The upgrade path: how to get the most bang for your buck
There are more than one ways to catch a hare, and the same applies to a good cruncher.
One way is to start with a decent mobo, with lots of room for future improvement.
I choose the Asrock A320M Pro4 because it will hold a future 8c/16t Ryzen 7, it has four RAM slots and two M.2 slots (one 'only' SATA3 however), plus decent VRM cooling.
On top of that, is is relatively cheap too.
I choose an A12-9800E as a start CPU/APU, because
- It had four cores (or two 'Excavator' modules to be more precise),
- It has a mere 35 Watt tdp,
- It had the best IGP AM4 APUs offered (at the time of purchase),
- It was relatively cheap (as in about 100 Euro's).
The idea is to upgrade the CPU first (with as added benefit that my DDR4 RAM will run at a higher speed too, 2400MHz instead of 2133MHz), and to buy an Asrock AB350M Pro4 later.
Virtually the same board, but with a better chipset. Then another CPU upgrade, followed by an Asrock B450M Pro4 purchase.
The Ryzen 5 2400G and 1500X look like potential candidates for the next upgrades, eventually pushing out my FM1 A8 APUs.
A12-9800E ain't all that bad (though Excavator is not Zen), rumours are that Athlon 200GE will cost significantly less though ($55-$65) In fact the A12's are about the same price as Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 3 2200GE:
Type |
Model |
Cores |
Threads |
Speed |
L1 Cache
in KB |
L2 Cache
in KB |
L3 Cache
in MB |
Tdp
in Watt |
PCIe
lanes |
GPU |
A12 |
9800E |
4 |
4 |
3100 |
2x 96 KB instruction
4x 32 KB data |
2x 1024 |
- |
35 |
? |
R7
671-922 GFLOP |
A12 |
9800 |
4 |
4 |
3800 |
2x 96 KB instruction
4x 32 KB data |
2x 1024 |
- |
65 |
? |
R7
819-1135 GFLOP |
Athlon |
200GE |
2 |
4 |
3200 |
2x 64 KB instruction
2x 32 KB data |
2x 512 |
4 |
35 |
? |
Vega 3
384 GFLOP |
Ryzen 3 |
2200GE |
4 |
4 |
3200 |
4x 64 KB instruction
4x 32 KB data |
4x 512 |
4 |
35 |
? |
RX Vega 8
1126 GFLOP |