Cheap computer gaming? There is a ray of hope! (updated)

Of course, don’t count on ultra-quality graphics, and forget about high resolution. He will go? If so, click!

AMD's brand new desktop APU series, Raven Ridge, will launch next week. The new series continues the previous tradition, ie it has received an integrated graphics chip with quite pleasant parameters. However, the situation is special in that the company has an amazingly good processor in the person of Zen architecture, which we certainly could not say about its predecessors. The tailwind from the other side is also quite strong; the evolution of video cards has slowed noticeably in recent times, allowing Raven Ridge’s Vega IGP to get closer to desktop solutions than before, while being even more advanced in terms of technical know-how than the Polaris generation. I guess you’ve already figured out that this will be the soul of our super-cheap compilation.

He is that certain ray of hope.

On the darker side of the coin is practically only memory. We’ve gotten used to the fact that stronger IGPs are sensitive to available bandwidth - it won’t be any different now. So the cost of the platform will be raised somewhat by the fact that we need to train the memory clock as high as possible. Fortunately, AMD has set very aggressive pricing for its newcomers, so maybe it can offset that disadvantage. One more thing to talk about. Although the press has practically “uniformly” picked up the stronger model, we still believe that the other competitor is significantly more remarkable; better value for money and still fair performance.

The Ryzen 3 2200G Zen cores tick at a slightly slower pace than the larger model, or skip Hyper-Threading, and its speed is reminiscent of older Core i5 CPUs - somewhere around the Ivy Bridge generation. It’s still a pretty decent production even if it’s not the speed of light, and let’s not forget we’re talking about a $ 99 product! From this point of view, there is no particular concern, let us now look over to the other side. Of course, at the moment we can't say exactly what the Vega GPU is capable of, but some leaked measurements (3D Mark 11 GPU points) provide a clue.

Luckily, AMD has already released a couple of crumbs of information that could be pinched in the image below. We strongly recommend the first name to your attention!

Based on the numbers, it looks like the Ryzen 3 2200G will not drastically lag behind the GeForce GT 1030, however, the big brother doesn't mean any other dimension either - by definition, AMD had to break the two products somewhat apart. Here comes an opportunity that the company itself has unveiled and that most users are already familiar with: overdrive.

AMD, of course, demonstrated the thing on the more expensive Ryzen, but the two APUs are built on the same chip, so the more modest type won’t fail in this area either. As you can see, the Vega IGP is very grateful for the overspeed, it is even conceivable that the Ryzen 5 2400G can be pinched. We also rely on the fact that the GPU featuring the 704 shader can obviously be more suffocated by the still tight memory bandwidth than the weaker competitor.

After the above, we calculate in broad outlines how much a configuration based on Raven Ridge can come from. Of course, the price of Ryzen is in the divination category, but it should be here in order of magnitude.

We think this is a pretty friendly amount for a computer today that is far from suitable for office use. We’re not saying that you’ll be able to run new titles in high quality with this compilation, but we’d bet you’ll come across values ​​that can be played (in the wrong case) at a low level - at least in the vast majority of cases. Think about how big this is when a mid-range GeForce GTX 1060 costs pretty much as much as the grand total here. A used configuration would certainly provide more steel performance for the same amount, but this is obviously not a track for everyone.

HotHardware has already begun testing.

We will also take a closer look at the two newcomers next week.