Got this when I was building a new PC to replace a five-year-old Ryzen 7 1700X system. The old PC was great performance-wise, I didn't really need to upgrade yet but I was beginning to have crashes periodically ever since moving to dual monitors in late 2020 due to working from home. These were the strangest crashes...no error, no warning, the system would just reboot. It was really annoying, even though with NVMe drives the reboot is quick. It was a mystery whether the problem was caused by the GPU, CPU, memory, the SSD, a driver somewhere, or some combination of all of the above. I figured it was time to pull my system into the modern age with updated interfaces, chip, and motherboard.
With GPUs still being ridiculously overpriced, I targeted the Ryzen 7 5700G as a chip that would give me comparable or better performance than my old system but still give me a more modern technology set without needing a GPU. The old PC had an nVidia 1060 but I'd had good luck with its predecessor when I'd run for five years with an AMD A10 APU chip that played games sufficiently well and absolutely manhandled Windows and office apps. But as luck would have it, the 5700G had been dropping in price during my research phase, and right when I went to buy, the price spiked up. Thanks a lot, irrational market!
Pondering what to do, I read some comparisons of the 1700X to the 5600G, and the 5600G fared ok. It was close in overall performance and much more efficient and used less power. It did have two fewer cores, but I'm not a streamer or heavy video editor, so I figured I'd give it a crack. Amazon had a third party seller that shipped out of Mexico with the best price...I was a little weirded out by that, but the seller came through and the chip is legit and arrived brand new in box with stock cooler, instructions, and foil badge sticker.
You should pair this APU with a good mobo and memory. I chose the MSI B550 MPG Gamer Edge WiFi, and TeamGroup DDR4 3600. The mobo will be critical in determining your possible upgrade paths, and the memory is used by the AMD APUs to help with the graphics. The MSI board will support eventually moving to the 5700G or even 5800 or higher with a GPU.
The 5600G installed easily and worked great on first boot. The MSI board supports the 5600G with BIOS version 17 and above and mine came with version 18 installed. So far the system has been stable with none of the weird crashes. I've not pushed the gaming performance yet, just a couple low-demand games. The most visually demanding was Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris...it was sluggish at 4K but fine at 1080 FHD. I'm also running several browser tabs open. The 5600G cost at about $100 less than the what the 5700G was running at the time. So far so good, and I know there are some easy APU/CPU upgrades available in the future but right now I've no need to do so.
Update 22-Sep-2022: I am completely despondent now. After running beautifully for two weeks, the random reboots when the system is at idle are now happening to this PC just has it had on my old one. I've read every post I could from others that have had similar issues with Ryzen chips and I'm beginning to think it's a driver issue, but I'm still not 100% sure. This is a nice chip but if it's going to keep crashing I simply can't use it; it's just too maddening to walk away and return a few minutes later and the thing has rebooted. I may have to return the chip or even consider switching to Intel. What a disappointment.
Update 24-Sep-2022: Back in action after doing a Windows reset. This is basically reinstalling Windows over your existing install. System is stable again. Very strange. But a few days ago when the issue started it was after I had just gone to the AMD site and installed a bunch of chipset drivers and the Radeon utilities. So I'll stick with the stock drivers Windows installed, and leave the other updates out. The only ones I've applied since getting this PC build are the motherboard BIOS (MSI B550 MPG Gamer Edge WiFi, now currently at BIOS 7C91v1B), various motherboard drivers for the WiFi and Bluetooth, and the MSI Center software so I can easily reference the mobo BIOS and driver versions from Windows. If I get past two weeks without the issue returning then I can say those AMD drivers were likely related, which is unfortunate, if those drivers also bring better performance. But the best feature is stability, so I'll stick with this for now. Also put the star rating to four stars - this is a great performing chip, but that reboot thing is a total bummer when it happens.
Update 08-Dec-2022: Running GREAT. Holding back on the drivers was the answer. System is rock solid now, through games, video streaming, and many browser tabs open. Have since run Fallout 4 just fine (it struggled with my dual monitor setup at first, but I think that's a Fallout thing and not the Ryzen chip) at FHD. I regularly put the system to sleep and wake it later; no problems and I'm getting things done at work and play.
| Processor | 4.4 GHz amd_ryzen_5_5600g |
|---|
