Larri

Yeah, I bought one at $85 to build a different PC. Its a shame its gone up, it was such a great deal, basically a 2600 for $35 less.

This is a great idea, but the stupid laptop's intake is at the bottom instead of the side because of the weird cooler. Maybe theres a similar one for a bottom intake?

Well, the a400 drives from Kingston have no DRAM cache, so I avoid them when I get one from TCsunbow for the same price that actually has dram cache. The Crucial and Samsung's are somewhat more expensive. I have a 2.5 inch ssd from TC and it works wonderfully.

Good point about the SSD, but the 2600x seems to be significantly more expensive than the 1600 AF at the moment, sititng $40 USD higher, so I don't know if its worth it...

PCPartPicker Part List Type Item Price Motherboard MSI B450I GAMING PLUS AC Mini ITX AM4 Motherboard $128.97 @ Amazon Memory Team T-FORCE DARK Z 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory $66.99 @ Newegg Storage TCSunBow X3 120 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive $22.99 @ Amazon Storage Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive $53.98 @ Newegg Video Card XFX Radeon RX 480 8 GB GTR Video Card Purchased For $0.00 Power Supply Corsair CXM (2015) 450 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply $49.99 @ Newegg Custom Ryzen 1600 AF $99.99 Custom Cougar QBX Mini ITX Case $59.25 Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts Total (before mail-in rebates) $502.16 Mail-in rebates -$20.00 Total $482.16 Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-02-25 14:51 EST-0500 A living room gaming box and home server.

I would avoid buying 32GB of ram for your use case, it will go unused MOST of the time. As for the ram you have already, thats a tough situation, its so similar to what you would buy now. Depending on the quality, you may be able to overclock it to 3000/3200mhz, if you can then just keep that. If you cant get it past 2666, then I would go ahead and upgrade, Ryzen benefits so much from fast memory. Buy a 3200mhz 2x8gb Kit, it should only run you about $60 USD. You will likely be able to OC this to 3600mhz, so I wouldn't bother buying a 3600mhz kit.

Have you messed around with any overclocking related settings? If so, one of your overclocks may be unstable. Check temperatures on your gpu and cpu, make sure nothing is exceptionally high - they may be malfunctioning or installed incorrectly. I would go ahead and clear your CMOS (if you don't know how, just look it up). Best of luck! And I know that you didn't ask for this, but consider replacing that mechanical drive with a Solid State drive

So there's no real way to improve thermals/ its not worth it?

Yeah, be careful that when you install the ssd is set as the primary drive in your bios or Windows might put essential boot files on the HDD rather than the SSD, meaning that your windows install is inaccessible and will not boot without the HDD installed. This happened to me, and I ended up having to delete my windows install after my secondary harddrive failed.

I'm new to this forum, so I apologize if this isn't in the right category. I have a Vivobook 14 laptop with a Ryzen 3500u, a pretty good laptop considering that I got it for less than $400 USD brand new. However, the way ASUS chose to cool this is rather unorthodox. They have the typical heatpipe coming from the cpu, but instead of a small heatsink with fins and a fan that blows air directly out of the chassis, the heatpipe goes to a small, thin metal piece that sits parallel to the motherboard, raised a couple of millimeters above it. The fan blows across this piece of metal, right back into the case. I attached an image to show the internals of the laptop (not my image). Needless to say, this method is not nearly as robust as a typical laptop heatsink, meaning that it doesn't provide very good cooling. In games, the package sits around 90 Degrees C, with the cpu only boosting up to its 2.1Ghz Base Clock occasionally, normally sitting at a pitiful 1.4Ghz. The cpu is rated to boost up to 3.7Ghz. The Vega 8 iGPU sits between 700 and 900mhz, rarely going above 1000mhz and never getting to its rated 1200. I feel like my system is really being bottenecked by this crappy thermal solution, and was wondering if there is any way to improve cooling that still allows the laptop to be used as a laptop. For example, I can open up the case and press a heatsink to the heatpipe, and temps go way down, but I obviously can't use the laptop anymore, save plugging in and hdmi and external components, at which point I may as well just carry around a desktop. Any help is appreciated!