Intel Core i3 14100 / i5 14500 vs. AMD Ryzen 5 8500G / 8600G In 500+ Benchmarks

As part of the recent AMD Ryzen 5 8500G and 8600G Linux reviews I ended up picking up the Core i3 14100 and Core i5 14500 Raptor Lake Refresh processors for the similarly-priced Intel competition. It's not too often receiving review samples from Intel of the lower-end processor SKUs, so I'm back around today with even more benchmarks of these lower-tier AMD and Intel processors. In this article are 500+ benchmarks looking at the CPU and iGPU performance of the Intel Core i3 14100 and Core i5 14500 processors up against the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G and Ryzen 5 8600G processors under Ubuntu Linux.

The Core i3 14100 as a reminder is Intel's 4-core / 8-thread Raptor Lake Refresh processor consisting of only P cores. This ~$139 processor has a 4.7GHz maximum turbo core frequency, 3.5GHz base frequency, 12MB smart cache, 60 Watt base power with 110 Watt turbo power rating, and UHD Graphics 730 at 1.5GHz.

The Intel Core i5 14500 that retails for around $239 USD right now features six P cores and 8 E cores, which provide a combined 14 cores and 20 threads. The Core i5 14500 has a 5GHz maximum turbo frequency (or 3.7GHz maximum turbo on the E cores), a 2.6GHz base frequency on the P cores and 1.9GHz on the E cores, 24MB smart cache, 65 Watt base power with 154 Watt turbo power, and UHD Graphics 770 with a 1.55GHz clock speed.

The AMD Ryzen 5 8500G meanwhile has six cores / 12 threads, a boost clock of up to 5.0GHz, a base clock of 3.5GHz, 16MB L3 cache, 65 Watt default TDP, and Radeon 740M RDNA3 integrated graphics with four cores and 2.8GHz graphics frequency. The Ryzen 5 8500G can be found for $179 USD.

The AMD Ryzen 5 8600G meanwhile has six cores / 12 threads, a boost clock up to 5.0Ghz, a base clock of 4.3GHz, 16MB L3 cache, 65 Watt default TDP, and Radeon 760M RDNA3 integrated graphics with 8 graphics cores and a 2.8GHz graphics frequency. The Ryzen 5 8600G retails for around $229 USD.

For this round of post-launch testing now that I have more time following my various Ryzen 8000G Zen 4 launch day focused articles, I ramped up the testing to 572 benchmarks on each of these lower-end processors under test. All of these processors were running Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.7.3 kernel, GCC 13.2 system compiler, and Mesa 24.1-devel graphics drivers. The Ryzen 8000G APUs were tested on an ASRock B650 Pro RS motherboard and the Raptor Lake Refresh processors with an ASUS PRIME Z790-P WIFI motherboard based on what I had available along with 2 x 16GB DDR5 system memory, WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB NVMe SSD, and the integrated graphics.

During the testing the CPU package power consumption was being monitored along with generating performance-per-Watt metrics for each benchmark. Let's dig in to this big benchmarking battle between the Intel Core i3 14100 / i5 14500 against the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G / 8600G processors.