AMD for Home / Office PC

[Dave Rice]

Since Keef’s post on his Athlon 200GE / A320 woes I’ve built 8 Home / Office PCs all with low end AMD CPUs. Previously they would have been dual core Pentiums, I’ve not had to build one since they’ve started including HTT on the Pentiums.

I’ve deliberately tried both the 200GE and Ryzen 2200G on A320 and B450 motherboards with 8GB ram and 240GB M2 SATA SSDs. All Office PCs I build are encrypted with Bitlocker, so W10 Pro is the o/s. So my chief requirement for their mobos has been the inclusion of a TPM header and the availability of the module. This means I’ve tried MSI, AS-Rock and Gigabyte motherboards but not ASUS as even the Prime series don’t support TPM.

All the motherboards have their own little foibles, especially when it comes to the BIOS/ UEFI, but no show stoppers and they’ve all worked flawlessly with default settings. Compatibility of CPU, ram and M2 drives hasn’t been an issue. They all come with utilities to upgrade the UEFI from within Windows and to boot to the UEFI settings, but Gigabyte has the most comprehensive suite including useful business tools like user management and USB blocking by device class. The B450 boards come with USB fast charge apps.

Of course the SSD makes a huge contribution, but the Athlon 200GE has enough grunt for this sort of machine. However at a mere £40 more the 2200G has to be the choice for all but the most budget stretched. The A320M motherboards are more than capable, the B450M are only £20ish more but for this class of PC it’s hard to justify. It looks like Keefs woes were down to the mega sound card / A320M combo so something to bear in mind if you need more than the onboard peripherals.

The Vega graphics nick 2GB of system ram so 8GB is a must but that’s more than enough. Your average office documents open almost instantaneously and boot times are 15 seconds. Amazing for a budget machine.

My default spec is now a Gigabyte A320M-S2H, Gigabyte GC-TPM, Ryzen 3 2200G, 1x 8GB DDR4, WD Green 240GB M.2-2280, Aero Cool CS100 MATX Tower Case & Integrator 400W 80+ PSU, Logitech MK270 Wireless Combo Keyboard and Mouse Set. £290 at CCL Online + £20 for W10 Pro and O2016 from E-Bay. All the other utility software is free from Ninite. AV is usually Kaspersky.

Goodbye Intel.

[keith with the teef]

The 320 board has saved you as few bob for the 2200g. But I investigated and the 200GE out peforms a phenom 2 on all cores all threads at 3.20 GHz and the on board GFX beat yeh old 6800GT.

It would seem the compatability problem with my sound card was down to powercolor: Intel tested only?

Yes, gigabyte mobo’s R always better. IMO.

[Dave Rice]

For the PCs I’ve built the 320 mobos are fine,the 450 doesn’t add enough for £20. Spending it on a something else** may improve real customer satisfaction. However for anything involving gaming or “design”, which may get serious later on if not right now, the 450 should be where you start and should probably be looking higher. Indeed it’ll be a different CPU and probably everything else.

Back in the sector of what’s on the mobo is going to be OK until it dies, I agree the 200GE is absolutely amazing for £50 or even £100 (as the Pentiums are now). But the 2200G just adds that extra zippiness and feeling of something in reserve.

**some budget became available in the charity I look after to be spend on the office PCs (everything usually goes to the kids and I’ve been doing a cuban mechanic job on the office PCs for the last 5 years+). So I asked them what “IT thing” would make the most difference to them? A gas arm for the monitors to free up desk space for the paper work and enable them to turn the screen around to show the kids things without them looking over their shoulders. £30 for these and if I’d needed to sacrifice the 2200G for the 200GE I would have.

Latest build, I’ve worked out how to tidy up the top PSU case ?

[keith with the teef]

Goodly build. As neat as. Yes, those arms look brill.

Thats gotta be the neatest you have ever done. Nice cable control case.

So. This time around with the gigabyte board you can get the ram in slot one. Just. 🙂

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