Of course, these were launched in direct competition to Intel‘s Alder Lake mobile processors which have honestly blown every other chip out of the water with incredible chart-topping performance. So, while Intel has been collecting crown after crown, AMD has been sitting silently preparing for Ryzen 6000’s launch. And today, we finally get the first glimpse of real-world performance in the form of a review.
Laptop specs
Professional Review got their hands on a Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop with a Ryzen 7 6800H APU. For the unaware, the 6800H is a upper-mid-range offering with 8-cores and 16-threads. It runs at 3.2GHz with a boost clock of up to 4.7Ghz, which is just 300Mhz short from the flagship Ryzen 6000 APU. The laptop is outfitted with 8GB of DDR5 memory running at 4800Mhz. Lastly, there’s also a discrete GPU on board, a 140W RTX 3060 powering the 15.6″ 1440p display with a 165Hz refresh rate. The laptop also has versatile I/O with a HDMI 2.1 port, but more importantly a USB4 Gen2 port. That should allow for speeds up to 20Gbps but, interestingly, in the review only 10Gbps is mentioned. Before we see the actual scores, it’s important to mention that they only pertain to the APU as the discrete GPU performance was not tested. The iGPU inside the Ryzen 7 6800H is a Radeon 680M with 12 Compute Units, so it’s a fairly powerful companion that can hold its own against the RTX 3060 to some degree.
The scores
Profession Review tested the APU in Cinebench R20 and Cinebench R23, both of which stress the CPU to its limits. The Ryzen 7 equipped Acer Nitro was able to top every benchmark except for the Cinebench R23 single-core test. As you can see in the pictures below, the Ryzen 7 6800H performed better than even the flagship Ryzen 9 5900HX from the previous generation. It beat the 5900HX by about 5% and the Ryzen 7 5800H, it’s predecessor, by roughly 9% in all tests. That’s not a huge uplift but it’s still an improvement nonetheless. Although, this is only according to Professional Review’s data, better scores can be found for the the Cezanne-based Ryzen 5000 chips in other laptops so the lead here might be even smaller for the Ryzen 7 6800H. Also mentioned in the review was the laptop’s battery life. Professional Review was able to squeeze around 2.5 hours of battery life out of this machine at 40% brightness while doing light tasks. That’s not a good showing as AMD explicitly focused on Ryzen 6000’s efficiency and how it helps extend battery life at their CES 2022 event. This could just be the laptop’s doing while the chip is being as efficient as possible, but it’s still a weak sign when it comes to battery life. The Acer Nitro 5 will be available starting this week from €1599, a €400 increase over the previous generation. This can be attributed to the worsening chip shortage and the inclusion of DDR5 memory as Ryzen 6000 is only compatible with that. Since the writing of this article, Professional Review has removed the review from their website so it’s no longer visible, but Videocardz managed to grab pictures before it was taken down.
