AMD Ryzen 5 2500U Gaming Performance: Crushes Intel’s Newest Chips!

The reviews are in for AMD’s first Ryzen mobile powered laptop. The HP Envy x360 15z comes with the mid-range Ryzen 5 2500U. The processor is set to go against Intel 8th Gen quad-core chips, but how well does it fare in games? Let’s find out.

AMD Ryzen 5 2500 Review Roundup

The AMD Ryzen mobile series includes two processors, the Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U, at least for now. Both are 4-core, 8-thread chips designed for lower power ultrathin notebooks. In this article, we’ll take a look at the Ryzen 5 2500U gaming performance—specifically that of the Vega 8 GPU it comes equipped with.

Now I won’t be going over everything so make sure to check out the great write-ups at HotHardware and The Tech Report.

Before we dive into benchmarks, I want to make it clear that there are many factors involved when it comes to a notebook’s power besides the processors they are equipped with. Even with the same chips, one can run fairly fast with better heat dissipation than the other. To put it simple, this isn’t the best sample size to determine the overall power of the machine, but it’s at least good enough for now considering it’s all we’ve got.

In terms of CPU performance, the same caveats apply to the mobile Zen architecture as their desktop counterpart. The single-threaded performance isn’t the best, but the difference seems to be very little, whereas the multi-core performance is pretty comparable to Intel’s Core i5 chips. Basically, content creators and professionals will want to watch the performance in their preferred application to see which processor suits them most.

Now without further ado, let’s move to our topic for today: Ryzen 5 2500U gaming performance. First though, keep in mind that this is Radeon Vega 8 with only 8 compute units, instead of 10 inside the Ryzen 7 2700U. Either way, the results are pretty impressive for an integrated chip.

Ryzen 5 2500 Gaming Performance – Blows Intel Away But Loses to Nvidia’s discrete Pascal GPU

The Vega 8 crushes Intel’s UHD 620 in both 3DMark Cloud Gate and Sky Diver. It also handily beats Nvidia’s older discrete GeForce 940MX, but loses to its Pascal-based successor MX150 by a significant margin.

Of course, these are just synthetic benchmarks, but performance in the real world is nearly the same. The Ryzen 5 2500U stomps all over the Intel’s mobile CPU lineup, but again lags behind the GeForce MX150.

That said, there is one thing that I really can’t draw any conclusions until it is tested more. HotHardware found that the Ryzen laptop draws a noticeable amount of power with peaks as high as 30 watts compared to Intel’s 16 watts when running an HD video.

This seemed to put the 2500U in more of the middle to low row with respect to the battery life. It could be something as simple as a driver update, but we can’t be sure of course.

Conclusion

So what does this all mean? Well, AMD clearly has a great mobile chip here with productivity benchmarks putting it on par with Intel’s newest i5-8250U. The Core i5 does very well in some places but AMD’s Vega 8 performance is leagues ahead of Intel’s integrated graphics solution.

For what gamers should get, it all comes down to the price. If you’re able to get a Pascal MX150-packed notebook at a price similar to the Ryzen one, then go for it. But when compared against Intel’s integrated graphics, AMD wins everytime for as long as there isn’t a major power draw issue, or you don’t really care about the battery life at all.

What do you think of the Ryzen 5 2500U gaming performance? Let me know in the comments below.