AMD's Ryzen 4000 is a groundbreaking mobile CPUiGamesNews.com

Through its Ryzen 3000 desktop product line, AMD provides more cores, more performance, and more value-narrowing the gap with Intel in benchmarking and gaming, and fundamentally providing excellent at a reasonable price product. The functions of Ryzen 4000 are roughly the same, but different. This is not the new Zen architecture, nor the bumps of existing desktop chips. Instead, AMD refactored the existing Zen 2 core into a new all-in-one processor APU with Vega graphics. The codename of the processor is Renoir, straightforward, this is a game-changer.

We are using the new Asus TUF A15 notebook computer to evaluate the Ryzen 4000- or more specifically the Ryzen 7 4800H. Its great thing is that you put this 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen chip into an excellent notebook The price in the computer is only £ 999 / US $ 999. For this, you will get a 144Hz 15.4-inch screen with adaptive synchronization, a GTX 1660 Ti discrete GPU, 16GB of 3200MHz DDR4 (in all important dual-channel configurations), and the specification is also equipped with a 512GB SSD. The version that Asus sent us is better because the specification has been upgraded to RTX 2060 with 1TB SSD. You did pay a premium of £ 300 / US $ 300 for this, but I think the money is worth it.

TUF A15 is obviously not an ultra-high-end laptop, but this is not its intended market. It is not a "thin and light" display. Without a borderless display, you will not use the screen for precise and accurate photography or video editing. You do get an adaptive sync compatible 144Hz screen, but the color reproduction is not surprising, and the motion processing is not superb. But remember, you can still get extraordinary specs in money, the key is that if the product is damaged, if you focus on the game, then the nip and the gap is not a big problem. This is not a superbook, but it is hardly a clumsy behemoth. It is not very light and weighs only 2.3 kg, but it does not weigh heavily on the backpack. Although the screen is not surprising, it is absolutely possible to play VRR games at a maximum setting between 80fps and 120fps. Even RGB-enabled keyboards and trackpads are fine.

But we mainly want to look at Ryzen 4000. Usually, many products come from a single Renoir design with H, HS and U names. The H chip is located at the top of the stack. The H chip uses the highest possible 45W TDP, followed by the HS chip, which aims to provide similar performance with a more compact 35W TDP. For ultrabooks and similar form factors, U chips are designed to provide optimal performance through a relatively small 15-25W power window. Our review processor is Ryzen 7 4800H. It retains all eight cores and 16 threads. Compared with the highest-end Ryzen 9 4900H, its clock speed is reduced the least, while its only other specification reduction comes from the integrated Vega graphics. GPU core clock.

note: AMD's H processor has a 45W TDP. The HS version is also available. Generally, you will lose a small amount of frequency in exchange for a reduced 35W TDP.

At that time, Ryzen 7 4800H was not a "full-fat experience", but in this product, it is almost impossible for you to tell-the story of value is extraordinary. Eight cores and 16 threads are Intel ’s high-end areas in the mobile space, and AMD brings the same configuration-usually More Performance-mid-range space. This is a very important thing, especially because the benchmark numbers essentially show that despite some warnings, you have the largest share of Ryzen 3000 desktop performance. Cinebench R20 seems to be the benchmark on which AMD depends on survival and death, and you can see here that Ryzen 5 3600X is only one step away from Ryzen 5 3600X and second only to 3700X. Multi-threaded results show that it exceeds Ryzen 5 3600X, Ryzen 7 2700X, i7 9700K and i5 9600K.

One thing to point out here is that these desktops are running faster 3600MHz DDR4 memory, which will improve their performance-in this respect, it makes the Ryzen 4000 look better. What I also found interesting here is that my Ryzen 7 4800H score here is basically comparable to the Ryzen 9 single-core performance in the AMD Renoir review guide, and we scored less than 100 points on multi-core.

Cinebench is indeed deceived in some respects, and as a workload representing the real world, we like to use h.264 and HEVC encoding through Handbrake to transcode 4K comparative video of Tomb Raider: Rise-this is our The only exception encountered was during the test. In these two tests, 4800H suddenly became the slowest Ryzen, although it was still faster than Core i5 9600K under h264 encoding. The result should actually be better than this, which makes me the only real criticism of this product.

Essentially, when you start video encoding, you get some huge clock from the processor, but we ran into a point where it suddenly dropped to 3.2GHz for the rest of the time-the reason is unclear. The obvious conclusion is that the chip is throttled due to overheating, but the core temperature does not exceed 80 degrees Celsius, and the fan actually slows down, because in this throttled backward state, less cooling work is required and the temperature drops to the mid-1960s . After a long effort, the processor seems to decide to enter a low-power mode. I should not have observed this in the game, and I should add that, but it is still a strange behavior-I want to do this test again on another Ryzen 4000 product.

So how good is the Ryzen 4000 in terms of gaming? Although this part does use the Zen 2 core, the migration from desktop processors to multi-function APUs has undergone profound changes. Using the excellent Ryzen 7 3700X as a comparison point, although we kept the same number of cores and threads, the clock was cut and the TDP was reduced from 65W to 45W. The huge 36MB L3 cache was trimmed back to only 8MB. We really want to know how close the game performance levels of the 4800H and 3700X are, which is full of challenges.

The usual way to test CPU performance in games is to pair the processor with the desktop RTX 2080 Ti and then run it at 1080p to eliminate GPU bottlenecks. However, this laptop is equipped with RTX 2060, in this case, the possibility of CPU limitation at 1080p is much smaller-GPU is the limiting factor in most cases. Our solution? We benchmarked the 3D performance of the mobile RTX 2060 and found that it is basically equivalent to the desktop GTX 1660 Ti. Therefore, we compared the 4800H / RTX 2060 mobile combination with the desktop 3700X / 1660 Ti to ensure that the 3700X is operating with 3200MHz DDR4. To ensure that we are actually testing CPU performance, the resolution of both systems is reduced to 720p.

Using "Crysis 3" and "The Witcher 3" as a comparison point, in all cases, the average frame rate makes Ryzen 7 4800H deliver 87% of the overall game performance delivered by Ryzen 7 3700X. Considering the significant reduction in cache, stricter power limits and inevitable clock reduction, this is an impressive feat. By comparing the 720p measurement results of these CPU limits with the standard 1080p results, we can effectively compare the CPU and GPU limits in the test cases, which are usually 10% different, which indicates good machine performance.

The slightly adjusted "Crysis 3"-which lasted 7 years, is still an excellent exercise-provides 80-120fps resolution at 1080p resolution, and looks great on the adaptive sync screen. The shadow of Tomb Raider has a similar result, running smoothly with its "highest" quality preset. The mobile RTX 2060 is obviously not as powerful as a desktop computer, but thanks to DLSS 2.0 support, you can still run Wolfenstein with ray tracing: Youngblood at 90-110fps. Remedy's Control with a full RTX feature set is one of the heaviest workouts in PC games, but this laptop still provides a frame rate of 50-90fps, which can only be reduced to 40fps in the craziest scenes. Of course, nothing prevents you from leaving ray tracing and using DLSS 2.0 to improve standard rasterization performance.

This is a good game package, but it is actually provided by Ryzen 7 4800H here. Surprisingly, the mid-range laptop is equipped with CPU power, which generally outperforms the Core i9 9980HK in the Dell XPS 15 we own in the Digital Foundry office. AMD's new Renoir chip also includes an integrated Vega graphics core, which we are very interested in. Not every Ryzen 4000 laptop will be equipped with a dedicated GPU, so in these cases, integrated graphics is the only option. The 3DMark Time Spy score is only 1074 points, while the RTX 2060 mobile processor scores 6010 points. Obviously, you need to pick combat power-but you can still use it to do some interesting things.

The extensive performance coverage of Doom Eternal also brings some additional information-first, iGPU can reserve up to 8GB of system memory for graphics, which is an upgrade to what we have seen in the previous AMD APU. A good thing. However, the driver is identified as "AMD proprietary", and at startup, the game actually requires us to upgrade it because it seems to be outdated. The problem is that AMD's automatic update program does not do this. It ’s nice to see that the driver update fully includes integrated graphics. However, the most important thing is that the integrated graphics of the Ryzen 4000 is not bad-in fact, we can find first-class products here, especially in the laptop section.

In the end, it's hard not to like the ASUS TUF A15, because at its main price point, you will find that many parts and performance are unacceptable, although they are not satisfactory. You can also get desktop-level gaming performance and productivity performance from the Ryzen 7 4800H, which is undoubtedly the most impressive notebook CPU we have ever tried. In addition to its excellent performance, its heat dissipation and power efficiency are also excellent: Yes, TUF A15 is equipped with a 90WHr battery, but on more routine tasks you do get full-day battery life, which makes the machine very easy to use.

Is there anything better than this? Since there is another Asus laptop-Zephrus G14, we would like to say "yes", it is supplied with Ryzen 9 4900HS and RTX 2060, miraculously stuffing all the technology into the 14-inch laptop. Its purpose is to cover the high-end market bypassed by TUF A15-but obviously, this requires a lot of extra costs. It is well-known as the flagship laptop of Ryzen 4000, and we will do our best to study it as soon as possible.