It’s finally time that I start covering budget gaming topics.
Having only experienced budget PC gaming until about 8 years ago, it’s certainly no foreign
subject to me - but I wanted to wait until I was in a better position with the channel
to market the content and to make purchases necessary to cover a wide variety of topics
on the subject.
I thought we’d start with a kinda “bridge between worlds” entry point - the new AMD
Raven Ridge Ryzen APU, specifically the cheapest one, the 2200G.
Many of the larger tech channels received press kits of these chips, along with like
$400 worth of memory, finally realized what the Nvidia GT1030 was, and started calling
this a “budget gaming” setup.
While it’s certainly “budget” if you want brand spanking new hardware, this is
still too expensive for the real “budget gaming” market, but I think it’s a solid
value for what you get so we’re still taking a look.
Right after this.
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I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun, and I built a $350 Ryzen APU “budget”
gaming rig.
This is including rebates and sales from Newegg - which like most of these videos, will not
be 100% re-creatable when you go to buy parts, but I felt they were reasonable representations
of what you can find if you hunt for deals and rebates.
I will say Newegg’s mail-in rebate process was easy.
Just very slow to get your rebate.
We’ll be covering the main build and benchmarks in this video, then covering differences between
single channel faster memory versus dual channel slower memory and comparing to an i5 2400
and GT 1030 rig in future videos.
Here’s the parts list.
The idea started with a rebate deal on this Rosewill Blackhawk case for $20 - and as I
went on and on about during my build stream, is an AMAZING case for the price.
I honestly feel like this case deserves a much bigger build than we’ve done here,
so I may do a case swap in the future because this can hold so much more.
I don’t like the tint on the acrylic panel, nor the use of glossy plastic, but it looks
good, packs a lot of functionality, comes with multiple fans, and has a lot of space.
You can’t go wrong here.
We’ve got a cheap 520W SeaSonic power supply, a Silicon Power 240GB SSD - you COULD get
a dirt cheap hard drive, but honestly the OS experience running from a hard drive is
so miserable compared to a SSD I personally don’t find the savings worth it.
SSD as the OS drive makes such an enormous difference in terms of day-to-day system responsiveness
and usability, it’s always worth trying to make a switch.
At the time - keeping in mind I bought these parts a couple months ago - I got the Ryzen
3 2200G APU and the MSI B350M Pro-VD PLUS Motherboard.
But for this, I had to follow GamersNexus’s guide to contact AMD for the book kit, update
BIOS, and a lot of waiting, whereas there are now other B350 motherboards already set
up for these new APUs.
I’ll have a better choice linked in the video description.
You’ll notice I got 2 RAM kits.
I got Patriot 2x4GB 2400 DDR4 RAM and ____.
They were the same price, but I couldn’t find any definitive info on choosing between
slower dual channel or faster single channel for Ryzen.
Simply separate test confirming the obvious that faster is better and separately, dual
channel is better.
So I bought both so we can test.
FOR SCIENCE.
The round of benchmarks and tests in this video were done with the 2x4GB kit at stock
2400MHz speeds.
Building was simple.
This tiny motherboard does not have enough fan headers for all of the fans in the case,
but it doesn’t need it.
It says cool and is the quietest machine I have running right now.
I targeted $300 for this build, but wound up closer to 350.
It’s certainly cheap - but performance compared to a build I got for HALF THE PRICE is not
worth if you’re truly on a tiny budget.
That’ll be for the next video.
For now, let’s look at the benchmarks.
Unless otherwise mentioned, all games were targeting full 1080p 100% scaled resolutions.
Let’s start with the more popular stuff.
Running the Counter-Strike GO benchmark map on medium settings with 4x MSAA netted an
average framerate of 68.7, maximum of 109.5FPS and 1% and .1% lows of 5.3FPS.
The game was responsive and felt fluid during normal gameplay, perfectly fine.
Turning down to low should net an easy 60fps lock, if needed.
PUBG felt like an unplayable mess.
Average Framerate of 26.5FPS, Maximum under 40FPS, 1% lows at 11.6FPS and .1% at 5.8FPS….
Too unresponsive (compared to the usual mess it is) to feel playable for me.
Maybe I know what the Xbox players feel like now….
hah.
Radical Heights wasn’t all that playable, either.
At FIFTY PERCENT render scaling and lowest settings, we’re talking around 25-40FPS
with the game feeling horrible and unresponsive.
No Thank You.
Fortnite, on the other hand ran amazingly.
This little APU is PERFECT for Fortnite, as most reviewers with faster turnaround time
than myself have already covered.
Framerates averaged 70.6FPS, minimum at 51.3 which is incredible, 1% lows at only 48.1FPS,
and max of 93.5FPS.
This game runs good.
I just suck at it.
Not my cup of tea.
DragonBall FighterZ held up an average framerate up against 60FPS with 1% lows at 41.7 FPS
and .1% lows at 25.8 FPS.
Overall felt and ran great.
That’s a NOPE.
Just kidding, running the cracked 64-bit exes in my Steam folder let Crysis run, but I had
to force borderless windowed mode or it locked my monitor to 24hz.
Kinks aside, Crysis on medium 1080p averaged 55FPS with a max of 82FPS and 1% lows at 27.4FPS.
Felt really good.
Skyrim SE - that is, the remaster - didn’t hold a high framerate, averaging 37.1FPS,
maxing at 60 and 1% lows at 20FPS.
BUT it actually felt pretty good for what you were getting.
I didn’t have the lowest settings on, but this felt like a good balance of performance
and visuals, even fighting a dragon.
Warframe ran great, averaging 63.6 FPS, with 1% lows of 38.5FPS and .1% at 15.3FPS, maxing
around 83FPS.
In DX11 mode, medium settings and most special effects turned on.
Niiiice!
Paladins ran REALLY well.
At 1080p mostly high settings, we got an average FPS of 96, Maximum of 175FPS, 1% lows of 46.5FPS
and it felt great.
Also that was my first ever online match and I won.
Probably won’t be my last.
Smite, I’m pretty sure, runs on the same engine, so we got similar results.
1080p high, average 93.4FPS, max of 127FPS, 1% lows of 61.5FPS.
Easy.
This one was just against bots, so no brags here.
Path of Exile is very well optimized for what it is, but I turned settings to medium and
left 4X MSAA on and we averaged 57.6FPS, hit a max of 78.9FPS, 1% lows of 34.6FPS and .1%
lows of 25.2FPS.
On these settings it played quite nice.
No stutter or anything.
DOOM 2016 wasn’t a great experience overall.
We’re looking at averages under 30FPS across the board on low at full 1080p - but I will
say switching to Vulkan gave us a few extra frames, which seemed to be enough to make
it feel more responsive and actually playable.
So there’s that.
Ironsight ran great at medium to low settings, averaging 97.3FPS, max of 180FPS and 1% lows
of 55FPS.
Sweet.
I tried running Black Ops 3 to get a general idea of Call of Duty performance, but there
weren’t many matches to get into and even on lower than 100% resolution scaling and
low, I found it to be too unresponsive to be playable.
Lastly, good ol’ Minecraft.
1080p, mostly higher settings turned on with Optifine, we averaged 126FPS and hit a max
of 280.7FPS.
However, 1% and .1% lows are under single digits.
There were many bits where it was loading new chunks where it just almost completely
stopped.
This may be due to the fact that while gaming the CPU is just taxed to 100% nonstop and
streaming all that data in was too much, but core gameplay was fluid.
If you’re willing to lock to 60fps max in the settings, it ruins great and these issues
are gone, however.
And these may not even be optimized Optifine settings.
It’s been a long time since I’ve touched this… when did they add bunnies to the game?!
Running some synthetics real fast, 3DMark Sky Diver got a score of 8,843.
Cloud Gate got 11,385 and Fire Strike Ultra was a slideshow.
I was actually VERY impressed with the performance of this little Ryzen APU.
The APUs have come a long way since the one I did a terrible video on in 2012 - though
not any worse than the video Linus did at the time - which seemingly got me blacklisted
by AMD - and they can definitely pack a gaming punch.
But at $100….
You can buy an entire older system for $100 and I have a rig that cost half of the price
of this one and required much less work that competes, performance wise.
BUT if you’re looking to do your first build, build yourself in general, or just want to
buy new and are on a low budget, I can definitely recommend the Ryzen 2200G for light 1080p
gaming, a home theater PC, or even a beefy family PC with some light gaming.
In future videos I’ll do that comparison I keep teasing, as well as the RAM tests I
mentioned earlier.
Got any more tests to request?
Comment below!
Until then, thanks for watching.
Hit the like button if you enjoyed, subscribe for more awesome tech content, and I’ll
see you in the next one.
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