AMD's New Ryzen 3000 APUs Give Budget Gamers An Affordable Taste Of Radeon Vega

AMD’s new Ryzen 3000 APUs don’t step it up the way the new Ryzen 3000 CPUs do, but they look to still be decent updates.

- Gordon Mah Ung

If you’re on a Top Ramen diet, the last thing you’re probably jazzed for is AMD’s new $750 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X or its $450 Radeon 5700 XT (go.pcworld.com/navi) graphics card. But AMD buried some good news for budget gamers among its massive CPU, GPU, and motherboard PCIe 4.0 announcement blitz at E3 2019: A pair of affordable new Ryzen 3000-series APUs.

AMD’s APUs blend the company’s Ryzen processing cores with Radeon Vega graphics on a single ready-to-game chip.

The Ryzen 3 3200G will feature a quadcore chip running with a 4GHz boost and 3.6GHz base speeds. For graphics, it will feature Radeon Vega 8 GPU cores running at 1,250MHz. The new APU will come with a Wraith Stealth cooler.

Compared to the previous Ryzen 3 2200G, the newer Ryzen 3200G (go. pcworld.com/ryz3) will run about 300MHz faster on the CPU side and about 150MHz faster on the GPU side. Budget gamers will be especially pleased by the price though: AMD will still charge $99 for the APU.

The $149 Ryzen 5 3400G justifies its higher price by outfitting its quad-core CPU with simultaneous multithreading. It’ll run at 4.2GHz on boost (about 300MHz faster than the previous Ryzen 5 2400G) and have a base clock of 3.7GHz. The graphics are faster too, upgrading to Radeon RX Vega 11 graphics that run at slightly higher clocks than its predecessor (1,400MHz instead of 1,250MHz).