Ryzen APU Build Advice

[chintal]

I’ve been thinking about a PC-ish build for some time now, and after a great deal of thinking I find I’m not where I’d like to be in terms confidence for my part selection. I’d like to try and explain what I want to do and would appreciate any thoughts.

 

I’m not a gamer. I would prefer to not have a desktop that would forbid me from playing, and I would like to perhaps play a little bit from time to time, but that isn’t the first thing I need from the build. I’m certainly not too worried about playing games that came out just now - I could always fall back to a decades worth of games I never even saw the titles of. I don’t edit video content either. I do make mild to moderate use of Solidworks, though it's ok if photo-realistic rendering takes forever.

 

I do have a few terabytes of media on 3.5" WD Red drives which I expose on my network using Kodi.I do this on a pretty old Dell Inspiron with a 3rd Gen Intel i5 with an Nvidia something or other. This laptop has since run out of USB ports for connecting the disks I want attached on it, and it’s on its last legs (on borrowed time, even). I might want to change that to Plex so that I can transcode and perhaps handle 4K video in the (near) future. I would also like to keep it relatively quiet, and have it double as a HTPC. I'm not particularly looking for serious overclocking. Some minor tweaking for the fun of it, perhaps, but it's more important to me to have a robust system that isn't going to break down on me.

 

The original thought for my build was to have something compact, low power, always on, which can hold at least 8 3.5" drives, which just sits on my network serving content. I do not wish to use RAID or RAIDz though. I expect to have unreliable electricity and I don't want to spend eternity rebuilding arrays. Also, anything that stripes data across the drives would be a problem for me - I'd rather lose the data on one drive than lose an entire array. I've more or less settled on unraid managing my disks, and two VMs. One with linux running Kodi (or maybe plex) and some other fairly light network services as a headless server which I'd rather not power down for extended periods, another with Windows 10 which gets the integrated graphics for some light gaming, Solidworks, occasional non-mission critical messing about. I sort of know unraid is going to have trouble passing through the Ryzen iGPU to a guest VM. This is a problem I have chosen not to think about for the moment, with the assumption that the problem will get fixed in coming months.

 

I started out earlier this year considering the Intel Pentium G5400 or i3 8100 on a B360 micro ATX motherboard (had more or less decided on TUF B360M-PLUS GAMING). The idea was that I could upgrade the processor and/or add discrete graphics down the road when I had disposable cash. This is until a few weeks ago, when I hear Intel is planning Generation 9 release in October. Intel’s disposition towards chipset compatibility doesn’t really work for me, and the release of the Ryzen APUs (which hadn’t really come out by then) opened up the possibility of switching to Ryzen instead.

 

Here’s what I have so far :

• MSI B450M MORTAR
• Ryzen 2400G
• 2x 8GB Corsair Veng. 3000
• Antec NE550M
• An ASMEDIA ASM1061+1093 based PCIe x1 to 4x SATA III adapter/HBA

I'll also put in a couple of small-ish SSDs for linux and windows boot drives, one SSD as an unraid cache drive, and one 3.5" drive for the OS's data drives, i.e., software and games etc. I'll be adding 4 WD Reds to this (3 data, one empty one for parity), with a plan increase this to atleast four more drives in the future, probably more, though more PCIe SATA controllers or by upgrading to an 8 or 16 port HBA. I'm not currently planning on using M.2, and I'm not likely to want to spend very much on it either. This is going to be a fairly light use machine from that perspective.

 

What I need help on is this :

 

Does it make sense for me to get the 2200G instead of the 2400G? I’m having serious doubts in the bang-for-the-buck department. If I’m perfectly honest, I’m not very likely to get a discrete GPU in the near future (12-24 months, minimum). Because I do also want to run VMs, I figured I may as well spring for the 2400G. But given the extra cores are just extra threads, I’m not entirely sure if they’re going to make that much of a difference.

 

I ask, because the price difference would make a difference to me, especially given the RAM costs what it does. I am also seriously considering the option of using the savings to upgrade the RAM to 2x 8GB GSKILL Trident 3200. While this would make for a better foundation for me if I do upgrade my CPU, I am left with the feeling that this would be a very unbalanced result in the interim (~ 2 years). My RAM choices are defined significantly by what I can get my hands on locally. I suspect both RAM options I’m looking at are CL16, but I’m not actually sure. I would have preferred to get 2x4GB 2666 or 3000MHz CL14 RAM, but for some reason those seem to be quite rare here.

 

Anything 4GB which operates at beyond 2400MHz does, in fact. The ones that do exist are expensive enough to not want to spend on a 4GB pair that might need to be discarded when upgrading. I’m particularly worried about the implications of https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_5/2400g , ie, if I do want to ultimately end up with 4 DIMMs of 4GB each, would the speed necessarily drop down to 2400MHz? If so, would 4 x 4GB @ 2400 make for reasonable performance and compensate for the lower speed, as long as I can suck it up for the moment with 2 x 2GB @ 2400? Or, as I suspect, would having 4 sticks basically end up being a ball and chain no matter what, and I should try to stay with 2 x 8GB with up-front investment in the RAM?

 

My apologies for the length of the question. Any thoughts would be helpful.

[Fasauceome]

I think you're on the right track. 2200G to save money and get good ram, especially given how Ryzen scales a lot with ram, you're better off with that foundation and having the drop in replacement of a better CPU and GPU down the line. If future Ryzen still needs fast ram, you'll have it. If not, current gen still needs it.

[Firewrath9]

19 minutes ago, chintal said:

I’ve been thinking about a PC-ish build for some time now, and after a great deal of thinking I find I’m not where I’d like to be in terms confidence for my part selection. I’d like to try and explain what I want to do and would appreciate any thoughts.

 

I’m not a gamer. I would prefer to not have a desktop that would forbid me from playing, and I would like to perhaps play a little bit from time to time, but that isn’t the first thing I need from the build. I’m certainly not too worried about playing games that came out just now - I could always fall back to a decades worth of games I never even saw the titles of. I don’t edit video content either. I do make mild to moderate use of Solidworks, though it's ok if photo-realistic rendering takes forever.

 

I do have a few terabytes of media on 3.5" WD Red drives which I expose on my network using Kodi.I do this on a pretty old Dell Inspiron with a 3rd Gen Intel i5 with an Nvidia something or other. This laptop has since run out of USB ports for connecting the disks I want attached on it, and it’s on its last legs (on borrowed time, even). I might want to change that to Plex so that I can transcode and perhaps handle 4K video in the (near) future. I would also like to keep it relatively quiet, and have it double as a HTPC. I'm not particularly looking for serious overclocking. Some minor tweaking for the fun of it, perhaps, but it's more important to me to have a robust system that isn't going to break down on me.

 

The original thought for my build was to have something compact, low power, always on, which can hold at least 8 3.5" drives, which just sits on my network serving content. I do not wish to use RAID or RAIDz though. I expect to have unreliable electricity and I don't want to spend eternity rebuilding arrays. Also, anything that stripes data across the drives would be a problem for me - I'd rather lose the data on one drive than lose an entire array. I've more or less settled on unraid managing my disks, and two VMs. One with linux running Kodi (or maybe plex) and some other fairly light network services as a headless server which I'd rather not power down for extended periods, another with Windows 10 which gets the integrated graphics for some light gaming, Solidworks, occasional non-mission critical messing about. I sort of know unraid is going to have trouble passing through the Ryzen iGPU to a guest VM. This is a problem I have chosen not to think about for the moment, with the assumption that the problem will get fixed in coming months.

 

I started out earlier this year considering the Intel Pentium G5400 or i3 8100 on a B360 micro ATX motherboard (had more or less decided on TUF B360M-PLUS GAMING). The idea was that I could upgrade the processor and/or add discrete graphics down the road when I had disposable cash. This is until a few weeks ago, when I hear Intel is planning Generation 9 release in October. Intel’s disposition towards chipset compatibility doesn’t really work for me, and the release of the Ryzen APUs (which hadn’t really come out by then) opened up the possibility of switching to Ryzen instead.

 

Here’s what I have so far :

• MSI B450M MORTAR
• Ryzen 2400G
• 2x 8GB Corsair Veng. 3000
• Antec NE550M
• An ASMEDIA ASM1061+1093 based PCIe x1 to 4x SATA III adapter/HBA

I'll also put in a couple of small-ish SSDs for linux and windows boot drives, one SSD as an unraid cache drive, and one 3.5" drive for the OS's data drives, i.e., software and games etc. I'll be adding 4 WD Reds to this (3 data, one empty one for parity), with a plan increase this to atleast four more drives in the future, probably more, though more PCIe SATA controllers or by upgrading to an 8 or 16 port HBA. I'm not currently planning on using M.2, and I'm not likely to want to spend very much on it either. This is going to be a fairly light use machine from that perspective.

 

What I need help on is this :

 

Does it make sense for me to get the 2200G instead of the 2400G? I’m having serious doubts in the bang-for-the-buck department. If I’m perfectly honest, I’m not very likely to get a discrete GPU in the near future (12-24 months, minimum). Because I do also want to run VMs, I figured I may as well spring for the 2400G. But given the extra cores are just extra threads, I’m not entirely sure if they’re going to make that much of a difference.

 

I ask, because the price difference would make a difference to me, especially given the RAM costs what it does. I am also seriously considering the option of using the savings to upgrade the RAM to 2x 8GB GSKILL Trident 3200. While this would make for a better foundation for me if I do upgrade my CPU, I am left with the feeling that this would be a very unbalanced result in the interim (~ 2 years). My RAM choices are defined significantly by what I can get my hands on locally. I suspect both RAM options I’m looking at are CL16, but I’m not actually sure. I would have preferred to get 2x4GB 2666 or 3000MHz CL14 RAM, but for some reason those seem to be quite rare here.

 

Anything 4GB which operates at beyond 2400MHz does, in fact. The ones that do exist are expensive enough to not want to spend on a 4GB pair that might need to be discarded when upgrading. I’m particularly worried about the implications of https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_5/2400g , ie, if I do want to ultimately end up with 4 DIMMs of 4GB each, would the speed necessarily drop down to 2400MHz? If so, would 4 x 4GB @ 2400 make for reasonable performance and compensate for the lower speed, as long as I can suck it up for the moment with 2 x 2GB @ 2400? Or, as I suspect, would having 4 sticks basically end up being a ball and chain no matter what, and I should try to stay with 2 x 8GB with up-front investment in the RAM?

 

My apologies for the length of the question. Any thoughts would be helpful.

Id get a 2200G with 3000 or 3200gb ram. Get 1x8 or 2x4.

[Franck]

7 hours ago, chintal said:

I’ve been thinking about a PC-ish build for some time now, and after a great deal of thinking I find I’m not where I’d like to be in terms confidence for my part selection. I’d like to try and explain what I want to do and would appreciate any thoughts.

 

I’m not a gamer. I would prefer to not have a desktop that would forbid me from playing, and I would like to perhaps play a little bit from time to time, but that isn’t the first thing I need from the build. I’m certainly not too worried about playing games that came out just now - I could always fall back to a decades worth of games I never even saw the titles of. I don’t edit video content either. I do make mild to moderate use of Solidworks, though it's ok if photo-realistic rendering takes forever.

 

I do have a few terabytes of media on 3.5" WD Red drives which I expose on my network using Kodi.I do this on a pretty old Dell Inspiron with a 3rd Gen Intel i5 with an Nvidia something or other. This laptop has since run out of USB ports for connecting the disks I want attached on it, and it’s on its last legs (on borrowed time, even). I might want to change that to Plex so that I can transcode and perhaps handle 4K video in the (near) future. I would also like to keep it relatively quiet, and have it double as a HTPC. I'm not particularly looking for serious overclocking. Some minor tweaking for the fun of it, perhaps, but it's more important to me to have a robust system that isn't going to break down on me.

 

The original thought for my build was to have something compact, low power, always on, which can hold at least 8 3.5" drives, which just sits on my network serving content. I do not wish to use RAID or RAIDz though. I expect to have unreliable electricity and I don't want to spend eternity rebuilding arrays. Also, anything that stripes data across the drives would be a problem for me - I'd rather lose the data on one drive than lose an entire array. I've more or less settled on unraid managing my disks, and two VMs. One with linux running Kodi (or maybe plex) and some other fairly light network services as a headless server which I'd rather not power down for extended periods, another with Windows 10 which gets the integrated graphics for some light gaming, Solidworks, occasional non-mission critical messing about. I sort of know unraid is going to have trouble passing through the Ryzen iGPU to a guest VM. This is a problem I have chosen not to think about for the moment, with the assumption that the problem will get fixed in coming months.

 

I started out earlier this year considering the Intel Pentium G5400 or i3 8100 on a B360 micro ATX motherboard (had more or less decided on TUF B360M-PLUS GAMING). The idea was that I could upgrade the processor and/or add discrete graphics down the road when I had disposable cash. This is until a few weeks ago, when I hear Intel is planning Generation 9 release in October. Intel’s disposition towards chipset compatibility doesn’t really work for me, and the release of the Ryzen APUs (which hadn’t really come out by then) opened up the possibility of switching to Ryzen instead.

 

Here’s what I have so far :

• MSI B450M MORTAR
• Ryzen 2400G
• 2x 8GB Corsair Veng. 3000
• Antec NE550M
• An ASMEDIA ASM1061+1093 based PCIe x1 to 4x SATA III adapter/HBA

I'll also put in a couple of small-ish SSDs for linux and windows boot drives, one SSD as an unraid cache drive, and one 3.5" drive for the OS's data drives, i.e., software and games etc. I'll be adding 4 WD Reds to this (3 data, one empty one for parity), with a plan increase this to atleast four more drives in the future, probably more, though more PCIe SATA controllers or by upgrading to an 8 or 16 port HBA. I'm not currently planning on using M.2, and I'm not likely to want to spend very much on it either. This is going to be a fairly light use machine from that perspective.

 

What I need help on is this :

 

Does it make sense for me to get the 2200G instead of the 2400G? I’m having serious doubts in the bang-for-the-buck department. If I’m perfectly honest, I’m not very likely to get a discrete GPU in the near future (12-24 months, minimum). Because I do also want to run VMs, I figured I may as well spring for the 2400G. But given the extra cores are just extra threads, I’m not entirely sure if they’re going to make that much of a difference.

 

I ask, because the price difference would make a difference to me, especially given the RAM costs what it does. I am also seriously considering the option of using the savings to upgrade the RAM to 2x 8GB GSKILL Trident 3200. While this would make for a better foundation for me if I do upgrade my CPU, I am left with the feeling that this would be a very unbalanced result in the interim (~ 2 years). My RAM choices are defined significantly by what I can get my hands on locally. I suspect both RAM options I’m looking at are CL16, but I’m not actually sure. I would have preferred to get 2x4GB 2666 or 3000MHz CL14 RAM, but for some reason those seem to be quite rare here.

 

Anything 4GB which operates at beyond 2400MHz does, in fact. The ones that do exist are expensive enough to not want to spend on a 4GB pair that might need to be discarded when upgrading. I’m particularly worried about the implications of https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_5/2400g , ie, if I do want to ultimately end up with 4 DIMMs of 4GB each, would the speed necessarily drop down to 2400MHz? If so, would 4 x 4GB @ 2400 make for reasonable performance and compensate for the lower speed, as long as I can suck it up for the moment with 2 x 2GB @ 2400? Or, as I suspect, would having 4 sticks basically end up being a ball and chain no matter what, and I should try to stay with 2 x 8GB with up-front investment in the RAM?

 

My apologies for the length of the question. Any thoughts would be helpful.

No GPU and you plan to use Solidworks ? i am very curious how you plan to hack solidworks into that. It's possible to hack for non CAD cards and run says "1070 GTX" but a APU i never heard that would be possible. even a 680 GTX is outputting 10-15 fps in Solidworks so and APU i doubt that it can run.

[Fasauceome]

59 minutes ago, Franck said:

No GPU and you plan to use Solidworks ? i am very curious how you plan to hack solidworks into that. It's possible to hack for non CAD cards and run says "1070 GTX" but a APU i never heard that would be possible. even a 680 GTX is outputting 10-15 fps in Solidworks so and APU i doubt that it can run.

If the 680 can do it, a ryzen APU can do it. The Vega cores inside are one rung lower than something like a 1050, and I'd say the 680 is a lot like the 1050 in terms of performance.

[Franck]

11 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

If the 680 can do it, a ryzen APU can do it. The Vega cores inside are one rung lower than something like a 1050, and I'd say the 680 is a lot like the 1050 in terms of performance.

my 680 gtx non OC have a bit more fps than the 1060 (non TI) of my brother. and BTW for some reason the 1060 cannot be hacked on his PC to run Solidworks. Probably because of something else because it should work since the 1070 does work perfectly fine. At work i don't have access to a 1060 to test but i know 1070 works.

[Fasauceome]

Just now, Franck said:

my 680 gtx non OC have a bit more fps than the 1060 (non TI) of my brother. and BTW for some reason the 1060 cannot be hacked on his PC to run Solidworks. Probably because of something else because it should as 1070 does. At work i don't have access to a 1060 to test but i know 1070 works.

1060 doesn't have a ti. Also, a 680 running faster than a 1060 is bizarre to say the least, do you have the same CPU?

[Franck]

54 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

1060 doesn't have a ti. Also, a 680 running faster than a 1060 is bizarre to say the least, do you have the same CPU?

I got first gen i7 3.0 ghz he has 3rd or 4th gen i7 with 3.4 ghz. by TI i meant the 6 gb version. my brother has the 3 gb one.

[Franck]

8 minutes ago, Franck said:

I got first gen i7 3.0 ghz he has 3rd or 4th gen i7 with 3.4 ghz. by TI i meant the 6 gb version. my brother has the 3 gb one.

rectification, i texted him to make sure and he actually has a 1050. He wanted to get the 1060 back then but he went for the 1050 and his cpu is i7-2600 at 3.4 ghz.

On league of legend and heroes of the storm he runs 15 to 20 fps less at same settings

[Fasauceome]

3 hours ago, Franck said:

rectification, i texted him to make sure and he actually has a 1050. He wanted to get the 1060 back then but he went for the 1050 and his cpu is i7-2600 at 3.4 ghz.

On league of legend and heroes of the storm he runs 15 to 20 fps less at same settings

it makes a lot more sense if he's got the 1050. the 680 is basically right between the 1050 and 1050 ti in terms of performance.

Also, 1060 ti would have been a logical name for the 6gb variant. it would also be the first generation to have a ti version of every card.

[Franck]

52 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

it makes a lot more sense if he's got the 1050. the 680 is basically right between the 1050 and 1050 ti in terms of performance.

Also, 1060 ti would have been a logical name for the 6gb variant. it would also be the first generation to have a ti version of every card.

Actually according to this https://www.techspot.com/article/1588-geforce-gtx-680-revisit/ the 1050 TI seems on par with 680 GTX

[chintal]

18 hours ago, Franck said:

No GPU and you plan to use Solidworks ? i am very curious how you plan to hack solidworks into that.

Solidworks works just fine on Intel integrated graphics as long as you :

• Draw things you can and do actually manufacture, and don't throw in much detail for things you purchase. For instance, I only use PCB outlines, mounting points and components that are large or provide interfaces like connectors, not any on the finer details like caps and traces. Things like cosmetic threads are left disabled.
• Limit to a finite number of parts and switch to large assembly mode often. The most complex things I do perhaps have 50-100 different parts, not more than that. More typically, there are only a couple of dozen different parts.
• Don't care very much about textures and decals and so forth during the drawing process, leaving that to render time.
• Have a fair amount of patience when drawing. The worst offences at draw time come when Solidworks tries to highlight edges. That can be painfully slow on more complex parts.
• When doing photorealistic rendering, go take a walk, grab a coffee while it's drawing. 
• Throw RAM at the problem. By throw RAM, I mean 8GB (which is what other people at work use) or 16GB (which is what I now use).
• Stick with a solidworks version from around the generation where the hardware is from as well. I currently use 2012 and 2015

[Franck]

5 hours ago, chintal said:

Solidworks works just fine on Intel integrated graphics as long as you :

• Draw things you can and do actually manufacture, and don't throw in much detail for things you purchase. For instance, I only use PCB outlines, mounting points and components that are large or provide interfaces like connectors, not any on the finer details like caps and traces. Things like cosmetic threads are left disabled.
• Limit to a finite number of parts and switch to large assembly mode often. The most complex things I do perhaps have 50-100 different parts, not more than that. More typically, there are only a couple of dozen different parts.
• Don't care very much about textures and decals and so forth during the drawing process, leaving that to render time.
• Have a fair amount of patience when drawing. The worst offences at draw time come when Solidworks tries to highlight edges. That can be painfully slow on more complex parts.
• When doing photorealistic rendering, go take a walk, grab a coffee while it's drawing. 
• Throw RAM at the problem. By throw RAM, I mean 8GB (which is what other people at work use) or 16GB (which is what I now use).
• Stick with a solidworks version from around the generation where the hardware is from as well. I currently use 2012 and 2015

Ah ok that make sense then. I had to limit myself to 2015 for the 680 gtx anything above if i try to bend a sheet metal it takes 20 seconds to perform. With an old Q600/P600 2017 runs flawlessly but you cap the VRAM extremely fast. At work we often work with large assembly over 5000 parts. On the 680 gtx i manage to get up to about 20 parts before it gets unusable.