AMD's latest Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 APUs are finally available, but whether they are truly the best depends on how you think about the ratio of CPU to GPU power. As with the previous generation, the new G-series chips are exclusive to OEMs at launch. This means that if you were hoping to get one to build a new system, you may have to go gray market instead.

This curious combination of Zen 3 processing and Vega graphics will, for now, only ship to system builders who build machines, not to the DIY crowd. But it will happen later, as AMD says it will "bring the gaming-optimized processor to new and exciting OEM desktop systems in the coming weeks and make it available for DIY users to purchase in the channel later this year."

AMD said something similar at the launch of the Ryzen 4000 G-series chips, but in a more vague way, saying that "next-generation APUs will be available on both 400 and 500 series motherboards." what AMD said almost a year ago about "next-generation APUs" might have meant this.

On the one hand, the current DIY denial is unfortunate, as having a chip with a vaguely decent level of GPU capability baked into it certainly helps, since there are no real graphics cards available to buy right now. But on the other hand, it seems that AMD is steadily eroding the graphics silicon inside APUs with each generation.

Nor is it the only route to get Zen 3 CPUs anymore; the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 5600X are currently MIA, and while not the most exciting of the Ryzen 5000 series desktop chips, they are still the latest 7 nm chiplet design, with 8 cores, 16 threads, and PCIe 4.0 support. [The six new Ryzen G-series APUs being released today come in three basic flavors: quad-core, hex-core, and octa-core, each in 65W and 35W versions for ultra-small builds.

Each has three levels of GPU support, but sadly we are talking about Vega-based graphics silicon with the older GCN design, not the more modern Navi or RDNA architecture. The top chip has 8 compute units, or 512 GCN cores, while the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 APUs are 7CU/448-core and 6CU/384-core designs.

Compared to the older 3400G and its 11CU GPUs, it looks a bit shabby, given the lack of capable graphics cards right now, but the clock speeds of the latest Ryzen 4000 and 5000 G-series chips have actually increased to a slower, more than older chips with more cores.

However, AMD has clocked down the Ryzen 7 5700G from the Zen 2-based 4700G, so the latest G-series GPUs run about 100 MHz slower. This is not a big deal, but it is unfortunate that the clock speeds have gone the other way.

However, we won't know how this will affect gaming performance until we get a system with the new chips in-house. And even then, trying to get an old 4700G was difficult when it was actually a big new one, but now it will be more or less impossible.

Still, the older APUs were able to get over 30 fps at low 1080p settings on "The Witcher 3" and even run "Death Stranding" at that level at high 1080p settings. In other words, these new AMD APUs allow you to enjoy games without a discrete graphics card.

However, they still do not support PCIe 4.0; even though the Zen 4 CPU supports PCIe 4.0 as well as the mobile version, these desktop APUs are limited to PCIe 3.0 only. On the laptop side, it could be the case that they do not want the higher power consumption due to the more modern interface, but this does not seem to be an issue on the desktop.

What might be is the lack of shiny fast SSDs for APU users.