Intro During my original $350 AMD Ryzen APU build
video, some of you were impressed with the gaming performance it had to offer, and some
of you wound up disappointed.
Well, in this incredibly late follow-up, I’m going to show you how to squeeze quite a bit
of extra performance out of your Ryzen APU build with some fairly easy steps.
Like… a LOT of performance.
Let’s jump in, after a word from our sponsor.
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In Review For a quick review - though I definitely recommend
watching the previous build video before watching this one, linked in the video description
- we built a $350 Ryzen APU system with the AMD Ryzen 2200G, a kit of 2 4GB sticks of
2400MHz DDR4 RAM, a cheapo Silicon Power 240GB SSD, the beastly Rosewill Blackhawk case on
a great sale, and a Seasonic 520W PSU.
I used the MSI B350M Pro-VD PLUS motherboard, but that required an AMD Boot Kit and BIOS
update to run the APU.
I recommended the ASRock AB350M Pro4 motherboard instead, as it is already ready to go for
the APUs without an update.
Performance was decent on medium or low settings in CSGO, Fortnite ran great, Crysis ran okay,
Warframe ran amazing and games like Paladins and Smite ran really fast.
Ironsight was a solid experience, too.
But games like DOOM, PUBG, and more demanding titles weren’t really playable.
Well, that changes today.
Like, a lot.
RAM OC Let’s talk setup first - to get the VERY
BEST out of your system, there’s a few steps to do:
Firstly, if your motherboard has “easy profiles” for RAM like this MSI motherboard does, spend
some time finding a good overclock for your RAM.
In the last video I questioned whether it would be better to have faster single channel
or slower dual channel RAM…
Well, both.
You want both.
These settings are in your BIOS settings, accessed by hitting the appropriate F-key
or the Delete key when it posts the motherboard logo, and then going to Advanced settings
mode.
The Patriot kit I got worked on first try with the second 3200MHz timings profile.
This is huge - an 800MHz overclock on the RAM helps Ryzen performance a LOT, and beats
the stock speeds of that single stick.
Now to figure this out for yourself will be annoying and there’s a reason I recommend
doing it first.
In order to “try” these, you just have to apply them - go for the looser timings
first, take note if any work - go to Exit, save changes and let it reboot.
If it reboots and posts the BIOS logo and such, you’re likely good.
If the screen never comes back on and it keeps rebooting, then that setting didn’t work.
Hard shut down the system by holding the power button until it kicks off and the lights go
off.
Next, flip off the switch on the back of your power supply.
Open your case and pull out the CMOS battery - a little watch battery-looking battery.
Use the tab and wiggle it out.
Leave it sitting out for a minute or two, pop it back in, turn on the power supply,
and boot the PC.
This clears out your BIOS settings so you can start over - this is why I recommend doing
this first, so you don’t keep wiping the important steps later.
Alternatively, if you have a “Clear CMOS” button on your motherboard or back IO you
can probably use that - my motherboard doesn’t have it.
This step is trial and error until you get a setting that can boot.
Each RAM kit will be different, but this 3200MHz setting worked for my Patriot kit.
VRAM A crucially important step to improve performance
with this build is to increase the amount of available VRAM, or video RAM, available
to the graphics part of the APU.
By default, it only reserves 256MB for itself - which is something you’d expect from a
high-end graphics card….
From 2004.
In your BIOS, under settings, Advanced, integrated graphics configuration, change the “UMA
Frame Buffer Size” or VRAM from 256MB to the maximum, which should be 2G.
IF you have more than 4GB of RAM.
For an 8GB RAM build, this is perfect.
For a 4GB RAM build, this will likely cause problems due to only leaving 2GB to the rest
of your system.
Please don’t build something with only 4GB of RAM in 2018 unless it’s running Linux
or Windows XP or something.
Exit and save these changes.
Anytime you need to clear CMOS or reset the BIOS due to other changes, you’ll need to
come back and apply this setting.
It’s hugely important.
CPU Overclocking Next, it’s time to overclock the CPU.
In my testing, I couldn’t push it too far so if there’s a “Game Boost” mode auto-overclock
tool built-in to your BIOS, you can probably just enable that and be fine.
On my motherboard, that got me a free overclock from 3.5 to 3.75GHz.
If you do want to push it further, turn Game Boost or whatever off, change CPU ratio to
38 for 3.8GHz and leave everything else on Auto - except your RAM timings and the VRAM
setting we changed earlier.
I had not problem getting 3.85GHz stable without changing voltages or anything more complicated.
Then you can run a free stress test such as Prime95 - linked in the description - for
30 minutes and make sure it stays cool and stable.
I’m using Core Temp - another free program - to make sure the CPU doesn’t get too hot.
Using the stock Wraith cooler included with the APU it gets quite toasty - but nothing
dangerous or problematic.
If you want to spend $20 to $40 on a better cheap tower cooler you’d definitely be fine.
As long as there are no errors in the 4 test threads in Prime95 after 30 minutes or so
and you’re not holding at like 95 degrees the whole time, you’re good to go!
If there are errors or it runs too hot, reboot back into BIOS and lower the number to 37
or 37.5 - or just use the Game Boost mode.
Ryzen master You can, in theory, do CPU and GPU overclocking
in the Ryzen Master software that you can download from AMD - it’s a software utility
that runs in Windows and allows you to adjust things there instead of going to BIOS and
etc.
However, I found it to not be all that useful, the default values were inaccurate and I couldn’t
even get the same results I got stable fine in BIOS with it.
So that’s up to you.
It reads the default GPU speed as like 400 MHz which is nowhere near correct, however.
Kinda disappointing, as I was more sold on software overclocking lately with Intel’s
Extreme Tuning Utility being very easy to use to overclock my i9.
But Ryzen APUs have a lot of quirks we’ll discuss later.
GPU Overclock Next up is an overclock that you should be
prepared for issues with.
If you want to skip this step, that’s fine - if it gives you issues it can be a headache,
but you have potential to gain a lot of performance here.
In the BIOS under the OC section, below CPU ratio you have “GFX Clock Frequency” and
“GFX Core Voltage”.
Leave “GFX Core Voltage” on auto or set it to 1.2V if you’re trying a higher frequency.
Then… frequency is going to be fun.
Some insane people can apparently push it to 1650MHz - though that kept giving me thread
locked Bluescreens.
1450MHz seems to be a more commonly stable speed, but that kept crashing for me in weird
ways as well.
I wound up having to back it down to only 1240MHz to 1300MHz to have any sort of stability
- still random bluescreens or quirks that seem to be driver-related - but even that
tiny amount really helps with speed.
To confirm that it’s working you can play a game or run a free benchmark like Superposition.
You can also use the number generated by this benchmark to see any improvements gained by
tweaks you make, graphics-wise.
Background software One last thing before we get into the games
- limit what background processes you have running.
Like REALLY limit them.
Close anything you’re not using, and Windows Defender even uses up a fair bit of resources.
While I cannot, in good faith, recommend leaving Defender disabled all of the time - disabling
it during gaming netted me HUGE gains in benchmarks - almost 2000 points in 3DMark Skydiver, almost
700 points in 3DMark CloudGate, and about 120 points in the SuperPosition benchmark.
To turn off Windows Defender’s realtime protection, click start, click the settings
cog, “Update and Security”, click “Windows Security” on the left, then click on “Virus
& Threat Protection,” click on “Virus and Threat Protection Settings” and turn
off real-time protection.
Again, this is risky if your network doesn’t have good security and you don’t have good
practices, but disabling ONLY during gaming should be okay.
Decide for yourself if the risk is worth the performance gains.
Gaming Benchmarks ONTO the games and VoxMarks!
I mainly wanted to test games that struggled last time or would have significant improvements
this time around, as well as a couple new games.
With the CSGO benchmark map, last time I ran things on medium with 4x MSAA and recommended
maybe knocking down to low.
With all the new settings, I was able to crank it up to High with Shader Detail on Very High
and MSAA and we still averaged 65.8FPS with only the big brutal smoke areas struggling.
During actual gameplay, average framerate was 77FPS.
Insane gains!
Now, there was some loading hiccups when I first got into the map for a minute or two
- this would be resolved by a warmup round, the the rest of the match was smooth as butter.
Ironsight was able to be kicked up to High settings for most settings.
I wound up turning down Anti-Aliasing to Average or low, and it still sometimes struggled when
there was a lot of alpha effects - or transparent stuff like smoke, fire, the on-screen red
blood indicator, etc. but matches averaged 61FPS on High and 103FPS on Average settings,
so definitely some good stuff there.
The Realm Royale alpha isn’t hard to run, but at 1080p with everything maxed, I got
an average of 110FPS with a 1% low of 57.3FPS.
Doesn’t get much better than that.
Unlike last time, DOOM 2016 was actually playable!
Running in Vulkan mode w/ same settings as last time, framerates weren’t too much higher
- average of 39.9FPS, but it actually felt responsive enough during gameplay to be an
enjoyable experience.
Menus were very sluggish, however.
I also wanted to test the PUBG mobile emulator.
I ran on medium game graphics settings with, unlocked framerate, anti-aliasing disabled,
and so on and the game ran wickedly well.
There’s 3 different settings menus to look at, plus the “low medium high” setting
when you first launch the game.
Since it ran so well, I cranked everything up to the max.
Full ultra HD 2k, extreme settings, everything as high as possible in every setting menu
and I still averaged 52.4FPS, and it was a very enjoyable experience.
I got a couple wins out of it, too!
There’s still about 60% bots in this part due to the player segmentation, but it’s
still fun for casual play, especially when I’m only half paying attention to benchmark.
PUBG itself runs alright, with everything on very low except for View Distance, I averaged
41FPS and it was way more playable than last time.
But this was on a previous Windows install.
My fresh install of Windows 10 1803… has issues… more on that later.
Minecraft can now hold a locked 120FPS most of the time with it dropping down to the 90s
at night.
Sweet.
Crysis ran a little better with 45FPS being the low-end I saw and it reaching over 60FPS
at times.
Fun!
Quirks & Problems Overall I was VERY impressed with the huge
performance gains seen by all of the tweaks, BUT this whole experience has been filled
with many headaches.
I had to do all of my rounds of benchmarks 4 or 5 times.
After it became clear 1450MHz on the GPU wasn’t stable, after I reinstalled Windows 10 due
to constant Bluescreens, after I decided disabling Defender was worth the gains.
There seems to be some… disagreements with the Ryzen APUs and Windows 10.
The driver doesn’t get along well, Windows 10 1803 just hates it, it’s a mess, really.
I thought I was crazy but there’s a lot of forum threads about issues similar to what
I’ve been having and I actually stumbled upon two JayzTwoCents videos where he ran
into similar glitchiness and discovered AMD was distributing the wrong driver and a lot
more nonsense.
Sometimes I’ll get a “thread locked in process” bluescreen.
Every once in a blue moon I’ll get an “ERROR BAD CONFIG” bluescreen - this was especially
problematic in the old Windows 10 install and when trying to upgrade it, which is why
I did a fresh install.
And two games - only two out of all that I’ve tested - just flat out don’t work somehow.
Skyrim Special Edition, as soon as it launches, inverts system colors and the game.
Even after I close it, I have to reboot to fix things.
PUBG now launches and just totally glitches the colors out altogether - something I haven’t
seen since like Windows 98.
This normally only affects the game and only in Fullscreen or FullScreen (Windowed) mode,
but when I tried getting around it by running in a Window and forcing it borderless fullscreen
using the app… it froze and turned the entire system into a glitchy mess that I had to hard
reset.
And this is even with the GPU overclock disabled.
I really have no idea what’s going on here and at this point I’m happy to blame the
APU because holy cow….
APUs always seem to have weird little quirks, but this is bonkers.
Conclusion Otherwise…
this is a beastly little gaming PC and definitely has huge bang for the buck outside of those
issues.
Hopefully AMD can get their crap together and get this resolved because I would love
to see the APUs more widely utilized for budget gaming.
This has certainly been an experience, but I do feel that the value per dollar of the
build is well, well worth it.
And that 520W power supply means that you can add in a beefy GPU later, up to a GTX
1070, even - though a 1050ti or 1060 might be a smarter choice, and get even more gaming
power out of it once your budget grows.
Product links and the first build video will be in the description down below.
Down there is a link to our sponsor, Lorex Technology, check them out.
While you’re at it, subscribe and enable notifications so you don’t miss an episode.
I’m EposVox, and I’ll see you in the next one.