Earlier this week, AMD officially launched its Ryzen 7040U Series CPUs, designed for ultrathin and light form factor laptops, and spearheading the lineup is the Ryzen 7 7840U. On that note, someone has already done a hands-on of the mobile CPU and more specifically, the prowess of its integrated RDNA3 cores.
The 7840U was tested out by YouTuber ETA Prime, who had the opportunity to test out not one, but two handheld consoles that are powered by the top-tier 7040U Series mobile CPUs. The consoles, the AOKZOE A1 Pro and the GPD Win Max, are both Chinese-made consoles, the latter having been around the market for a while.
As a refresher, the Ryzen 7 7840U is an 8-cores, 16-threads processor with a base and boost clock of 3.3GHz and 5.1GHz, respectively. Then there is the Radeon 780M integrated GPU, the portion of the processor that is based on the earlier mentioned RDNA3 architecture that I mentioned, and the topic of discussion.
It should be noted that ETA Prime’s hands-on videos are clearly being tested purely from a gaming standpoint. More importantly, you also see them testing the Windows 11-operated consoles in two resolutions – 1200p and 800p – as well as within two power limits, 15W and 28W.
Overall, the performance of the 7840U running on a locked TDP of 15W and at 1200p resolution across both consoles were pretty impressive; with the graphics presets mainly a mixture of low and medium, the A1 Pro particularly is able to maintain an average framerate of 55 fps while running Cyberpunk 2077. Once the TDP is bumped up to 28W, the average frame count jumped to between 65 fps and 72 fps. Naturally, some games had trouble even reaching 60 fps, The Last of Us Part 1 being one such example. Of course, it has been proven since the PC port of it was released that it is the game itself that is problematic, and not the hardware.
As for the “almost on par” with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 GPU, ETA Prime actually gives a quick comparison between the 7840U and dedicated GPU in his GPD Win Max 2 video – I’ll put the time stamp here for you. It’s not an unfair comparison either, considering the fact that it wasn’t that long ago that the Pascal-based GPU was topping Steam’s list of most popular GPUs.
At this stage, the performance of AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840U shows just how far the world of PC gaming has come, especially for integrated graphics. At the same time, if you’re wondering why AMD bothered launching the Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme, remember: those two chips were design specifically for handheld gaming console, while the Ryzen 7040U Series is, again, made for the laptop market.
