The Ryzen 5 4600H is the new mainstream processor from AMD in its H series, designed for high productivity and gaming laptops. There is no Ryzen 3 option in the series, so the Ryzen 5 4600H is actually the lowest level APU offered here.
This is the chip that AMD sells for entry-level systems, and yet it is a convincing piece of silicon to put in economical devices: you get 6 Zen 2 processor cores and 12 threads, a frequency of 3.0 GHz base with a boost up to 4.0 GHz, with 8 MB of L3 cache and a standard TDP of 45 W.
With AMD offering 8 cores in more expensive parts like the Ryzen 7 4800H (see review), they can easily include six cores in traditional laptops while maintaining good product segmentation.
You also get all the benefits of AMD's 7nm Zen 2 architecture, which means a significant improvement in efficiency over previous generation parts, an improved IPC and an updated graphics processor design. The Ryzen 5 4600H has an integrated Vega GPU with 6 computing units clocked up to 1500 MHz, but in practice, the vast majority of systems using this APU will also include a discrete GPU.
Direct competition comes from the latest generation of Intel, as well as older parts that are still on offer. Intel offers Core i5 options for the entry-level market, but these are just quad-core designs with average clock speeds. The Core i5-10300H for example, clock up to 4.5 GHz and contains 8 MB of L3 cache in its 45 W TDP.
This new 10th generation game is not too different from the quadcores that preceded it. We get a small clock speed gain on the Core i5-9300H, which is itself a small clock speed gain on the Core i5-8300H. If we go back a few more generations, you will find a similar design used for the Core i7-6700HQ of 2015. With Intel stuck on 14 nm all this time, AMD takes the opportunity to launch itself and shake up the laptop market.
The laptop used for testing today is the Asus TUF Gaming A15 which includes the Ryzen 5 4600H coupled with a GTX 1650 Ti GPU. It's a new entry-level GPU with which we unfortunately don't have a ton of comparison data to use at the moment for GPU-hungry benchmarks, but we'll work with that over time. .
This laptop looks a lot like the TUF Gaming A15 that we used in our Ryzen 7 4800H review, but there are some subtle differences in the design inside and out. The cooling components are a smaller unit that does not have a vent on the right side. The GPU is also a lower power variant compared to the Ryzen 7 models. Asus also ships this laptop with 8 GB of single channel memory, leaving a free DIMM slot for future upgrades. However, this significantly reduces performance out of the box.
In other words, out of the box, this laptop is your average affordable entry, but to ensure an apple-to-apple comparison with other systems, we swapped memory for 16 GB of dual-channel DDR4-3200 . Many entry-level systems use only a single DIMM, which is a little frustrating, but a standard method of economy nonetheless.
As usual when we run laptop performance tests, the numbers you will see in the other system specifications are an average of the results on multiple laptops with the same hardware configuration. We try to test apple-to-apple as much as possible while removing bottlenecks, and all configurations are tested with the default power settings, unless otherwise noted. For AMD and Intel processors, this normally means a long-term power limit of 45 W.
Landmarks
Let's start this one with a look at Cinebench R20 and ... wait, that can't be right. The Ryzen 5 4600H is at the top of the ranking, not at the bottom as you would expect from an entry-level APU. With a score above 3200 points, AMD's consumer APU outperforms much higher Intel processors, such as the Core i7-10875H and Core i9-9880H in the multicore test. This is impressive given that the components of AMD only contain 6 cores, while Intel offers 8. The superior efficiency of Zen 2 allows AMD to win here by a margin of two
figures compared to 10875H, while presenting a basic drawback.
The situation is even more impressive when you pit the 4600H against the new Core i7-10750H in a heart-to-heart battle. AMD's share is 27% faster in terms of multi-thread performance and equal for single-thread, which is pretty good considering that these chips don't really compete in terms of price.
It is not as good as Ryzen Mobile can obtain in terms of efficiency, the Ryzen 7 4800H is still 30% faster with the same energy consumption, the usual situation of clocking more cores at a lower frequency is played good for Zen 2 as with Intel processors.
The big kick comes when we actually put the Ryzen 5 4600H against the chip with which it competes, the Core i5-9300H. Now, I haven't tested the new Core i5-10300H yet, but on paper it should be very similar to the 9300H, maybe slightly faster. And in Cinebench R20, the Ryzen 5 4600H absolutely erases the 9300H. It's twice as fast for multi-threading and about 8% faster for single-threading.
We see similar exceptional results when looking at Cinebench R15, with almost 2x the performance of the Core i5-9300H as we have just said. Margins against other Intel processors are also maintained, with a 29% lead over the Core i7-10750H and a 21% lead over the old Intel Core i7-9750H.
AMD also doesn't bother with video encoding performance. In the handbrake, the Ryzen 5 4600H delivers a crushing blow to the Core i5-9300H, arriving 65% faster. To put this margin in perspective, what the Core i5-9300H could encode in 68 minutes, the Ryzen 5 4600H does it in just 41 minutes.
This puts the 4600H next to Intel's Core i7-10875H in terms of handbrake performance, which is very impressive considering the huge price difference between the 4600H laptops and the 10875H laptops.
AMD continues to produce massive numbers in anything multi-threaded as it was in Blender. The 4600H is twice as fast as the Intel Core i5-9300H, and more than 30% faster than the current six-core offer from Intel.
Ryzen also works well for code compilation. For GCC compilation, the Ryzen 5 4600H is more than 50% faster than the Core i5-9300H, while commanding large tracks compared to Intel's six-core products. This GCC build has multithreaded and single-threaded components, but unless we are entirely single-threaded, AMD seems to maintain double-digit performance gain.
The Ryzen 5 4600H also works well for compiling Chromium using the settings recommended by Google. It is ~ 57% faster than Intel's quad-core competitor, although the margins are a bit thinner compared to the six-core components. The Ryzen 5 4600H is still 8% faster than the Core i7-10750H and about 20% faster than the Core i7-9750H.
Moving to shorter-term workloads, Microsoft Excel gets our first good look at how AMD compares to Intel with the same L3 cache size. The Ryzen 5 4600H and Core i5-9300H both have 8MB of L3 cache, and we see AMD providing margins similar to other tests with a 45% performance advantage. However, as soon as you switch to an Intel processor with 16 MB of cache, this heavy Excel workload switches in favor of Intel, even if only marginally. AMD is almost able to compensate for the drawback of the cache with better processor core efficiency.
While this is representative of Excel's high performance, in lighter productivity workloads, as shown in the PCMark productivity test, AMD is ahead thanks to higher single-threaded performance. We see a 10% margin on the Core i5-9300H, as well as an advance of around 7% on the Core i7-10750H and 9750H.
Then, for general PC use for things like web browsing and loading applications, AMD also has a small margin here with its six-core H-series processor. At worst, we get performance equivalent to a Core i7-10750H, which is a very good place to stay.
Another workload that generally works well with AMD processors is 7-Zip. The Ryzen 5 4600H is significantly faster than the Core i5-9300H in this review, and we see about 20-25% ahead of the decompressed six-core Intel processors as well. Compression is another story, AMD easily beats the Core i5. but cannot follow these Core i7 offers.
MATLAB R2020a is a tool widely used by engineers. The
Ryzen 5 4600H is not only 28% faster than Intel's quad-core, but also 7% faster than the Core i7-10750H.
The weakest result for Ryzen is with Adobe Acrobat PDF export. In this single-wire test, the 4600H is slightly slower than the Core i5-9300H and this margin increases with higher-speed Intel parts like the Core i7-10750H.
AMD remains the fastest CPU option for AES cryptography. This is an accelerated hardware function on modern processors and it seems that AMD has the best engine for it, pulling 30% ahead of Intel's competing portable processors.
The following benchmarks are all computational workloads, so it means that they include some form of GPU usage with CPU usage. Since the system we have includes a GeForce GTX 1650 Ti, we don't have solid comparison data for this test, but we thought we would include it anyway just for reference. This will allow you to assess how this type of system will compare to some of the most expensive laptop options available on the market.
Adobe Photoshop is not a very GPU intensive application and is mainly dominated by processor performance. The Ryzen 5 4600H performs well, matching the performance of the Core i7-9750H despite a slower GPU. This configuration easily outperforms the Core i5-9300H when paired with a GTX 1660 TI as well, which bodes well for creators who do a lot of Photoshop on their laptop.
Then we have Adobe Premiere. We are currently using beta 14.2.0 for testing, as it introduces hardware acceleration for Nvidia and AMD GPUs, and should be representative of performance in the future. In Puget's export test, the Ryzen 5 4600H works well again since it has a slower GPU.
And if you want to use software coding, for example 2-pass coding, the Ryzen 5 system strikes well above its weight, lying between the Core i7-10875H and Core i7-10750H systems although it does not include than an entry level GPU for an acceleration effect.
The editing experience on Ryzen is solid, working well in Puget's Live Playback workload, corresponding to Core i7 processors. And then for effects like Warp Stabilizer, the Ryzen APUs as a whole rank above the Intel offerings.
Our latest productivity workload is DaVinci Resolve Studio and this is where the GPU plays an important role in encoding performance. Since the GTX 1650 Ti is not the most powerful GPU in the world, it falls at the bottom of the graphics. It should be interesting to see how the 4600H behaves when paired with something more powerful, like a GTX 1660 Ti or RTX 2060. For now, it's the only laptop we can find using the 4600H.
We also wanted to show at least some form of gaming benchmark, but the GTX 1650 Ti is easily outperformed by other GPUs in our database. Even in a game like CS: GO with low settings, the benchmark pass had some sections limited by the GPU with this discrete 50 W card. So for game performance we will just have to wait for an appropriate comparison, as this environment limited by GPU is not suitable. For gaming purposes, we expect most GTX 1650 Ti systems to work similarly due to the GPU bottleneck; CPU is not really a consideration.
Performance breakdown
Let's explore some performance comparisons before concluding. The Ryzen 5 4600H is significantly faster than the Core i5-9300H in most workloads, which we believe will also be the case with the Core i5-10300. Multi-threaded performance is up to twice as fast with the number of cores and the efficiency advantage of AMD, but even with single-threaded performance, we have seen better performance in most cases. For frequent use cases like decompression, cryptography, application loading, web browsing and light productivity, the 4600H was the fastest processor.
The Ryzen 5 4600H is also generally faster than the Core i7-10750H, a higher-level Intel processor that has the same six-core layout. In multi-threaded workloads, the 4600H was 20-30% faster, and also held up better in some lighter thread count tests. However, with the 10750H clocked in the high 4 GHz range for burst applications, as well as its excellent single-thread performance and cache
higher, the Core i7 processor can win the crown of performance in a few tests.
Similar story with the Core i7-9750H, although in areas where the Intel side wins, the margins are closer than we just saw. We think it's safe to say that AMD performs better with the same number of cores with this generation of laptop processors.
The Ryzen 5 4600H stands out from the eight-core Core i7-10875H in multicore testing. In fact, the Ryzen 5 4600H can be up to 10% faster. However, with higher single wire performance and higher clock speeds, there are also many workloads where the Ryzen 5 4600H is not faster.
We have mentioned in the past that the Ryzen 7 3750H was not a very good laptop processor and this is clearly demonstrated with the performance gains that AMD was able to achieve by switching to Zen 2. The Ryzen 5 4600H decimates the AMD's flagship product compared to the previous one - gen, sometimes achieving a 100% performance improvement, which seems almost ridiculous.
As for how the Ryzen 5 4600H compares to the Ryzen 7 4800H, it's not surprising to see the Ryzen 5 option fall behind. In general, the 4600H is ~ 20% slower for multi-threaded tasks and 4 to 8% slower for single-threaded. What is impressive here is that in the same 45 W power envelope with the same boost characteristics, AMD is able to add 33% more cores for a performance increase of around 30% going from 4600H at 4800H.
The parts with the largest number of cores are generally more efficient in mobile form factors because they are in a more favorable position on the voltage frequency curve, but AMD goes beyond what is generally possible. This is probably the result of binning and the simple use of better quality silicon for 8-core chips. And although the 4600H is in a lower bin, it still offers much better performance than other processors in its class.
It's hard not to be impressed by what AMD offers this generation with Ryzen mobile APUs. The Ryzen 7 4800H is 30-40% ahead of multicore performance compared to current high-end 8-core Intel processors, and while it sets the right tone for Zen 2 on laptops, we believe the Ryzen 5 4600H is the most impressive bouquet.
This six-core processor offers a performance advantage over Intel's Core i5 four cores which is simply unheard of in the mobile space. You don't often see twice the performance in the same price range, let alone the form factors of limited-power laptops.
Simply put, the Ryzen 5 4600H is way above its class, often matching or beating Intel Core i7 processors, especially the Core i7-10750H.
Simply put, the Ryzen 5 4600H is way above its class, often matching or beating Intel Core i7 processors, especially the Core i7-10750H. Intel may have been a bit blind in offering only a quad-core processor in the Core i5-10300H. Granted, the Core i5 lineup isn't very popular with OEMs, but whether the Ryzen 5 4600H competes with the Core i5 lineup or a Core i7, AMD is still leading in most productivity workloads.
Finally, how the Ryzen 5 4600H's prices in practice will largely depend on the system in which it is integrated. In budget systems that use it, the CPU will not be a problem, but the performance limitations may come from memory or GPU configuration, as is the case with this Asus TUF system which we believe is will target the price 900 to $ 950.
The Ryzen 5 4600H is powerful enough to ask interesting questions about laptop configurations. Most of the time, OEMs will offer Core i7 upgrades on any model above the base, because Intel's quad-core is not that good. But in an entry-level system, is a Core i7 or even Ryzen 7 necessary? Could OEMs offer, say, a GTX 1660 Ti paired with a Ryzen 5 4600H for less money than an equivalent laptop with a higher-level processor? This could end up being a fantastic balance in the budget space between price, processor performance and graphics processor.
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