Patricia’s machine has been acting up for months, dying unexpectedly. I tried replacing CPU, memory, and power supply. Also cleaned the CPU heat sink. But to no avail, and now it shuts down almost immediately after boot. So it’s probably the motherboard.
And of course you can’t buy new FM-2 mobos any more, so it means new processor and memory as well, plus a graphics card, because the Ryzen doesn’t support on-board integrated graphics. So we just had to lay out about $600 for an upgrade, but it will be a much better machine, with a Ryzen 5 3600X (same as mine) and 32G of RAM in a single stick (upgradable to 128G). It will also be able to support multiple monitors. Unfortunately, it won’t be here before Tuesday.
[Sunday-morning update]
Wow, time flies. I just realized from an old blog post that her mobo was five years old.
“Ryzen doesn’t support on-board integrated graphics”
There are Ryzen APUs but they have lower core counts: the 3200G (4C4T) and 3400G (4C8T).
Probably not worth it. Those cost slightly more but benchmark at only half the speed of what he has.
Yes, the PCIe-2 2G graphics card was only sixty bucks, and will support three concurrent monitors.
Rand, what motherboard and video card did you get? $600 seems a bit steep.
MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus. It was $170, but about as low-cost as you can go and still get X570. I wanted her to have expansion capability going forward. The processor was $205, and the 32G stick was a Ripjaws, for $150. So that’s $525, plus CA tax, plus $60 for the card. A little over $600 total. She wanted to just buy a new computer, but I showed her how much less she’d get for the money if she did that, particularly considering the machine has a fairly recent 750 watt supply, and a nice gaming case.
If she ever decides to get more serious about gaming or video, she can always upgrade the card; the board can handle PCIe4.
Interestingly, I see now that that board is out of stock. But hopefully we got the last one, because it’s supposed to be being shipped.
Well, it depends on what she’s doing. 4C4T is fine for web browsing and office stuff, and would’ve saved having to buy a video card. But if she wants more power for video editing or anything that needs it, yeah. (Plus, Rand mentions below he got her a cheap card, so the potential savings aren’t really there.)
I had a 2200G running Linux and it was pretty decent, as I said in my previous post, for light use.
I’m still playing games on a PC I built in 2012, with a GPU from 2017; shows how much progress has slowed in the last decade that such a thing is actually possible. However, it’s also started randomly shutting down for no apparent reason, so I’ll likely be getting a new Ryzen PC later this year to replace it.
It’s nice to see that AMD have finally kicked Intel in the butt and stopped them just shipping another four-core CPU that runs slightly faster than the last one every year.