Gadgetory

the core p9 DTG from Thermaltake features a unique prism shaped open-air design so you can ogle your parts from any angle the five millimeter tempered glass keeps things classy and the three chamber design supports a full complement of hardware even if your custom water cooling for more on the core p9 DTG click the sponsor link in the description what's up guys welcome back to Pauls hardware today's video is my follow-up to what was originally my February build then I need to start off by saying a big apology to you guys because I know this is a lot later than I was originally intending to put it out I've been out of the loop for a little bit but I'm back so thanks a lot you guys for bearing with me and today I'm going to show you guys a little bit more details about the setup of this build and then I'm also going to do some demonstrations just showing you the basic performance if you're planning to build a gaming PC and you want to do an APU based PC because graphics cards are so expensive right now I think this is a great solution for anyone who's just trying to get their foot in the door and then of course have a lot of upgrade potential in the future so all the parts in this system were all assembled about a month ago and the link to that video I'll put in the description as well as a list to all the parts that I've used now at the end of that first video I directed you guys over to my first five things to do with a new PC build video and that should have helped you get things set up but every computer that you build yourself is gonna be a little different might have quirks so I'm gonna start off with some things to know and the one big one that I've already gotten a few comments on and a few tweets about is the potential BIOS incompatibility issue so here's the situation right now we have these new AMD APU s the Rison 320 200 G and the rise in 520 400 G these came out in January 2018 the motherboards that they're compatible with are gonna be your beef be 350 chipset motherboards and your X 370 chipset motherboards those came out a year ago now if you happen to have an older motherboard a be 350 chipset motherboard or an X 370 chipset motherboard e there's like a 320 as well but I typically recommend B 350 or X 370 now if your motherboard was manufactured and shipped to a retailer sometime in 2017 then it has an older bios version on it and what you need to do is take your old your motherboard with old BIOS update the BIOS on it so that it will recognize and be compatible with your new you this situation is going to happen again in another month or two once the rise in two processors launch we'll have the same situation because you have a bunch of rising two CPUs like the theoretically the 2800 X and so forth that will be compatible with existing B 350 and X 370 motherboards but if the motherboard was shipped earlier and has an older BIOS on it the BIOS needs to be updated first in order to recognize the CPU that puts you in kind of a catch-22 situation because in order to update the BIOS you need to install a CPU to get the board up and running so long story short older be 350 motherboards that shipped in 2017 might need and updates to be compatible with the newer 2200 g-20 400 G Rison + vague ap use and in the future even rise in two CPUs as well that might come out and most be 350 and X 370 motherboards have an updated BIOS available but you'll need to install an older CPU first in order to boot up and update your board and then install your 2200 year 2400 G so for example the board that's used in this build the AP 350 in gaming Wi-Fi if we go over to the support page on gigabytes you'll notice down here under BIOS there's nine older versions and in fact the first versions came out back in June or so as when the motherboard launched and it wasn't until late 2017 or beginning of 2018 that we have what's we have Raven Ridge CPU supports so in December and then we have some more updated ones that have come out after the fact as well if your motherboard has a f5 BIOS or older and then you can't install and recognize a current gen apu into it now there are three solutions to solving this problem if you happen to be stuck in it solution one involves some four thoughts so if you've already bought your hardware then this probably won't help you but before purchasing your motherboard make sure the motherboard says AMD rise in desktop 2000 ready AMD has published some stickers that they might put on the box or the motherboard manufacturer might put a sticker on the box that says Raven Ridge ready this might be difficult to confirm with online purchases though so you might also want to double check if you're shopping on new AG or Amazon that they've put some extra text in there that indicates the motherboard that's going to ship to you is compatible or is updated to be compatible with these new Raven Ridge ap use the second solution if your motherboard has arrived and it's not updated then it's just not gonna work you'll install everything like I showed you in the first video and then it won't put up or you get a blank screen now if you don't happen to have a slightly older 1000 series rise and CPU on a hand your fastest solution is probably gonna be your local PC repair shop most PC repair shops will update your BIOS for you if you bring the motherboard in they might charge you a small fee I've heard five to fifteen dollars and by the way if you happen to be a PC repair shop owner out there consider offering a BIOS update service for free especially with the rise in two stuff coming out it will make a good impression on potential new customers and it is a great way to get that potential customer to hang out and browse your store for five or ten minutes while they wait for you to do be very simple update the third solution is direct from AMD and they will actually lend you an older Bristol Ridge apu so this is an APU that has older architecture but it is functional it costs about sixty seventy dollars if you were to buy it at retail but if you contact AMD you send them proof of your purchase and they will ship you a dual-core a six ninety five hundred you can install that update your board and then they will provide a shipping label to return that loaner CPU back to them it does take a week or two to get to you gamers Nexus recently tested and this as a consumer so if you don't have time to wait that long then the first or second option are probably going to be a better bet for you since I knew I was okay on the BIOS update issue on this board in particular I pretty much set up the system according to that first five things to do with a new-build video now I also installed an 8 gig memory kits the original kit that I installed if you guys remember was a g.skill Flair X kit and these are each eight gig dims and I wanted to test in the same configuration as I recommend it to you guys so I've just swapped out for these this is just a g.skill ripjaws 5 kit 4 gigs per dims so 8 gigs total 2x4 and that's so I could test the configuration that I'm recommending you guys actually buy 4 sub of $500 now if you've got the team kits that I recommended in the first video then in order to get the memory running at the right speed you can just go into the BIOS and plug in the XMP settings as per my first five things video I actually went in and manually set the speed on this memory to run at ddr4 3000 so it would be the same speed as the kit that you might get at home and that way we can hopefully get about the same performance as you might expect as well let me show you guys how I've set this up in the BIOS so I've not jumped into the BIOS also known as UEFI and here is where we can change some of the core settings of the motherboard and how the CPU works in the memory frequency and that kind of thing now this usually has a graphical interface so you can actually use your mouse and your keyboard to navigate around but for those of you who need to update the BIOS just to give you guys a quick tip on that you're basically gonna need a USB Drive I recommends plugging it in to a different computer and formatting it fat32 is the file format you want to use once you've had a fat32 USB Drive go to that gigabyte download page I already showed you download the latest update put it on the USB Drive and then from in here you can use the cue flash option in order to update and that will basically access your Drive you tell it what the file is and you can do an update from there since I don't have a drive installed it's not even letting me do that but wanted to show you where that's listed at least beyond that I wanted to talk about memory so here we can look at frequency settings we can see for example that our CPU is installed and the clock speed on its and here's where we would plug in that XMP profile extreme memory profile if we wanted to so just switch to profile one and you would be good to go I didn't do that here though simply because I did it manually I just set my memory profile multiplier to thirty which gives us a speed of three thousands and then I said the cast cast latency to 15 because that is what the memory kit is actually rated for beyond that you can do the other steps that I mentioned in my first five video browsing through the BIOS if you want to I would definitely recommend checking your boot options making sure that that's proper I've only got one option for booting and I've got two because I've plugged in an external SSD as well but beyond that Windows installation everything should go the same way that I showed in that video so let's save and exit and now here we are back in Windows I've skipped over a lot of stuff that just because it's included in that other video but I went to the gigabytes website and downloaded drivers where applicable specifically for the chipset and that kind of thing those have all been installed and I saved them here also got the Bluetooth and the Wi-Fi installed there I did want to point out for this mother in particular there appears to be a minor glitch that might happen with the default Wi-Fi drivers that Windows 10 downloads so definitely go to the gigabyte website download those Wi-Fi drivers and install those because they definitely are a lot more stable for me beyond that you're also gonna want to make sure that you have the proper driver for your graphic would be the graphics card but since it's the APU its included as part of the CPU but for that you can go over to the AMD website and go to drivers and supports and you can do the automatic detection thing if you want to I tend to like to tell it manually that I have an APU and that it's a desktop APU and it's a Rison 3 with Vega because it's the 2200 and I'm using Windows 10 64 bits and there it will give me the results I can double check down here that it's the proper actual CPUs that are compatible and then click on download there narcho to install that driver once that package is installed you can right click on the desktop and go to AMD Radeon settings and here you can access some of the functions of the Radeon software such as the Radeon overlay you can establish profiles for different games that you play how it handles video for example display scaling that kind of thing as well as just looking at your system setup whether its overview software its installed updates for like OpenGL open CL and mantle and volcán for example and then also you can look at the hardware that you have installed which if you have the 2200 G is a Vega 8 graphics units and you can see different revisions and other stuff in there now one of the functions in the BIOS is to assign your integrated graphics a certain amount of memory that's allocated from the amount of memory that you installed so since we have 8 gigs of ddr4 we are going to allocate some of that that's specifically set aside for the video or video card and the rest of the system can't use that so that's why if we were to for example go to my PC and look at properties we could see we have 8 gigs of installed ram and we have six point nine five gigs usable some of that's being used by the graphics and some of that is being used by system resources resources that you can't touch depending what you're doing with your system seven gigs may or may not be enough so if we go over here to our ask manager we can take a look for example at the amount of memory that's being used right now of our 6.9 gigs we're currently using 2.2 gigs just with the operating system up and running we're not really doing anything I mean I guess I have chrome loaded so there's some chrome tabs basically but the point I'm getting at is that it's important to keep an eye on your system what it is doing how it is behaving and what's resources are being used that way you can get a better idea of like alright is it time to upgrade or is this okay for my purposes now if we actually go to logical processors we can see the four cores of our processor and what they're doing task manager is a nice basic functional way of doing this but what I actually did for this system and for our continued testing today as I downloaded some additional software so apart from our Andy Radeon drivers i've also went to the msi website and downloaded afterburner and then i've gone to the guru 3d website and i've downloaded the rivatuner statistics server I've also gone to hardware info HW infocom to download HW info 64 and I'm running that as well when I ran all of those it can give me a good idea of what's going on with my system and the reason I'm using this software is simply because it's a little bit easier with the software to monitor stuff while you're playing a game there's a ton of stuff that you can do with this software so I'm not going to go into all of it but basically over here you get a view at a lot of different sensors that are on the board and what's going on so for instance your CPU is right here and you can see the different cores and the voltage that's being delivered to each core you can also look at the core clock and it's got a current min Max and average so right now it's just idling not doing much so about 1.6 gigahertz but when it actually ramps up when it when you tell the CPU to do something it's actually going up to about 3.7 gigahertz and if we wanted it to go higher than that then we could overclock to possibly go even beyond that but I'll hopefully cover that in a different video beyond that we can also see usage per core and we can see that we've only really gotten up to about sixty three point four percent usage on any core right now that's because I haven't really done with much with this right now you can also take a look at your memory that's installed we can see the memory speed here running it fifteen hundred megahertz or about that double data rate memory so it's actually running at three thousand speed and then we can also see our CPU temperature for example it's a good idea to keep an eye on that to make sure things don't get too warm then we've got more stuff from the motherboard the motherboard has lots of different sensors on its but if we keep scrolling down we can find our GPU listed right here the AMD Radeon Vega eight here we can also see GPU temperature and we can also see stuff like the GPU clock speed the GPU memory clock speed GPU utilization so what I'm gonna do is tell hardware info 64 to use the rivatuner statistics server to actually show the value for some of these things and then when I load up some games we can monitor these stats as we're playing the game alright so the first game I'm testing here is Grand Theft Auto 5 the classic GTA 5 which runs just five on this one just fine on the 2,200 G if a little bit less than 60 frames per second at low settings or these are normal settings at 1080p on the games a 1920 by 1080 today GTA 5 is one you might consider just dropping the resolution down to 720 or something a little bit lower if you want it a little bit better framerate but let's look at these settings that I'm rolling with in GTA 5 when it comes to the graphics we're at 1920 by 1080 ignore suggested limits 60 Hertz and pretty much everything else is set to either the lowest or normal settings which is pretty much as low as it can go just a quick look at it there and then also advanced graphics right everything but I do want to point out when it comes to the on screen display here up the top left there direct3d 11 here's just a frame rate so we're looking for an average frame rate around 60 frames per second above that if possible our CPU stats are also listed here so we can see the frequency the load as well as the current temperature memory and this is system memory we can see how much is under load right there as well as the overall percentage and then for our GPU we can see the temperature the frequency as well as the load and then I've got dedicated as well as dynamic vram dedicated is what we have told it to use and then dynamic is if it goes over that it can use up a little bit more now it comes to the memory for the graphics card you can the dedicated and dynamic dedicated supposed to be what you assign to the graphics card that it will set aside for you to use and then dynamic means if it determines that it's all being used up it might use a little bit more up and that means it's going to steal some from what's available for your operating system so it is something to keep in mind right now we're only using about four gigs of RAM on this on the CPU side so overall we're only using about five five to six gigs which means we're probably okay but depending on the game you're playing you might use more memory and in that case is when you might consider a memory upgrade so after driving down the highway for a little bit I can tell that first off we are definitely GPU limited with this game we can see the GPU percentage there is hovering it around well just below 100% so the GPUs max depth CPU we're getting about 60 to 70 percent usage on so that's not bad it means we've got a little bit of headroom there even though we're just using the quad core and then beyond that frame rate as mentioned it's dip in a little bit below 60 frames per second here and there but overall it's a pretty smooth experience GTA 5 was a game that in my initial testing of the Raven River Ridge launch it was a little bit better suited for the 2400 G compared to the 2200 G but again it's still very playable and even at the low settings GTA 5 still looks pretty good boys chat muted alright next up we are playing pub G and always remember ctrl T to avoid a mute voice chat Pub G is not a very well optimized game and I discovered this in my initial video as well it's pretty difficult to get a reasonably playable framerate playing it 1920 by 1080 with the 2200 gene then this game so to that end I have gone and set all of my settings to very low and you can see him right here at 1920 by 1080 playing a full screen everything set to very low I got vsync off so that's that's what we're working it's right here I'm already being attacked this guy think he is want you back so I'm gonna play through one round here I think see let's see if I can get a chicken chicken dinner maybe I've never won pub G all right already I can tell that we're above our memory limits or using our full gig of dedicated vram and we're already using 680 on top of that as well as five point two five point three gigs of our dedicated RAM in the green there so that's getting pretty close to like using up all the memory and that's definitely gonna be an issue with this game especially as it seems like as I get closer to a town here or something with a little bit more structures loading in we're just using up more and more so if there is gonna be something that causes the framerate to tank it's going to be having to fetch textures and that kind of thing from the sort storage drive even though it's fetching it off of an SSD I can definitely impact frame rates but anyway I've at least landed and we're bouncing back and forth between 16 ish so I haven't feeling well our normal frame rate we're getting is a little bit above 30 which again is playable if not ideal but if you've seen those dips where it goes down to like 16 or something like that see you'll notice it's not happening right now because I'm just kind of in an area that I everything's loaded into but when it was loading stuff as when we got the frame rate dips I also have an Xbox controller plugged in that I did for grand theft auto which is why I'm seeing Xbox control commands pop up on screen instead of the normal keyboard and mouse which is confusing me yeah at least I threw a throw smoke bomb at him I think so obviously inspired some fear but pop G's challenging as it is though especially with a little framerate so let's switch over to fortnight alright guys I've moved over to fortnight and battle royale and right now we're just in the pre loading area everything on screen is the same as it was before we're in the bus now so I wanted to quickly show you the settings I'm using we're at 1920 by 1080 window full screen and everything is set to medium although I'm only getting around 40 frames per second so I'm actually gonna switch most this to low and off right now just to see if we can't help us ourselves out a little bit when it comes to the frame rate that they'd seem to help we're up to 60 now so I'm gonna attempt to play fortnight now I'm not very good at it Wow there's lots of people lots of people diving in should be fun alright so we're using a decent amount of memory we're at 5 a little over 5 gigs of memory and I should probably pick up those bandages and I should probably have some idea of what I'm doing in this game beyond that though video memory is looking pretty decent we're not even up to a gig which is one of the nice things about this game is it is not very difficult to play you don't need a whole lot of system resources or anything like that so so that's definitely a nice great thing we're holding pretty steady at 60 frames per second in fact so steady that I feel like vsync might be on hold on these things off vsync saw fit was just giving me real solid 30 frames 30 FPS okay what a jerk okay well I died which is probably a good thing because I was just getting distracted anyway point being fortnight Battle Royale perfectly playable nice two solid 60 frames per second frame rate as long as you keep the settings down too though time to jump in overwatch here and let's take a quick look at the settings I'm using fullscreen or again we're in 1920 by 1080 overwatch has a pretty robust system for adjusting your settings in order to get yourself a good frame rate so I've actually just gone and sets the graphics quality to the low presets and I turned off the frame rate cap that shouldn't really affect anything anyway and then the only other thing that I've changed is I've set the render scale to be fixed at 75 percent if we're getting a good frame rate I might bump it back up to 100% that will give us the best visual detail at least ignoring everything else but all that said let's go ahead and jump into a game I pick Zarya I usually go for Zarya or fara I'm not sure why all right we're just in the staging area right now but getting pretty good frame rate actually in the 80s and above 90 so I'm going to something real quick actually bumps that render scale back up to hundred percent and let's see how that does it so now we're around 60 all right so maybe 75 might be a better option this doesn't make things noticeably sharper though I will will say that 64 66 right now five that lived that long but okay the fun thing about actually playing these games as I test them is that I completely forget that I'm testing a game and then I'm actually playing the game and kind of having fun more to the point though let's take a look at some stats RAM usage is a little bit over five gigs so that's definitely on the higher side but not too much of a concern as again our framerate seems to be holding it above 60fps even with the render scale set to the max what am I being attacked from oh she's like standing behind me I was even paying attention plus I was saying RAM usage is a little over five gigs and dedicated the RAM is using almost the full amounts just under one full gig for V Ram so it looks like we're pretty solid there as well oh oh did we get it got it we won I was nowhere near there but we still won that's what's important alright so that was a lot of fun and I haven't played overwatch in a few weeks so that's always nice but I think at this point I probably need to call things quits and at least give a quick assessment good this is a good little system for the price and everything I'm getting excellent performance and I'm able to play these games granted not at highest settings but we're using an integrated graphics chip anyway so of course there's going to be an upgrade path to that we can always make this system better if we want but with this memory configuration and these settings we're definitely kind of hitting the top end of where we want to be when it comes to like future proofing and being capable of supporting higher end games for example but it's definitely capable of playing them and if you're a 1080 gamer and you want to get into PC gaming it seems like a very very viable solution alright guys that is gonna wrap it up for this video I hope you've enjoyed it and again my apologies for it being quite delayed but if you happen to build this system and get it all put together and then let me know what your experience was down in the comment section down below is it working well for you if graphics cards prices come down then I will hopefully do an upgrade pass on system as well show what kind of performance different so you can get by installing a graphics card maybe go into some overclocking if you upgrade the cooling solution that's the great thing about building a new system like this is it opens this pathway to all the other things that you might do with it besides just playing video games like like I've been doing a little bit with today but before I make this video too long I want to say thank you again for watching thanks to all you guys who have been tweeting to me and asking me where I've been in that kind of thing I have heard them and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside on your way up if you can hit the thumbs up button it's much much appreciated and thank you for watching we'll see you guys in the next video