Light Gaming Rig

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
My present 10 year old AMD Athlon X2 3600+ based desktop is on its last legs and I am frustrated each time I sit in front of it now.

I have a Dell full HD monitor, cabinet for Micro-ATX board etc. I have selected AMD Ryzen 3 2200G as my APU.

1. What is the purpose of the computer? What all applications and games are you going to run? (Stupid answers like 'gaming' or 'office work' will not work. Be exact. Which games? Which applications? Avoid the word 'et cetera.')
Ans: Home desktop with light gaming, 1 or 2 year old titles at medium/low settings.

2. What is your overall budget? If you can extend a bit for a more balanced configuration, then mention this too.
Ans: Do not have a fixed budget yet but prefer to remain below 40K.

3. Planning to overclock?
Ans: NO.

4. Which Operating System are you planning to use?
Ans: Windows 10 and Linux OS Dual Boot Configuration.

5. How much hard drive space is needed?
Ans: Have 160 GB and 320 GB hard disk.

6. Do you want to buy a monitor? If yes, please mention which screen size and resolution do you want. If you already have a monitor and want to reuse it, again mention the size and resolution of monitor you have.
Ans: Have a Full HD monitor.

7. Which components you DON'T want to buy or which components you already have and plan on reusing?
Ans: Cabinet, keyboard, mouse, DVD drive, UPS.

8. When are you planning to buy the system?
Ans: In 1 or 2 weeks.

9. Have you ever built a desktop before or will this be done by an assembler?
Ans: Have built before.

10. Where do you live? Are you buying locally? Are you open to buying stuff from online shops if you don't get locally?
Ans: Bengalooru.

11. Anything else which you would like to say?
Ans: I have finalised Ryzen+Vega APU. Prefer ASUS for motherboard. Might buy a 1 TB disk in future.
 

SaiyanGoku

kamehameha!!
Wait for a while and get G4560 + B250/H110 mobo when prices are sane. Add 1050Ti later. Buying current AM4 APU's doesn't makes sense to me.
 
OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I am sticking with AMD.

After much deliberation I have decided on this APU. My needs are minimum and cannot afford more at this juncture but with a viable upgrade path for future.

Is there any more value for money AM4 board out there? I prefer ASUS.

Also which would be a budget PSU for me considering that I might buy a graphics card in future?
 

gta5

Ambassador of Buzz
if you want to stick with amd apu..
wait 2-3weeks

A6 9500 appeared in india only 10-12 days ago . maybe A8 9600 may launch in a few weeks.. or simply ask mdcomputers or primeabgb if and when they are expected to launch...

A8 9600 has double the cpu cores and should only cost around 1200-1400rs more than A6 9500 ..

plus it appears tax on PSU has been reduced to 18% from 28%.. so wait for that to reflect in new prices and you might save another 350 Rs + Corsair CX 450 to come back in stock in mdcomputers or other sites.. ( no proper review yet though)

mobo .. there is asus prime A320M K available for Rs 4700.. no overclocking on this plus i am not sure whether ryzen 3rd gen (zen 2 - 2019 ) might be supported on it or not.. am4 compatibility is certain till 2020 but whether oem will allow low end chipsets to be updated i am not sure

and i think selling this apu might be hard..
 
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OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I like your suggestion of A8-9600 but at present it is not available. I will go for it if it becomes available in the next 2 weeks.

About motherboard I am unable to decide between Gigabyte GA-AB350M-HD3 and GA-AB350M-D3H. One has 4 RAM slots and the other 2. I am more interested in PS/2 ports for mouse/keyboard and PCI slots to plug all sorts of things like TV tuner card/backup network card etc in future.

Is Corsair VS450 a good choice considering that I may add a graphics card in the future?

HDD - Is Western Digital a good choice? There is no 7200 RPM Blue model in 2 TB.

I am not worried about selling this APU as in such a case I will just build a backup system or donate it to a cousin.

Final edit before sleeping:
This is the configuration I am looking for now
CPU : AMD A6-9500 / AMD A8-9600
RAM : Corsair Vengeance 2400 MHz 8 GB
Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-AB350M-HD3 / GA-AB350M-D3H
HDD : WD Blue 1 TB 7200 RPM / WD Black 2 TB 7200 RPM
PSU : Corsair CX450
 
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whitestar_999

Super Moderator
Staff member
Corsair VS450 is not a good psu.
POWER SUPPLY CORSAIR CX SERIES™ CX450 — 450 WATT 80 PLUS® BRONZE CERTIFIED ATX PSU
 
OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
Corsair VS450 is not a good psu.
POWER SUPPLY CORSAIR CX SERIES CX450 — 450 WATT 80 PLUS BRONZE CERTIFIED ATX PSU
OK. Done.

My plan is to give the final list to a cousin in Bengalooru to try and source them. If the prices are not attractive or out of stock, then I will go online.
 
OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I decided to wait for A8-9600. Then today on Newegg I saw these prices

A8-9600 Rs. 4516 + Rs. 2000 shipping AMD A8-9600 Bristol Ridge Quad-Core 3.1 GHz Socket AM4 65W AD9600AGABBOX Desktop Processor Radeon R7 - Newegg.com
A10-9700 Rs. 5803 + Rs. 2000 shipping AMD A10-9700 Bristol Ridge Quad-Core 3.5 GHz Socket AM4 65W AD9700AGABBOX Desktop Processor Radeon R7 - Newegg.com

The prices seem too good to be true considering that Amazon is selling an imported A8-9600 at 11+K as of today (it was 13 K a few days back there). What is the catch here in Newegg? Is it taxes added later?

EDIT: Looks like customs duty. For A10 it is estimated at around 3.1 K. Has anyone bought from Newegg recently? Is it safe? Is there any change in the final price?
 
OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I finally bought this configuration from MD Computers this week:
APU - Ryzen 3 2200G - 8732 Rs
Motherboard - ASUS Prime B350 Plus - 7739 Rs
RAM - ADATA XPG RGB 3000MHz 16GB(8GBx2) - 14632 Rs
PSU - Corsair CX450 - 3304 Rs
HDD - Western Digital Blue 7200 RPM 1 TB - 3009 Rs
Key-Mouse - Logitech MK200 USB combo - 767 Rs
Shipping - 500 Rs
Total -38,679.

Thank you all for the help.

EDIT: Although I wrote this earlier, at the last moment I had to remove one stick of 8GB RAM to bring down the total to around 30ish K. I have later added another of the same type.
 
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OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
Installing the hardware took some effort as I have to make do with an old case for now. Motherboard did not come with screws to fix it. There was a single screw which acts like a pillar under the board. I guess it also provides earthing or something like that. There were 2 SATA cables one with a bent connector and one straight.
While installing the CPU, I had to loop the fan cable in order to stop it from fouling with fan because of its length and location.
The cable bundle out of PSU is very thick and takes a lot of room.

I have installed 64 bit Windows 10 Professional. All normal operations are smooth so far. Coming from my previous Athlon X2 3600+ this is like night and day!

I have kept 2 GB RAM for video. 6 GB for Windows. I have installed latest drivers from AMD for graphics.

Installed Alan Wake and went to play. It said my system is low spec and put my resolution to 1024x768 and settings to LOW
In this mode I get 25 to 30 FPS. I have a Full HD monitor by the way.

The motherboard has series of red LEDs at the back and they pulsate nicely when system is on. Also the ADATA RAM too has RGB lighting. Nice to see.
 

siddhesh222

Journeyman
I don't get it, the performance seems too low for a 2200g... Alan wake is quite old by now.. 2011 or so I think.. I think it might be because you have single channel RAM... I think the 2200g is capable of 1920x1080 low..
 
OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I too was expecting that. I thought even with the limitations I would get playable speed in low settings for FullHD resolution.

I will create a thread in Gaming section requesting help with troubleshooting this.
 

gta5

Ambassador of Buzz
with single channel ram you loose as much as 40% performance in many games..

this person is getting around 40-45 fps in 1280x720 resoultion HIGH with Gt 1030 ,

 
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gta5

Ambassador of Buzz
2200g at stock is slightly slower than GT 1030 , plus he is using single channel that will cost him a lot of performance.. .. as much as 40% performance loss

too many variables here to make decent comparison

Need to test with some other games , especially those that have already been tested with 2200g with single channel and dual channel and then compare your results
 
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OP
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I have ordered another 8 GB ADATA 3000 MHz RAM of the same type today. Since so much importance is put on making sure that both sticks are of the same type/latency etc. and if I wait for sometime and ADATA stops producing the same RAM, I will have to replace both sticks then. To avoid that I ordered one today itself. I hope this will in addition make it future proof for at least 4 years.

EDIT: Wait... why did I write that I had bought 2 sticks of 8 GB RAM in my earlier post of the final configuration above? I had only bought one then and just bought the second stick now. I think I had planned to buy 2 earlier but had to bring the budget down to 30ish K level. Anyway I am correcting it now.
 
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