AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Review

 

 AMD shorthand lesson: The "G" is for "graphics." AMD's quad-core Ryzen 5 3400G is one of just a few of the company's Ryzen-branded CPUs that include built-in graphics processing. It's particularly suited for installation in a PC that doesn't need a discrete GPU for graphics-intensive activities such as 

editing video or playing 3D games. A list price of just $149 and competent computing performance make it a fine value, too. Whether you're building a budget productivity PC or a very entry-level gaming rig without a video card, the Ryzen 5 3400G is an excellent choice to power it.

The Ryzen 5 3400G is from AMD's latest third-generation Ryzen CPU family, but it's a bit different than most of the pack. Most of the third-generation chips use an entirely new 7-nanometer (nm) processor architecture (dubbed "Zen 2") and offer significant improvements over their predecessors.

 The Ryzen 5 3400G does not. Rather, it's an updated version of the second-generation Ryzen 5 2400G, sharing many of the same features and a similar microarchitecture. It also generally matches—and in some cases slightly exceeds—the second-generation chip's proficient computing performance.

Part of this proficiency stems from its support for multithreading. Of the third-generation Ryzen CPUs that have built-in graphics processing (a family of two, at this writing), the Ryzen 5 3400G is the only one of the pair to boast this feature. Here's a cheat sheet of all the new-for-2019 desktop Ryzens...

Multithreading can boost performance when running modern CPU-intensive applications like software that transcodes video or renders 3D imagery. Each of the Ryzen 5 3400G's cores can handle two processing threads, compared with just one thread per core for the entry-level AMD Ryzen 3 3200G,

 which also has four physical cores. A full review of the Ryzen 3 3200G is forthcoming, but you can see how it stacks up against the Ryzen 5 3400G in the performance section of this review.

 

The Ryzen 5 3400G's $50 premium over the $99 Ryzen 3 3200G also gets you slightly higher clock speeds. The Ryzen 5 3400G runs at a base clock of 3.7GHz, versus 3.6GHz for the Ryzen 3 3200G. The more expensive chip also offers a maximum boost clock speed of 4.2GHz, compared with 4GHz for its Ryzen 3 sibling. Although these rated speed differences might seem small, the difference between the 

maximum boost clocks, in particular, could be a significant time saver when you're compressing files or touching up photos.

The final major difference between the two chips pertains to their graphics processing. The Ryzen 5 3400G comes with a built-in AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 GPU, with 11 graphics cores of its own running at up to a 1,400MHz clock speed. The RX Vega 11 is a step above the RX Vega 8 that's on the

 Ryzen 3 3200G, which has eight graphics cores and a 1,250MHz peak. Both are well ahead of the performance you can expect from Intel's integrated graphics solutions, such as the UHD Graphics 630 found in most of its recent mainstream desktop CPUs.

Don't be misled by the "Vega" nomenclature, though, which is shared with AMD's previous generation of high-end discrete graphics cards (for example, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64). The RX Vega 11 and RX Vega 8, while robust for what they are, don't offer anywhere near the full graphics horsepower that you'd get from AMD's standalone Radeon RX graphics cards or their Nvidia GeForce GTX or RTX competitors.