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DPete27 wrote:

Pentium G4560 = $80 and there are decent mobos with 4 RAM slots for $65 - $75.

I second the above, the Pentium G4560 is plenty quick, cool running, and might not even need the external graphics card for the indicated use case, which would take the build price down to $400. That still leaves a future upgrade to a used Kaby Lake i5 and a graphics card on the table, for a year or two hence when it becomes necessary.

I mean, sure, I would also want to support AMD now that they have a competitive architecture again, but until they get the APUs launched they haven't earned it for these lower-end builds.

derFunkenstein wrote:

The GPU we'll talk about, my friend (the data) is pretty adamant about it being a pretty budget-y solution. Is the 1030 really faster than the RX550? I've only looked at a couple face-off style reviews, and they were pretty mixed. I have a feeling the RX550 will be a non-starter, but we'll see. Whatever it is, I'm sure it'll be a step up from the hand-me-down Core 2 Duo system with a GeForce 9600 GT that the kid has been using.

Well, I said 1030 because it's slightly cheaper than an RX550/560, offers enough performance to be worth using over an IGP and is very low power, usually passively-cooled with no cheap fans to wear out.

If it's really a low-budget system, ditch the GPU altogether an plough that extra money into an Intel CPU/Board with IGP instead. Sure, Ryzen is good, but if the GPU isn't necessary it's not the best choice. An i3-8100 is going to give you a decent IGP (HD 630) which isn't amazing but it'll run MOBAs/Minecraft/Rocket League etc just fine, and you'll probably save around $30 overall, too.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Well, I said 1030 because it's slightly cheaper than an RX550/560, offers enough performance to be worth using over an IGP and is very low power, usually passively-cooled with no cheap fans to wear out.

True, if you are more concerned with GPU performance for the dollar, then a discreet card and a cheaper CPU is the way to go.

Ex. Nvidia 1030 vs. Intel 630 (IGP) found in the latest i3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0MeI0sQfy4

Well, here's the thing. From what I can find, the absolute cheapest Z370 motherboard on Amazon and Newegg (required for a Core i3-8100, unless those run on 200-series boards) is the $110 MSI Z370 Pro-A. To accommodate that board, we also have to switch out the case for an ATX case and spend more that way, too.

The board I picked out in the OP is more than $30 less than that. So if we're spending around $35 extra on the CPU and around $35 extra on the motherboard and have to pop an extra $10 or so on a case, suddenly we save zero by going Intel with integrated graphics vs the Ryzen 3 and RX550 combo. And I think the AMD setup is probably going to perform better in situations where you'd actually feel it, which is the limited selection of games available to the kid.

We are going to spend a few bucks extra on RAM, but I think this is otherwise pretty much set. I did find a $110 RX460 4GB (which should perform roughly equal to the 560) and the dad is mulling it over, but we might get that instead. Next is to wait for Black Friday to ruin all of our plans.

Hell, last Black Friday I finagled a 1060 3 gb for just under $120 (with *rebates). (..of course I wasn't on the back-end of a bit-miner craze.)

Hopefully several good deals will show-up around then.



*this was on jet.com which had (and perhaps still does) promo-code stacking, with the deal popping-up early in the morning (Friday) - along with a universal (retailer) rebate (from PNY). They purchased the card from Newegg at a loss. (..and it was shipped from Newegg.)

So thanks to early Black Friday deals, I nabbed a PowerColor RX 560 4GB for $75 on Newegg yesterday. I was able to make my friend see reason on a perf/$ basis, if nothing else. He figured if I could get faster for the same money I might as well.. Saw it mentioned on PC World but unfortunately the sale is over. Best available now is $80 after MIR. This was $75 up front.

Question: Would we lose much performance going with a 1x8GB memory setup instead of 2x4? Thinking about future expansion. May not matter since the mATX board we chose has four DIMM slots.

Your friend made a good choice with the Radeon RX560 4GB. A lesser discrete GPU would be a poor value.

Many modern CPUs do such a good job of caching things that they're not as sensitive to single-channel vs. dual-channel memory as was the case a decade ago. I don't know if that's the case for Ryzen. We do know that Ryzen really likes running with higher memory frequency (up to DDR4-3200), since that pushes up the performance of communication within the chip as well as to main memory.

With a motherboard that has four DIMM slots, I would not be so concerned with future expansion options that I would select 1x8 GiB. 2x4 GiB today plus 2x8 GiB or 2x16 GiB in the future is a viable option when the current budget is tightly constrained.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

2x4 GiB today plus 2x8 GiB or 2x16 GiB in the future is a viable option when the current budget is tightly constrained.

Thanks, JAE. That's what we'll do then. It was what I had originally planned but I've seen 1x8 at prices slightly lower. You are correct that it'd still be trivial to take this thing to 40GB of RAM before anything needed to be replaced, and I'm sure that's more than the kid will ever need.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Your friend made a good choice with the Radeon RX560 4GB. A lesser discrete GPU would be a poor value.

Many modern CPUs do such a good job of caching things that they're not as sensitive to single-channel vs. dual-channel memory as was the case a decade ago. I don't know if that's the case for Ryzen. We do know that Ryzen really likes running with higher memory frequency (up to DDR4-3200), since that pushes up the performance of communication within the chip as well as to main memory.

With a motherboard that has four DIMM slots, I would not be so concerned with future expansion options that I would select 1x8 GiB. 2x4 GiB today plus 2x8 GiB or 2x16 GiB in the future is a viable option when the current budget is tightly constrained.

Ryzen seems to care less about timings than raw speed, even more so than recent Intel architectures.

Of course, modern memory access timings scale with speed in any case, absolute latency seems to be about the same for DDR4 regardless of speeds.

Ryzen 3 1200 is $100 and Gigabyte AB350M Gaming 3 is $70 at Newegg today so we picked that up. MX300 275GB was also only $80. A trial Premier account gives us shipping, too.

Might come in a few bucks under budget which is nice. So far on the parts we've bought we've saved around $20 with no rebates or anything.

Looks as if the sporadic (deal-sniping) purchasing is going well.

Having just an SSD should be fine. Instead of going with this GPU, get GT 1030 instead. Or you can simply get the Core i3 8100 with HD Graphics 630. The current generation Integrated Graphics are decent enough to run games like DOTA 2 and League of Legends. Here's a guide on Intel HD Graphics that can help you out. The rest of the specs seem good though.

I'm glad that the original poster's build is coming along well! For other readers, I would strongly suggest a refurb business line desktop from Dell, HP, or Lenovo. They're build to last and can generally be found with a SSD. Toss in a power-sipping GPU and you'll get quite a system for your budget. Building at the low end is usually more expensive than going with off-lease business hardware + GPU.

For example, here is an i7 3770, 256GB SSD, and 8GB RAM for $400: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 4474#close
Here's an Ivy Bridge i5 with 16GB RAM and a 480GB SSD for $400: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 42J5280202

You can do much better for the money with a more thorough search; that was a quick Newegg sort.