Thoughts on APU?

[karboner]

Hi guys -

So basically my home PC is getting long in the tooth. The current is an OG Surface Book, but I've built systems in the past (AMD I'm most familiar with). I like the off-desk look but I think I want a desktop - maybe an ITX system.

I occasionally play games, but not often and I certainly wouldn't consider myself a huge gamer these days, and the PC under my media center handles Tomb Raider and other games fine (and I do have an NVIDIA SHIELD TV in the media center, which seems to have an "OK" streaming experience)... so my thought given the current GPU situation, is maybe I should spring for an APU and just save that part of money for now (I would like to buy a house, which is hard enough with rent and with the state of the housing market).

Main uses will probably be Visual Studio and other development environments - most usage probably would benefit from maxing out the RAM moreso than GPU... my monitors are 1920x1080 and I have no intention of upgrading those, so that's the max I'd be gaming at if/when I do game.

Anyway - what are your thoughts? Go APU and then a year or two down the road pick up a GPU?

 

[tkitch]

You ought to be able to find an AMD 5000G series chip soon enough, and they work well enough for light gaming.

 

And they're still 5000 chips, so they also do well with PC work. 

[karboner]

Thanks, I figured as much... might be better for cooling and noise too since I'm thinking of a small case

[jasonditz]

I had good performance with an A10-6800K APU. Thing ran pretty hot on stock cooler under any graphics load though.I know the Ryzen G's are very different beasts but I'd still err on the side of better cooling

[jaslion]

12 hours ago, jasonditz said:

I had good performance with an A10-6800K APU. Thing ran pretty hot on stock cooler under any graphics load though.I know the Ryzen G's are very different beasts but I'd still err on the side of better cooling

They run fine with the stock coolers too.

[ShockWire]

17 hours ago, karboner said:

Hi guys -

So basically my home PC is getting long in the tooth. The current is an OG Surface Book, but I've built systems in the past (AMD I'm most familiar with). I like the off-desk look but I think I want a desktop - maybe an ITX system.

I occasionally play games, but not often and I certainly wouldn't consider myself a huge gamer these days, and the PC under my media center handles Tomb Raider and other games fine (and I do have an NVIDIA SHIELD TV in the media center, which seems to have an "OK" streaming experience)... so my thought given the current GPU situation, is maybe I should spring for an APU and just save that part of money for now (I would like to buy a house, which is hard enough with rent and with the state of the housing market).

Main uses will probably be Visual Studio and other development environments - most usage probably would benefit from maxing out the RAM moreso than GPU... my monitors are 1920x1080 and I have no intention of upgrading those, so that's the max I'd be gaming at if/when I do game.

Anyway - what are your thoughts? Go APU and then a year or two down the road pick up a GPU?

 

If you want a recommendation on a small form factor build I would suggest the nr200. Its extremely popular in the sff community and is both a competent case design while also being good value. If you need any help on building in it or planning for it I would suggest watching optimum tech's videos where he goes in depth on airflow recommendations and part compatibility and look at r/nr200 for even more advice and info about it. Also with regards to the asked question I think it depends on what performance you expect from your apu, it is only based on vega graphics while the new steam deck is ryzen based on rdna2, so imo I feel like the apu is just not worth it but if you can't get a gpu and u need a pc now what can you do. If you want to see a detailed video about the apu then I suggest this vid.