A quick check puts a Ryzen 5 5600 and a Radeon RX 6600 at $360 combined, where the 8700G is set to $330. And a RX 6600 will deliver around double the graphics performance. So even without factoring in motherboard and memory the 8700G is hard to justify for a cheap gaming rig.
Wrong prices. Anyway, you'd get even lower graphics performance. The 8700G is 12 CUs, and those two models come with 8 and 4 CUs, making them even less compelling alternatives to a dedicated graphics card.
the 8600G seem to be $229 instead of $299, which seem to have been a mistake of the interviewer in the video
the 8500G seem to be $179 instead of $176 which was a typo on my side
Like OP mentioned they have only 8 and 4 CUs respectively.
In comparison the Steam Deck has 8 (RDNA2) CUs, so while you can't really call a 8600G a "desktop gaming" APU it still can somewhat run a lot of games, enough for many very causal gamers.
For comparison the minimal GPUs in the 7x00X CPUs have 2 (RDNA2) CUs, which is still enough for most office PCs and still can run stuff like Dead Cell on 1080p reasonable well. Now Dead Cell is highly optimized but what I'm trying to say is: If you get yourself a cheap office PC or update of one and want to sometimes play some simpler older games a 8500G can still be all you need.
Generally speaking, you can set the power target of a high-spec GPU below 100% to get most of the performance at significantly reduced power draw. So if you're cost sensitive it's still probably better to get a dGPU, just cap the power.
The dGPUs have more cores and wider memory buses/dedicated memory which delivers higher performance than the space constrained integrated GPUs.
