I have an AM4 based desktop with the following current configuration:
- Ryzen 2200G CPU
- 8 x 2 DDR4 3000 MHz RAM
- RX 7600 GPU
- Gigabyte B450M D3SH motherboard
- Corsair RM550 PSU
- 1 GB M2 NVME disk
- 2 HDDs - 1 mirroring the NVME and the other as data drive
- Acer FullHD flat panel with FreeSync
Goals are casual gaming at 1080p or slightly lower resolution, target fps 30+
Please give me suggestions for:
- Best AM4 CPU available now (a) with no integrated graphics (b) with integrated graphics.
- How would you rate Ryzen 5700G for this setup? It is available and budget friendly.
- Can I buy 3200 MHz RAM to fill the 2 vacant RAM slots in my motherboard so that I can continue to get dual channel benefit? 3000 MHz RAM seems to be no longer available from the brand/locally.
- 1 GB SATA SSD for cheap purely to store game installations (Crucial BX) but there is no spare SATA port in the motherboard, is there a way to connect 2 HDDs to same SATA port?
EDIT 1: I think there are 3 HDDs and 1 DVD drive occupying all 4 motherboard SATA ports. I erred in the post above earlier.
Integrated graphics is mainly as a backup plan for when discrete GPU conks off.
Presently the 2 sticks of RAM although of same brand and specification, were bought a month or two apart. So not sure if they are working as intended. How to confirm if they are working in dual channel mode or not?
If the dimms are in the correct slots, they should be in dual channel. I belive cpuz shows memory information. I did some more reading on mixing memory and I remembered things a little off. The rule of thumb to not mix kits only applies to if you’re going for peak performance, but otherwise if you match speeds and timings it should work fine but you’ll loose the top 0.5% of performance, which is margin of error. If you start mixing timings and speeds, it will all run at the lower speeds if it works,but you run the risk of incompatibility, which generally shouldn’t be a problem, but you could get unlucky, so taking that risk is entirely up to you.
The 5700G is decent overall, using my old 5600G as comparison. It’s an excellent option for integrated graphics gaming, but their underlying architecture borrows chips from the 3000 series and adds some modern extras. It can’t support PCIe4, so you’ll be hard limited by that lack of support, should you upgrade your motherboard up a generation in the future.
However, since your current one doesn’t have PCIe4 anyway, perhaps the 5700G could be a good option until you upgrade the motherboard (at which point, you should probably move on from AM4/Zen3 anyway).
Yes, buying a brand new AM4 setup would be a dead end choice. Because I already have these AM4 things, I wanted to just upgrade.
Will changing the CPU cause me to lose my Windows license? I use only local account. And end of road for Win 10 is also another reason to choose a new CPU.
I don’t think so, but I don’t know for certain if the Windows license will check for hardware in a SecureBoot fashion. I linked my license with a MS account to facilitate easy upgrades and reinstalls.
Your license shouldn’t care what hardware is installed, though, and if you’re upgrading from AMD to AMD, Windows should be able to handle that virtually seamlessly. The only thing you want to make sure of is that your BIOS version supports whatever processor you choose.