PC GAMING, right now, is at a standstill. The computing world has been rocked twice— once by the pandemic, and then again by cryptocurrency. Our humble GPUs have been snapped up and thrown into the deep, dark abyss of crypto mining, toiling away on inane calculations generating value from Whatever your stance on nothing. cryptocurrency, whether you believe it’s the future of decentralized finance or a meritless environmental disaster, it’s impossible to deny the impact it has had on the industry. As the availability of new GPUs has dwindled, enjoying our humble pastime is all but impossible. This generation’s mid-range graphics cards are now priced like last year’s flagships. Budget options are coming in at $400, and the whole market, although slowly recovering after multiple government crackdowns, is still a place of desolation when it comes to sourcing that most vital of PC components.

So where do you turn, when the GPU’s time in the sun is currently stifled? To integrated graphics? Given that processors are currently one of the few areas cryptocurrency can’t make a quick buck, it’s not a bad shout. For years, we’ve championed integrated graphics as “just enough” for entry-level 1080p gaming, but as GPUs became more affordable, development in iGPUs stagnated, until now.

With AMD launching its Ryzen G series chips, and Intel declaring its 11th-generation processors packed some of the best graphics performance Team Blue has ever mustered, we decided it was time to put the two to the test by building two similar rigs to truly decide who holds the crown of this generation’s iGPU king.

AMD INGREDIENTS

AMD WRAITH STEALTH COOLER $0

There’s nothing we love more than a good deal at Maximum PC, and a free cooler is right up our street for this build, especially given the price of the Ryzen 7 5700G.

As standard, it comes with the impressively robust Wraith Stealth cooler. This meaty offering packs a serious punch and makes Intel’s old and outdated included heatsink look like a paperweight in comparison.

You install this little guy by removing the brackets from the motherboard and using the included mobo backplate to screw it into position. It’s not quite as fancy as the be quiet! cooler offered up by the Intel rig below, but it’s free! www.amd.com

AMD RYZEN 7 5700G $359

The main talking point of this build is the AMD integrated graphics chip, specifically the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU. This chip marks the arrival of the 7nm Cezanne Zen 3 APUs.

This 65W CPU is packed with eight cores and 16 threads, a 3.8GHz base and a 4.6GHz boost clock, 16MB of L3 cache, and eight Radeon RX Vega CUs that operate at 2.0GHz. It looks pretty tasty on paper, it’s a Zen3 chip too so it steps up to a DDR4- 3200 interface from DDR4-2933. This will certainly aid gaming performance with the integrated 7nm Radeon RX Vega graphics engine. It should produce solid 1080p gaming and for our battle, that’s exactly what we are aiming for. www.amd.com

450W CORSAIR CV450 80+ BRONZE $45

We have gone for a budget-priced PSU in this build, which is more than capable of powering our machine. With no traditional radiator AIO and no GPUs, we don’t necessarily need a huge powerhouse PSU. It’s a non modular power supply, which does hinder cable management a bit. Ideally you want to remove cables you’re not using (such as any PCIe power and of course those excess SATA cables that are going to take up space in the bottom half of the case).