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 have a few terabytes of media on 3.5" drives which I expose on my network using Kodi. I might want to change that to Plex so that I can transcode and perhaps handle 4K video in the (near) future. 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).
The original thought for my build was to have something compact, low power, always on, which can hold atleast 8 3.5" drives, no RAID, which just sits on my network serving content. I would like to have 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, another with Windows 10 which gets the integrated graphics or later discrete GPU 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).
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
- Corsair CX550 Bronze
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 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. 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, 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.