My new Media center Build. Waffle.

[keith with the teef]

A up lads. Just build me a new media center PC consisting of.

1 x
Masterwatt Lite V2 400w White 80+

1 x
AMD Athlon 200GE 3.2GHz Processor

1 x
MSI A320M PRO-VH PLUS socket AM4 DDR4 m-ATX Motherboard

1 x
Adata XPG GAMMIX D10 DDR4 4GB 2400MHz Memory

1 x
AvP Viper Mini Tower Black USB 3.0 case

Now, the new build took place because my old phenom 2 lost compatabiility with my fancy sound card. Strangley enough I cannot find anything wrong with my phenom 2 set up. It just lost compatability with my sound card.

Now, the new build is windows 10 only. What a Barstoll. I did not want to be beat and so tried a ps2 key board to get w7 on it. But no. MSI go on to say that the board supports other OS, Yeah bigs will fly.

So got me a 10 pro 64 e-bay for a few quid. Ty Dave for the heads up on that some time ago.

Got it running installed driver MSI disc put my sound card in and it did now work, OMFG.

Strange the bios has a feature to show if slots are populated and it showed no.

pooped card? tried it in my gaming rig and it sprang into life.

Bios then. went to msi site got me latest bios and made a pen drive bootable.

Extracted bios to pen insrted booted and not recognised.

Truns out that bios was the rogue overcloking ones, which clearly do not work on the 320 board.

So go some slightly older ones and yup flashed the bios this time.

Popped the sound card in and Bingo.

Then tried to play music and film and the PC was crashing all over the place.

Must be MSI drivers, so went to AMD and sorted with new drivers. Now solid as a rock.

Loving my new media center build. 35watt SOC of £50 astonishing.

The performance is very similar if I set the penom2 to 3.2GHz on cine bench.

The SOC 3D is of 2004 out put. which means I can run Doom 3 and NFS undergorund2 at 60fps. The must have card for both games in 2004 was the 6800 ultra@ £180.

I digress.

The new machiine plays music and blu rays perfectly and the £20 case is nutsly good. ?

Just have to e-bay my phenom 2 hardware now.

 

[Dave Rice]

Interesting. Intel’s prices have got silly with Pentium CPUs basically £100 this could be a good alternative with the Ryzen 3 1200 in the i3 slot.

TBH I rarely build these days, especially with cracking refurbs so easily available. I see E-Buyer have a AMD Athlon 200Ge 3.2Ghz, 8GB DDR4 + 240GB SSD, No Operating System (£20 W10 Pro + Office 2016 on E-Bay) and a 3 Year Manufacturer Warranty for £250.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I do not trust MoBo manufacturers driver disks at the best of times. My usual tactic is to build a system and then do the following:

See if I can install Windows on it (even if I plan to use something else later). If that works and I can get on the internet I then run Windows update. If device manager is still showing problem devices then I go to the manufacturers web sites for the latest drivers. Then I update drivers for working devices starting with the graphics card.

Only if the above fails at stage one will I insert the MoBo disk.

If I am keeping the Windows instal I will have a look at the MoBo disk later because sometimes they surprise me by sticking some usefull stuff on there.

[keith with the teef]

@ WOF: to right. 🙂

@ Davey ravey gravey: Damn thats cheap. My base machine £170 minus ssd, spinner, blu ray drive. 🙂

 

[The Duke]

Given that pc hardware as been really powerful since the original core I dropped anything above gen 1 is still a great pc. So there is so many referb routes today.

[keith with the teef]

Guru 3D have a review up.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-athlon-200ge-review,1.html

In some ways they have undersold the chip some what. Man, for those who know what to target the chip at then its a diamond in the ruff.

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