AMD is at last putting its latest generation of Ryzen 5000G APUs (go.pcworld.com/r50g) in the hands of DIY builders.
These processors, with Vega-powered integrated graphics, let you play games without having a discrete GPU—a very welcome alternative after months of waiting for the sky-high prices on graphics cards to drop. Of course, this generation also provides the best performance you can get from a CPU.
But perhaps you don’t relish the idea of chasing after yet another component likely to be in high demand. Or maybe you don’t want to deal with building your own PC right now, period. You’re in luck. You can find these two chips, plus the even more affordable Ryzen 3 5300G, in prebuilt machines right now.
Here’s the best of the bunch, plus what you need to know for upgrading them down the road.
HP PAVILION DESKTOP TP01-2337C (COSTCO)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G Processor with Radeon Vega Graphics
RAM: 8GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM (1x8GB)
Storage: 1TB PCIe NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive
Wireless: 11 Wireless-AC (2x2) and Bluetooth® 5.0
OS: Windows 10 Home
Price: $650
This retailer variant of an HP Pavilion prebuilt (go.pcworld.com/rtvr) with the midtier Ryzen 5 5600G is one of the best values that we’ve seen lately. Reproducing it as a DIY build actually costs more, which is not typical.
That said, the configuration isn’t perfect. We strongly recommending adding a second stick of 8GB RAM for optimal performance (which, according to HP’s support pages [go. pcworld.com/hspt], should be an easy addition to make).
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