Gadgetory

hey guys Eber here with hardware connects and a few weeks back we explored AMD's Raven Ridge apos and came to conclusion that they were worthy enough to handle 1080p gaming at medium to low settings and remember this was without the inclusion of a graphics card because about the Rison 5 at 2400 G and the Rison 320 200 G featured Vega graphics if you're interested in checking out a full review I'll link it right over here but today I want to put together a gaming pc featuring one of these ap use at a pretty affordable price point actually I don't even know if I should use that term at this point because a current state of component pricing is downright ridiculous and I you guys know what I'm talking about either way let me walk you through my parts pic but also do know that I will be mentioning some of the alternatives that you'd go with throughout the video and of course I'll be talking about my experience building this guy but most importantly I have to go through some interesting troubleshooting steps and of course we'll talk about that shortly so let's dive in right after this welcome to you a new keyboard train first attach the magnetic wrist rest it simply pops in don't forget about the USB pass-through port and the headphone jack to simplify your connectivity you're the boss of the meeting control which is right over here fiery red key caps are included because it is a gaming product with RGB / key elimination and under the hood we've got cherry MX silver speed and blue switches for those legit actuations and finally don't forget about the voice control enjoy your new x1 by thermaltake check it out in the description below ok my choice for the APU was the horizon 520 400 G that costs around a hundred and seventy dollars it features four cores with a threads comes with a base clock of 3.6 gigahertz with a boost up to 3.9 there should be more than enough to perform day-to-day tasks like web browsing and consuming high quality content not to mention this apu does support 4k HDR playback you can also get away with some light content creation maybe a little bit of photo editing as well thanks to the inclusion of a threads the horizon 320 200 G isn't a bad alternative for $99 as it features a slightly lower clock speeds as well as a lack of a threads compared to the 2400 gene there are also a difference in specs when you look at the Vega GPUs integrated on both chips alright so my motherboard of choice was initially this by an a/b 350 and gaming Wi-Fi ITX if you recall I did use this board last year to build a mini ITX horizon 3 PC but I encountered a few problems with this choice for this APU build the existing bios for this motherboard didn't really support the hip new Raven Ridge apos so if you're planning on picking up this motherboard especially if you're thinking of picking it up from you know Craigslist or Ebay or whatnot you might be out of luck because you'd have to install a new Rison or previous generation rising base CPU get it to post update the BIOS and then switch back to the APU because the latest BIOS adds support or it enables the display i/o on the motherboard as well as add support for the Raven Ridge APU now do not that most new motherboards that have stocked up on retail channels should come with the latest BIOS but you could be out of luck it's like it's like I don't know I don't know if it's like winning a lottery at this point you might even run into the same issue if you pick any other b250 motherboard if it has an older BIOS so and make sure to check that before pulling the trigger the original BIOS for Raven Ridge was pretty terrible but it has improved since launch unfortunately I didn't have a spare rise in CPU here in the studio so I had to switch out that gigabyte board for MSI be 350 I pro AC micro ITX motherboard it's a pretty basic board nothing too much to talk about other than you get the necessary i/o ports RAM support up to 32 gigabytes and 32 hundred megahertz a single inductive slot and Intel dual band wireless AC but there is one major problem msi hasn't actually made this board available to the market yet and i'm not kidding it costs $89 but it still isn't in the market at least this was one of the board's that was sent to us as a reviewers kid when we were testing out Raven Ridge so I'm not sure when they're gonna be available but there are some alternatives of course if you find some of these new lead 50 motherboards that are coming on stock that should technically have the latest bios you should be just fine but you could also offer a standard ATX solution and then you know go that way it's actually a lot cheaper than going with a micro ATX motherboard what's even interesting is that b250 motherboards are frequently sold out and the demand for those boards are pretty high and the prices also start to fluctuate at this point it's actually really surprising to me because we thought that GPUs were being on demand at this point and of course prices on GPUs are let's just not have that conversation right now but no be 3d motherboards are in the equation guys so let me know in the comments down below if you have a micro ITX solution or a micro ATX alternative for a be 350 motherboard for memory I chose team groups dark pro 16 gigabyte ddr4 dual channel kit clocked at 3200 megahertz the company is making a huge comeback into the North American market after being known as the overclocking King back in the DDR days the dark Pro kit features a stealth black design along with a high efficiency forged aluminum heat spreader for maximum heat dissipation and at 3200 makers clock speed they should boost the gaming performance significantly especially you know with Raven Ridge ap use now you may be wondering why I went with 16 gigabytes instead of a gigabytes and there are a few reasons for that one modern applications like chrome actually take up a lot of system resources especially on the RAM side so if you have like 15 tabs open and if you open up task manager well you're definitely going to notice that within the RAM segment most importantly you know if you're playing back 4k content that also relies heavily on memory usage as well so it's a good way to future-proof your system especially in you know next couple of years another reason is that this motherboard only comes with two slots so if you populate it with a gigabyte dual channel kit and if you want to upgrade to 16 gigabytes saying the next couple of years you'd have to invest on the memory kit later on so it's another investment now you could go with a single eggy bed module and run it in single channel mode but that would significantly affect gaming performance now I also want to spend some time and talk about memory pricing because this 16 gigabyte RAM module at 3200 mega Hertz costs around two hundred and twenty three dollars and you know as I was putting together the parts list I noticed that the memory was the most expensive component of the entire PC and you know that actually kind of opened my eyes because you know it we're almost coming to a point where we have to set aside a certain budget after looking at the memory pricing because normally we would set aside a certain budget for the CPU and GPU and then the rest of components sort of follow along but at this point in 2018 it's the other way around we have to first find memory and of course a GPU and then the rest of components kind of follow along it's kind of all over the place - I'm not really sure if you know what's the perfect solution to this bunt but yeah it is it is a little frustrating anyway so let's talk about storage I chose the OCZ TL 100 two and a half inch 240 gigabyte SSD as our main boot drive for quick access to applications and for storing my game library Western Digital is one terabyte blue caviar hard drive should do the trick the teal 100 is currently unavailable but a perfect alternative would be OCR 200 series as the 240 gigabyte variant only cost $70 now you don't have to necessarily go with an SSD for this particular build you can use the standard 1 terabyte hard drive as your primary boot drive to store your OS your Documents and whatnot but if you want a little bit more performance it is a worth or it is recommended to go with an SSD I think the best possible configuration would be 120 gigabyte SSD and a hard drive so there are there are a variety of configurations you could go in terms of storage for this APU build powering the whole system is Silverstone's st 45 SF small form-factor 4 PSU with an 80 plus bronze certification and it retails for about $60 there should be plenty enough to power the Rison 520 400 g + it's also super quiet during idle and load operations the case of choice is the Silverstone SG 13 Mini ITX enclosure it highlights the strengths of ITX design plus at $50.00 you just can't ask for more there's plenty of room for proper airflow although you won't find dust filters which is a bummer and the included hard drive bracket only supports a single three and a half inch hard drive or two two and a half inch SSDs in my case I'm onto these drives vertically to accommodate both the SSD and the hard drive so I just keep that in mind if you're picking up this case so now that we've taken a closer look at the parts list for this build along with the operating system a basic set of peripherals the total price rounds up to about 870 dollars without taxes now if you eliminate the SSD for just a hard drive in the OS along with peripherals provided you have them all ready you can say we're on $230 and perhaps invest that into a gtx 1050 the options are not limited which is awesome alright so let's put this thing together actually it's already assembled but just a little montage so this is the final build and as you can see it is pretty compact I'm not sure if I can fit this entirely on you know on camera but this looks like a pretty compact case I think this should be an excellent option for an HTP see if you're thinking about that or just a regular you know desktop system this is pretty compact it's got two a USB 3.0 ports on the front you've got your audio outputs as well your i/o is at the back and overall there's plenty of airflow it's a very simple build doesn't come with fancy RGB lighting or whatnot so it's it's just meant to be it's just meant to be here at your desk and you know just to get your job done of course we don't have to talk about performance so let's let's move on to that now for clocking I decided to use Amy's rising master software but before I get to the settings I want to quickly mention that Amy's public version that's available for download directly from the website ironically doesn't support these ap use and that I found I found that to be really frustrating because you know it's been almost a month since these new hippies launched and they still haven't managed to update their you know their public version of the software it doesn't make any sense I am I'm pretty it's disappointing I ended up using the beta version that was sent to us as part of the reviewers kit and after several BSO DS remember overclocking his game of trial and error but with Raven Ridge it's more of an error than success so it takes time to dial in the proper overclock I managed to get a stable three point nine five gigahertz on the CPU core speed and fourteen eighty eight megahertz on the GPU I tested boats talk and overclock settings with the same memory speed so here are some numbers starting with the Adobe Media encoder test I rendered a one-minute 4k h.264 video and noticed that the higher clock speeds are heavily utilized and they're able to deliver pretty good results Cinebench r15 showcases similar results as well overclocking the CPU did score 30 points higher than stock settings blender doesn't really need an explanation in fact I wouldn't even consider this apu for 3d rendering but this just shows how much performance you can get by just overclocking the APU what about gaming well as you can see the IGP overclock certainly helped boost the overall performance of the system in 3d mark 5 strike we see nearly three hundred point increase from stock settings and be aware this score would have been a lot lower with memory speed set to 2133 megahertz doom at 1080p set to medium averaged around 46 frames per second and with the IGP overclocked it gave us roughly a couple more frames per second so it's not too significant but worth mentioning or watch a 1080p set the high settings yields a 63 frames per second at stock settings versus 66 with the overclocked remember overclocking the GPU does a bit for performance but the GPU is very limited in its overclocking capabilities and it's likely to ensure the SOC package remains within its TDP limits and the stock cooler that comes with the apu does a really good job keeping temperatures under control so you don't have to invest in an other aftermarket cooling solution so at the end of the day could I call this APU build a success probably not because the motherboard of choice isn't currently available in the market so I'm not sure what I could substitute it with at this point but as for the rest of components it seems like a really good fit for an overall well averaged gaming PC now the price point can be debatable I'm sure you might have your own arguments in terms of you know picking up line components or whatnot but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that in the comments remember there are three factors that made this build almost a failure number one component pricing especially with memory and the second point almost ties into the first but it's the fluctuating motherboard availability and lastly overclocking challenges would this build make a lot more sense with horizon 320 200 G and a gigabytes of RAM again let us know but most importantly I have one more point to add on to this apu build there is an upgrade path down the line for example this motherboard technically does support the Rison 7 you know 1700 X or the previous generation Verizon processors if you want a little bit more performance you can just drop in a rise in CPU and again you know that CPU horsepower if you need to so this bill could be a great foundation for that and I'd love to hear your thoughts I mean bear with harbour connects thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one