Ryzen 5 4500 Review – AMD Dumping Old Stock? + Budget Gaming PC

Finally! AMD launched a new set of Ryzen CPUs – it only took a year and a half but we finally have the new… 4th generation? Wait what? This can’t be right? Wait is this like the 1600 AF then? No? Oh.. Well this is embarrassing…

This little guy is the Ryzen 5 4500, a 3 year old CPU in 2 year old branding, that launched in April of 2022. I say 3 year old CPU because this chip is based on the Zen 2 architecture launched back in mid 2019, it’s a 6 core, 12 thread, 4.1GHz boost clocked chip that’s labelled as a 4th generation CPU, as in the generation that didn’t really happen except for mobile chips. Although that’s rather fitting as the 4500 is based on their Renoir mobile CPU and APU architecture, not the desktop 3rd generation Matisse design.

That means this chip does not support PCIe Gen 4, and that’s actually a pretty big deal. In what can only be described as a hilarious self-own, if you were to pair this new budget CPU with AMD’s latest budget focused, mobile derived, graphics card – the RX 6500 XT – you’d find yourself hamstrung by that card’s use of just 4 PCIe lanes which were intended on running at Gen 4 speeds but on this CPU would cap at literally half the the bandwidth.

Luckily this chip is cheap enough that you might actually be able to spend a few quid extra to bag yourself a better GPU – in fact this whole system from Cyberpower, complete with 16GB of DDR4-3600 RAM, 500GB of NVMe SSD space, an RTX 3060 and even a bundled keyboard, mouse, mousepad and headset will only set you back £899 which doesn’t sound like too bad a deal… But let’s take a look at the performance to see how it compares.

Starting with Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p high settings, the 4500 comes in at the bottom of our chart here, behind everything including the now 2 generation old i5-10400F and by a reasonable margin. Exactly 20 FPS difference in the average in-game FPS is a significant drop, as is the 25FPS difference in the CPU render average performance too.

Microsoft Flight shows the same pattern with our 4500 running 20 FPS behind the back and 10 FPS behind the similar Zen 2 based 3600X. This drop is also more likely to be noticeable too, as getting over 100 FPS versus 80 FPS is easier to spot and feel than 120 FPS vs 140 FPS. The 1% lows also dip below 60 FPS, the only chip to break that barrier in this group.

CSGO is a great game for testing CPUs, as it really leaves nowhere to hide for slow chips. While 230 FPS is still perfectly, perfectly fine, even the 3600X can muster almost 100 FPS more, and the bigger brother 5600X nets well over double the performance – hell even almost double the 1% low performance too!

Cyberpunk shows a much tighter spread for the average performance, with the 3600X and 4500 tied, then around a 10 FPS gap to the rest of the pack. The main standout to note here though is the 1% low figure on the 4500, which is the lowest of the set by nearing 5 FPS meaning while the average FPS might be the same as the 3600X the playing experience is likely to be choppier and more prone to dips.

Fortnite is pretty similar too with the 4500 still at the bottom of the chart, around 6 FPS behind the 3600X, or 25 FPS behind the top end 12600K. The 1% lows are equally the lowest, although overall the spread is fairly tight making for a more reasonable experience especially compared to some of the previous results.

Finally in Watchdogs Legion it’s the same story. The 4500 is in last place, the 3600X isn’t much further ahead, then the rest of the pack takes leaps and bounds upwards. As with all of these results, the performance is perfectly adequate, but it does lag quite significantly behind its peers.

In CPU specific benchmarks, like Cinebench R23, the single threaded performance pretty much matches its gaming performance where you get a hair less performance than the 3600X. Interestingly they both beat the 10400F here, likely thanks to stronger single core boost characteristics. In multi-threaded it’s the same story. The 4500 is a hair slower than the 3600X, which is a reasonable amount slower than the newer 5600X and especially the new 12th gen Intel i5’s.

In Blender and the BMW scene the 4500 ever-so-slightly outperforms the 3600X and even the i5-11400F by a couple of seconds. The higher end 5600X still handily outperforms the 4500, with only the oldest 10400F suffering at the back of the pack. In the Gooseberry scene though the 4500 slips back down to the more expected second to last position with a considerable gap to the next fastest, that being the 11400F over a minute faster.

In the Adobe CC suite, using Puget bench, Premiere pro again sets the 4500 second to last, albeit with a fairly tight grouping of the scores – save for the 10 core 12600K anyway. It still lags behind the 3600X, although does outperform the 10400F as expected. After Effects is the same, although the relative gap to the 3600X actually increases, with even the 11400F taking a considerable victory over the 4500. Finally in Photoshop the 4500 actually comes in last, with the newer 12400F offering 40% more performance, and the 5600X netting a nearly 50% higher score!

Interestingly the 4500 seems to be a more efficient core than its desktop Zen 2 counterpart, only listing 62W of package power consumption during the Blender Gooseberry render compared to 79W on the 3600X.

So for gaming with an RTX 3060, while it’s hardly the end of the world, you are definitely leaving performance on the table by using the 4500. In some cases that might be a considerable amount of performance too, or worse smoothness while playing. For productivity tasks you are giving up a considerable amount of performance compared to getting the higher priced 5600X or a 12400F.

Which I think brings us nicely onto the pricing for all of these. The 4500 is generally listed for £120, versus more like £210 for the 5600X or £165 for the 12400F. That’s a fair difference – although I’d argue the performance difference does justify those price tags especially as time goes on – but as it turns out the 4500 isn’t the only CPU AMD finally launched. The 5500 and 5600 are also new, and the 5500 – which does feature PCIe Gen 4 support and is based on the newer Zen 3 architecture – is more like £145 and is likely to offer decent performance gains too.

If you’d rather buy a prebuilt system like this one from Cyberpower, they offer the 5500 for £30 more, or the 5600 of £67 more instead, both are what I’d consider worthy upgrades. If you are picking this system up, it’s a decent shout overall. It’s well built, the parts are definitely budget – an mATX B450 motherboard, a DRAMless 500GB SSD, the AMD Wraith stock cooler and fairly a budget case and fans – but it performs pretty well and still leaves some room for upgrades in the future. The board doesn’t even have VRM heatsinks though, so dropping in any of the 142W chips like the 5800X or higher isn’t likely your best option, although if you are willing to spend a little more you can swap to a higher end board instead.