So my eight-year-old wants a desktop PC. He's kind of a budding gamer, but right now, he almost exclusively plays Roblox on his iPad and will definitely carry this over to the PC. As he gets older, he may want to graduate to more demanding titles. On the other hand, he may also get bored with it and stick with consoles and mobile gaming.
I don't want to spend a ton on a PC for a very young child who may not take to PC gaming seriously, but I also want to get something that might be upgradeable as he grows if he wants to join the PC master race.
In my research, I came across this.
The recommendation I saw in PCMag that led me to the PC above suggested that the integrated graphics with the Ryzen 5 5600G could serve as a starting point for low level gaming and allow me to spend on a GPU card later if it's justified. The price and functionality appear to offer exactly the path I want.
I've seen other, more expensive versions of this pre-built, and I've also looked at the possibility of building it myself. I like this particular chip because it's only a generation or so back and it still appears to be well-regarded by the community. If I went with one of the cheap old workstation conversions, I'd be limited by proprietary hardware and fewer options--a lot of the stuff out there, especially Intel stuff, is very old and won't be able to run Windows 11 when it becomes necessary. What I'm finding suggests this path could see us through quite a few years to come and allow us to upgrade as needed.
Am I barking up the wrong tree here, or does this seem like it could work the way I want?
UPDATE: I've decided to buy the pre built deal I found with the 6500G. I would like to go to a fancier build, but the price of the AM5 chips and motherboards takes them off of the table for me right now. I think what I'm getting will be good enough as some of you have said.
Thanks to everyone for your help! If y'all are interested, I'll post an update when I get it.
Forgot to mention to not forget to go into the BIOS first thing. These boutique builders really suck at the configuration side of things and often don't set things up, if at all so you'll be stuck at literal default settings including setting the RAM up with docp leaving you with slow RAM settings.
Thanks for the heads up. I'm learning a lot about modern PC's from my research, and this tracks with what I've been learning--it's cool to realize I understand what you're talking about. I have been enjoying this more than I expected. I'm seriously considering starting to look for old PC's to play with for myself and maybe build a new one some day.
It should let me set the RAM to the highest speed it will handle, right? If I'm remembering right, that ought to be around 3200 or 3600 MHz for DDR 4, right?
Any other BIOS settings I should check when I fire it up?
Yeah man, I use the 5600G for a jellyfin server for hardware transcoding so my setup of course is going to be a little different than yours but generally I'd turn off the CSM, turn on SAM if it's there, go into the NB configuration, probably in the advanced tab somewhere and up the frame buffer size to a 4GB for the iGPU to use.
Might want look at the overclocking it too just a bit, plenty of guides out there but it does look like you have a stock cooler there, which isn't great, so you overclock to squeeze just that bit more performance out there, you should look for a new cooler, this ID-COOLING SE-214-XT caught my eye for my system, except the fan cause who needs RGB for a server, for 17 bucks and was reviewed really well by a lot of places including gamers nexus. Buy yourself a tube of arctic silver or mx4 for another 7 dollars and I'd think you'd be set for a little gaming rig for your kid and a nice re-introduction to building a pc for you.
Honestly though, I think you can get away with just bumping up the igpu just a smidge with the stock cooler and you'd be fine if you don't want to spend the extra cash on a "good enough" build.
Hmm... I'd check the mobo manual and see what they have for POST information, that might give you some insight into what could be up just in case something in the machine isn't seated right or something. Known to happen with pre-builts.
I'd try booting into safe mode (hit f8 repeatedly) first and see if it can boot, I'm familiar with windows being finicky with changes.
Baring that, maybe something in bios got screwy so I'd do a reset to default settings if you can get to the bios, or if not I'd cmos reset either with a jumper on the mobo or just take the battery out for a few seconds, re-boot and see if it'll start up. If that works then I'd make one change at a time in the bios.
Fun stuff, sorry to hear your machine you bought isn't working.
Thanks, bro. You've been a help through the whole ordeal. I did get it working by doing a clean reset. It took forever. Once I got Windows working, I went back and enabled xmp profile 1. I'm not brave enough to try anything else right now 😂
Overall, aside from the windows issue, I'm happy with it. The SSD is a Patriot P300, which is apparently okay but no frills. The motherboard is an MSI B450M-Pro Max II--which is limited to two slots for RAM, but I was expecting that since it was advertised as machine at 64 GB. The RAM is Patriot Viper of some variety at 3600 MHz. The case and power supply appear to be MSI, as well.
The CPU appears to be the reported Ryzen 5 5600G.
A lot of the components are not top tier, but it does appear to have room for upgrades within reason as prices drop.
I was surprised by the packaging, btw. There was a shipping box, then a box within that with a few components like power cord, keyboard and mouse, and a USB wireless adapter separated from the final box containing the actual PC, with bubble wrap strategically placed throughout.
Also, the cables are all neatly managed.
I wonder if the OS issue was a bad install or something I did. It's fully activated with the reset, so they did at least have a valid key. I saw some indications that UEFI settings or secure boot settings may have an effect. I don't know.
One last question: is it worth it to download the MSI utility software? I don't want to add bloatware, but if it does have useful features so I don't have to boot to bios for overclocking or fiddling with fans, RAM, or whatever else, that might be nice. I just don't know.
Thanks again for your input. I feel like I need you to mail me an invoice 😁
No worries man, always glad to help out a fellow gamer and gamers to be. It'd still suggest going in and play with the vram settings to get that up to the 4gb or your igpu will be starved for resources and her you now know how to fix it if it goes bad again.
As for MSI afterburner, I don't think you'll get much out of it with the the igpu most everything there is handled in the BIOS, so I think you'd be okay skipping it.
Glad you got it working!
The setting for the IGPU is on some sort of dynamic setting that indicates it will scale as needed, up to 4 GB and beyond, so I left it. If forcing a value is better, I can absolutely do that. Do you think I still need to set a value?
So this was a long, long time ago when I had a media PC with an old laptop AMD APU and it just seemed to do a little better if I allocate a bit more to it right away vs letting it manage things on the fly. But maybe things have gotten better so just try and play around if you feel like it. Good luck!