As the title says, I'll be building one to replace a friend's box for him quite soon. Whatever ends up inside it will have an AMD processor, a full sized ATX MB, a compatible display card with both HDMI & VGA outputs, plenty of RAM and a suitable PSU. I haven't done any deep searching yet as my latest h/w is built on a Gigabyte TA-970 'Ultra Dependable' MB with an AMD 6-core CPU, 8GB RAM & the Nvidia Geforce 8400GS video card - which is all enough for my needs. Frankly I do not even know how many cores are the current norm as its been a while since I looked... Any suggestions ?? Thanks for any helpful replies !!
Beware of the Ryzen chips, bug ridden nightmare. My year old PC is sat in the corner gathering dust due to it either crashing/freezing or green screening. Windows and Linux users are all having similar issues. I have the one of the very first Ryzen processors, back of the queue for any support. Going to buy a refurb Dell i5/i7 as soon as the funds are available.
Thanks for that info Kim100 !! I posted my query at another place as well and it amuses me greatly to see someone recommending a Ryzen based system with all sorts of hot/fast baloney for general office uses - calling it 'mid-range'. All that sort of nonsense serves to do is to push me right to what I know FOR SURE that works well and for long time periods.
My Ryzen PC can run well for weeks or months, very fast for the money but along would come a Windows update followed by a driver update that would destabilize the machine. Bios upgrade recommended, this worked sometimes but now these upgrades are not available for my processor, its too old [how long have they been out, two years or so?] AMD are now trying to bodge up some sort of fix with new chipset drivers, its not worked for me, freezing issues for months now. PC not used for Gaming Fresh install of Windows Tried another [2] HDD, again with fresh installs Latest drivers applied each time Each HDD checked for errors Only Keyboard & Mouse fitted RAM re-seated and all connectors CMOS reset BIOS Updated [To latest permitted release] Power Plan set to High Performance Same problem evident at the end of windows set up I did try MX Linux on the PC briefly and it did seem OK but I need it to run Windows. I have wasted two days of my life this week before swapping it for an old PC from the back of a cupboard. The old PC wont run Windows, far too slow but I am running MX Linux on it at the minute and its very smooth. The very latest Ryzen's may be fine but having had my finger burnt once it will be some time before I go there again. Good luck with the new PC.
MX Linux ISO is 1.5gb. My Ryzen PC has been running MX for the last two days without any issues. I installed MX using the standard basic method, apparently Systemd is optional, as the PC is running OK I am not going to alter anything, I haven't looked into how you make the choice between installing Systemd and not but from what I have read it does add functionality to the system. The Ryzen PC is still under warranty, the company have advised me to return it for testing as it is intended and expected to run Windows 10, it could be that it is faulty but is coping with a less demanding OS. MX does handle NTFS without any modifications or additional software which is one bonus. The only problem I had was the PC freezing when I plugged in an external drive, this turned out to be a well known issue with wireless keyboard/mouse combos, as soon as I went wired it worked fine.