New Rig, Bad Timing, Seeking Advice

Flynn Church · January 21, 2021

So. I pulled the trigger on a new build last year, because my roughly 10 year old i5 system was getting long in the tooth and I wanted to move on to something fresh. I had to do it on an incredibly snug budget (I'm an unemployed novelist, so money for me doesn't exist), but I pulled a Ryzen rig together. Not the best, but enough to get a foothold--A450 board, shiny SATA SSDs (my word the leap from spinning rust was astonishing!), and a Ryzen 5 3400G to get around the fact GPUs were hard to get. I figured, eh, things will level out soon enough.

It turns out that saying that in November 2020 was rather incorrect.

I am now faced with a quandary: I don't know the best plan to move forward. The Vega 11 is an okay APU but it's stumbling under load, I only have 16G in here and while I really don't need more only giving it 2G for VRAM Reservation is limiting, and it certainly won't run anything new very well.

* I could put more RAM in here and up the allocation, but I'm not entirely sure that will do any real good; I have my doubts.

* I have a GTX 960/4G from my old machine, and I could drop that in, but looking at hardware reviews the Vega 11 seems to be better and the 960 would just bottleneck all over creation. It's also an old card that's been put through thousands of hours of use, I don't know how long it will hold up.

* I could stay with things exactly as they are and try to get an actual GPU. Pricing seems to be in no hurry to drop, and trying to get $300-$400 for something reasonable online (local retailers are not proving very reliable; the only card I can find this week is the GTX 710 and some Quadros) will take months on my current budget. My GTX 960 is down to selling for under $100, so that won't help a lot.

Open to suggestions from the community, I don't have anyone outside retail who has a card to give/sell, so that's out.

Thanks for not laughing at me, I swear I don't usually do things this ineptly.

Thingyman · January 21, 2021

I would say try to get a 3060 or 3060ti, it might take a few weeks but you should be able to get one. Use fixitfixitfixit’s live stream, it helped me get my 3070. I say Best Buy is probably your best bet.

WhitetailAni · January 21, 2021

10 minutes ago, Flynn Church said:

A450 board

Do you mean B450?
There is no A-series 400 chipset - only A320 and A520.

Flynn Church · January 21, 2021

2 hours ago, ragnarok0273 said:

Do you mean B450?
There is no A-series 400 chipset - only A320 and A520.

Yes, B450, mea culpa. Asrock Steel Legend B450 to be specific.

Mark Kaine · January 22, 2021

6 hours ago, Flynn Church said:

APU but it's stumbling under load, I only have 16G in here and while I really don't need more only giving it 2G for VRAM Reservation is limiting, and it certainly won't run anything new very well.

I'm pretty sure you can allocate more, I'd suggest 4GB.

Otherwise, your options may be limited yeah, you can try getting a 3060/ti and in the mean time the vega 11 shouldn't be so bad, you can like I said give it more RAM and also maybe OC it a bit, that worked well when I had a 2200G... it's not a long term solution I agree, but other than waiting to snag a new gpu I don't see a lot of other options currently.

Flynn Church · January 22, 2021

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

I'm pretty sure you can allocate more, I'd suggest 4GB.

Otherwise, your options may be limited yeah, you can try getting a 3060/ti and in the mean time the vega 11 shouldn't be so bad, you can like I said give it more RAM and also maybe OC it a bit, that worked well when I had a 2200G... it's not a long term solution I agree, but other than waiting to snag a new gpu I don't see a lot of other options currently.

Running a Win10 gaming/streaming machine in 12G seems really a really snug fit, precariously so. A 3060 is out of my reach for quite some time financially, but RAM I can do. Suppose I can explore overclocking as well.

Mark Kaine · January 22, 2021

6 minutes ago, Flynn Church said:

Running a Win10 gaming/streaming machine in 12G seems really a really snug fit, precariously so. A 3060 is out of my reach for quite some time financially, but RAM I can do. Suppose I can explore overclocking as well.

Nah, that's fine, giving the gpu more memory should have priority, I had 8Gigs, 4 for the Ryzen igpu, 4 for Windows, wasn't an issue at all, tbh when I upgraded to a 3600 and 16gb I did see huge improvements from the cpu, but basically no difference at all on the ram side (I tested it back to back with my old ram)

I mean you do you but I think you're vastly overestimating the ram windows really needs... I usually use between 2 and 3 GB when not gaming for example.