and that's definitely that we will steer people.

Donny Woligroski (Technical Marketing Manager at AMD) - PCWorld

In addition to memory support, Donny Woligroski (AMD Technical Marketing Manager) also talked with PCWorld about the power scaling and said that they have seen the performance being much better versus the laptop APUs since the Ryzen 8000G AM5 Desktop APUs utilize higher power of 65 Watts and power scaling is pretty much linear. Plus, the thermal advantage on desktop PCs will also net better performance.

You have a lot more power at your disposal. So these are 65W parts so they can use more power and power is pretty linear with graphics in these kind of parts and like you were saying, you can thermally give yourself a lot more headroom so you are not gonna get constrained by hot temperatures like in a laptop and we did see a significantly better perf on the desktop because of those things.

Donny Woligroski (Technical Marketing Manager at AMD) - PCWorld

Also looking forward to seeing overclocked numbers, 3 GHz+ on an iGPU sounds awesome!

— Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) January 8, 2024

The AMD Ryzen 8000G AM5 Desktop APUs are launching on the 31st of January so for those of you who were waiting for a new APU on AMD's latest platform, now is the right time to upgrade your rigs!

News Source: PCWorld