 It's finally time! You've pulled together enough scratch to build yourself a sick new gaming PC, but... Where's the GPU? This story has played out countless times this year, and manufacturers say that it'll keep happening for a long time yet. So it's clear that until the situation improves, we need some way to game without paying extortionist prices on eBay. Something like a CPU that you'd actually want to use, but with integrated graphics that don't suck. And, hey, wait a minute... AMD has one of those! So then, why did they make it so damn hard for us to get one? I mean, it's easy to get stuff from our sponsor, iFixit. Need a diverse toolkit? iFixit has the right thing for you. Learn more about the Manta Toolkit and its 112 steel bits with two premium drivers at the end of this video. APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit, and it's nothing new. In fact, nearly Intel's entire consumer CPU lineup was technically an APU by the time AMD launched their first one in 2011. But that doesn't mean that AMD was playing some kind of copycat game. You see, while an APU is fundamentally just a CPU with a GPU glued onto it, so sexier branding for integrated graphics, what most people forget is the game-changing value that those first APUs brought to the table, performing so well, at least in GPU heavy tasks, that they effectively killed the value proposition of entry-level discrete graphics cards. So, while Intel had APUs, only AMD had the confidence to imagine a future where CPU and GPU could become greater than the sum of their parts. This led to a surge in APU-equipped desktops and laptops in the early to mid 2010s. Kaveri in particular was a major step towards fully uniting the CPU and GPU, and was a low-priced and readily available alternative to Intel's Unicorn Iris Pro graphics. That's actually very cool if you care about the streaming. Unfortunately, while AMD's Radeon team was having a golden age of sorts, thanks to the then new GCN architecture, the CPU team was... Oh, no, that's just the end of that sentence. They just were. So, APUs were relegated to the cheapest of budget PCs, thanks to their uncompetitive CPU performance. But then, starting with the Ryzen 4000 series in mid 2020, AMD began producing APUs with their characteristically excellent integrated graphics, and as many as eight of their high-performance Zen 2 cores. Finally, it's the APUs' time to shine! Except for one small problem. You can't bloody buy one. At least, not for your custom PC. For almost a year, AMD has restricted these parts to OEMs, meaning that while they're perfectly compatible with any motherboard off the shelf, pretty much, they can only be obtained as part of a pre-built PC. It's like... Come on! We're in the middle of a GPU shortage, the likes of which we have never seen, where people need graphics that they can use today and upgrade tomorrow. AMD, you are basically handing these customers to Intel. And the worst part is that nearly every bloody Ryzen motherboard on the market has these onboard video ports that we can't freaking use, because we can't buy the CPUs for them. Excuse me, APUs. Just... LTTStore.com When I pointed out the ridiculousness of this situation, AMD immediately responded, saying they are planning to bring their Zen 3-based 5000 series APUs to retail later this year. And we'll definitely be looking at those, so get subscribed. But in the meantime, we found out that QuietPC.com is, quietly, selling 4000 series APUs, like the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G, directly to end users, as long as it's accompanied by a motherboard, cooler, and RAM, which is perfectly reasonable if you're going to build a system. So this right here, then, is an 8-core CPU with an 8-core GPU attached to it for what works out to be about $360. That's only about $30 higher than the launch price of the GPU-less equivalent to this, the Ryzen 7 3700X. So as long as the onboard graphics is good enough to use and beats whatever graphics card we can obtain for $30, we're laughing. What can we obtain for $30? Hmm. Uh, nothing. So we decided to settle for the minimum that we'd be comfortable with for gaming today, a Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 750 Ti, which is worth $75 to $100 on eBay these days for some reason. I mean, it shouldn't surprise me when even worthless cards like the GT 1030 are going for $100 right now. So even ignoring the DVI-only outputs, this DGPU is going to have to be a lot faster than this iGPU to justify its price. Starting at $720 medium, the Radeon iGPU is close, but not quite up to the GeForce's performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the DGPU pulls even further ahead in GTA V, an older title with little support for multithreading. Now, Nvidia's cards prior to Turing were stronger in older titles like this, but it's less true with modern DirectX 12 ones, and this is exemplified by both the win the APU pulls off in F1 2020, and the absolute thrashing it gives the DGPU in Forza Horizon 4. That is more than half again as fast. Microsoft Flight Simulator is traditionally CPU-bound, but definitely GPU-bound in this scenario, and gives us similar results between the two, and CSGO as well is usually CPU-bound, but here we see some of that pre-Turing Nvidia optimization for traditional rendering paths showing, with minimum frame rates being the biggest win by far for the DGPU. Depending on the game though, you might actually prefer running at a higher resolution versus having more in-game eye candy enabled, so we ran a second set of tests at 1080p with low presets. As expected, both GPUs do struggle here, at least partially thanks to their slow memory. Remember guys, iGPUs rely on the performance of your system memory, which is both slower typically than video memory, and is shared with the CPU. And as for the 750Ti, well, it's just really old. So Shadow of the Tomb Raider yielded similar results to 720p, but GTA V gives our DGPU a chance to shine yet again in spite of this, pulling ahead of the iGPU by nearly 40% in minimum frame rates. F1 2020 curiously hands a slight win to the DGPU, although it is within 5 FPS, while Forza once again brings the iGPU way ahead, as high as 59% faster in the 5% lows. Flight Sim is awash here with both GPUs starved for memory bandwidth, and CSGO once again shows the Nvidia DGPU's traditional rendering strength. In total then, that leaves us with slightly better performance for the integrated Radeon graphics at 720p, and a solid win for the DGPU at 1080p. But Linus, you might say, you know that graphics card is ancient, surely a modern one would be a better comparison. Yeah, we know, and we tried, but a modern dedicated graphics card goes for at minimum 150 plus for a Radeon RX 550, and $300 for a GeForce GTX 1650. That is 5 to 10 times the cost of our Radeon integrated graphics. And while yes, they are a lot faster, they're not faster by enough to justify the price. And you got to remember guys, for many gamers, these are temporary fixes while they're waiting in a backorder queue. So 30 bucks? I mean, that's probably walking around money if you're saving for a 3060 or something. $150 to $300? That ain't walking around money, ladies and gentlemen. So you have to ask yourself then, with the GPU shortage projected to continue well into 2022, which would you rather, be stuck paying scalper prices for a GPU that will probably be literal e-waste by the time you're ready to get something modern to replace it, or take a last gen, but still really decent CPU with $30 onboard graphics bolted to it that has the added benefit of having an excellent upgrade path? I would bet money that this thing will hold a decent amount of its resale value when it's time to get rid of it, at least compared to a seven-year-old graphics card. And because APUs no longer use a different motherboard socket, a Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 chip is just a chip swap away when the time comes. Of course, there's probably a limit to how many of these bundles that QuietPC can get their hands on, which is why I'm both frustrated that AMD has kept these parts out of the spotlight for so long, and also excited to see their Zen 3-based successors in the hands of enthusiasts later this year. Now, given that these are probably going to slot in behind the 5600X and 5800X in pricing, these are going to be no-brainers, not just for interim buyers waiting for new GPUs, but also for value builds in the years to come. At least I hope so. We haven't reviewed them yet. Just like I hope to tell you about our sponsor, iFixit. Thanks, iFixit, for sponsoring today's video. iFixit's Manta kit has 112 steel bits, comes complete with standard bits like Phillips and Flathead, but also Torx, Tri-Point, and GameBits as well, and includes not one, but two aluminum screwdriver handles. It's got a hefty quarter-inch driver for full-size applications and a smaller four-millimeter driver for precision work. Both of them feature magnetic bit sockets, knurled grips, and silky smooth spinning tops. Their toolkit lid doubles as a sorting tray, and all iFixit tools are backed by a lifetime warranty. If something breaks, they'll fix it for free. So don't wait. Start repairing your gear today by visiting ifixit.com forward slash LTT. So thanks for watching, guys. If you're looking for something else to watch, go check out our video on cloud streaming services for another way to game during the great GPU depression here. It really has come a long way since on live.