In April, AMD unveiled one of the most unique desktop processors the company has offered to upgraders and PC makers in recent years—and we don’t mean the 3D V-Cache-based Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The Ryzen 5 4500 ($129) is a newer CPU with an outdated architecture. It’s also one of only two consumer-oriented desktop processors in the AMD Ryzen 4000 series. To make the chip even more unusual, it’s based on one of AMD’s accelerated processing units (APUs, chips with on-chip graphics), but lacks the APU’s integrated graphics. All that said, the Ryzen 5 4500 is quite an oddball in AMD’s lineup. However, if you’re on a very tight budget, it might be attractive if you already have a decent graphics card.
The Wonderful Origin of the Ryzen 5 4500
Since 2020, AMD’s desktop processors have been built around the company’s “Zen 3” microarchitecture, a rather significant evolution of earlier “Zen 2” designs, bringing increased performance across a wide range of tasks. If you’re interested, you can learn more about Zen 3 in our AMD Ryzen 9 5900X review. Suffice it to say here: it beats Zen 2, but not better in every way. Additionally, the two architectures are identical in one respect, designed and fabricated for TSMC’s 7nm FinFet process.
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With that in mind, AMD’s rationale for creating the Ryzen 5 4500 with Zen 2 becomes hard to fathom. You might think this is a way to get more chips on the market, since silicon shortages have been widely reported, but that only makes sense if the 4500’s CPU chips are made in a separate manufacturing process. Since it’s built on the same 7nm process as AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series, creating a new Ryzen 5 4500 chip from scratch would take up fab space that could otherwise be used to make 5000 series processors.
Knowing this, it’s questionable whether AMD will devote significant resources to producing a Ryzen 5 4500 CPU. Instead, it’s likely that most of the Ryzen 5 4500 chips have been created or will initially be created as other parts. As we explained in our Ryzen 5 5500 review, creating a chip is an imperfect process. Slightly defective chips are common and often detuned, their defective parts are permanently disabled and the rest are sold as lower performance parts.
This is likely what AMD did with the Ryzen 5 4500, but unusually, the new CPU was originally designed as an APU, possibly a Ryzen 5 4600G with Radeon Graphics (we haven’t had a chance to test it yet). That said, the chip has a CPU and integrated graphics processor (IGP) built into it; the only part that seems to be defective and disabled is the Radeon RX IGP. If the company has been making lots of APUs that fail quality control, rather than letting those chips sit idle, it would make more sense for AMD to launch them as budget-oriented CPUs without integrated graphics.
It is worth mentioning that the Ryzen 5 4500 is also AMD’s only consumer-oriented Ryzen 5 4000 series desktop processor, not an APU. (The other Ryzen 4000-series chips AMD is retailing are the aforementioned Ryzen 5 4600G APU and the announced Ryzen 3 4100, which, like the 4500, don’t have an IGP.) Over the past few years, some OEM-only desktop CPUs in the 4000-series have , they appear in pre-built PCs from some major manufacturers. But before these three, none of these OEM chips were officially available to consumers, and the rest of the Ryzen 4000 lineup consists of mobile CPUs.
Design: Are you a dial-in APU?
Now that we know how the Ryzen 5 4500 came to be, we should talk about its price and hardware specs. Neither looks as impressive on paper as the chip’s actual performance would suggest. Priced at $129, the processor has six CPU cores with a base clock of 3.6GHz and a boost clock of 4.1GHz. Each core supports simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology, which allows each core to process two software threads at a time, resulting in a total of 12 addressable threads.
As part of Zen 2, the Ryzen 5 4500 has only 8MB of L3 cache, half the size of a similar Zen 3-based Ryzen 5 5500, and only a quarter of the Ryzen 5000-series processors like the Ryzen 5 5600X. More worryingly , which is half the L3 cache of the AMD Ryzen 3 3100, and costs less at $99 (if you can find it).
(Photo: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
If AMD keeps some of the IGP enabled, it will give people more incentive to buy the Ryzen 5 4500 since they don’t need to buy a separate graphics card. This was technically possible even if most of the IGPs were defective, but since it didn’t happen, the chip’s main appeal was its six CPU cores. Most competing alternatives only have four cores. But the performance benefit of doing this is not as dramatic as you might expect.
Testing the Ryzen 5 4500: I have your six
For benchmarking, we paired the Ryzen 5 4500 with our MSI MEG X570S Ace Max test bench and a 240mm water cooler. (The CPU comes with an AMD Wraith Stealth cooler, but we used a liquid cooler in line with our other Ryzen tests.) The system also comes with 16GB of DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,000MHz.
(Photo: Chris Stobbin)
The Ryzen 5 4500’s main competitors come from more affordable processors like the Ryzen 3 3100 and Intel Core i3-10105. Both chips have only four CPU cores and support 8 concurrent threads, but they cost less than the Ryzen 5 4500 and have other advantages – the Ryzen 3 3100’s L3 cache is twice that of the Ryzen 5 4500. times, while the Core i3-10105 actually has less L3 cache but a higher clock speed.
The Ryzen 5 4500’s lower price keeps it from competing directly with other Ryzen 5 processors. But if you have extra cash in your wallet, a newer CPU like the Ryzen 5 5500 can beat it pretty well in every way.
From our benchmark results, the Ryzen 5 4500’s limited L3 cache is clearly a bottleneck. HandBrake generally favors processors with more and higher frequency cores, so we expected the 4500 to do well in this test, but it actually lost out to the Ryzen 3 3100. It does greatly outpace the Core i3-10105, however.
In most of our productivity and content creation tests, the Ryzen 5 4500 was able to take advantage of its extra cores to maintain an edge over the Ryzen 3 3100. The Core i3-10105 didn’t come close in most of these tests.
The Ryzen 5 4500 performed exceptionally well in Cinebench R23, trailing only slightly behind the pricier Ryzen 5 5500, but it was noticeably behind the Ryzen 5 5500 in all other tests. This shows the performance advantage of AMD’s Zen 3 architecture over the older Zen 2, as well as the benefit of a significantly larger cache.
Next, we ran our gaming and graphics tests. As mentioned, the Ryzen 5 4500 has no IGP, so there is no integrated graphics testing here, only discrete graphics. These tests below were conducted with our Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, which we typically run at Founders Edition clocks.
In these benchmarks, the Ryzen 5 4500’s lack of L3 cache does start to become apparent. While the new chip was able to stay competitive with the Core i3-10105, it fell behind the Ryzen 3 3100 in Rainbow Six Siege. It also lost out to every other CPU in the group, including the Ryzen 5s without IGP.
Conclusion: Pure AM4 Price Play
It’s hard to judge a CPU like the Ryzen 5 4500 based on price and specs alone, but luckily, that’s why we benchmarked it. Despite its dated architecture and smaller L3 cache, the Ryzen 5 4500 significantly outperforms competing chips like the Ryzen 3 3100 and Core i3-10105. In turn, it’s beaten by the likes of its big brother, the Ryzen 5 5500. It ends up being a classic case of what you pay for.
(Photo: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
If you can afford it, the $159 Ryzen 5 5500 is a better choice than the Ryzen 5 4500. If the $30 difference is a deal breaker, you can get the 4500 for $129, or save even more on the 3100 with a Ryzen 3, though we sometimes have issues finding the latter chip in stock.
The only clear loser in today’s race is the Intel Core i3-10105, but it’s fair to say it’s an older chip, and Intel has a new “Alder Lake” Core i3 at a comparable price that we haven’t had a chance to test yet. We cannot make sensible advice for (or against) them until we do so. But for now, we see no reason not to support the Ryzen 5 4500, but only if it’s the best you can afford and you already have a decent graphics card.
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