2018 Beginner's gaming rig build advice

[phitzbear]

Good evening! I've been out of the PC building scene for quite some time (approximately 10 yrs or so). Recently my wife expressed a desire to have a decent budget gaming PC that she can play Sims 4 and a few other indie titles on. She gave me a budget of $400-$500. I know the games she plays aren't terribly hard on GPU's. My question is this. I've been researching my options and have stumbled across several articles promoting AMD's new line of APU Ryzen processors that have pretty robust integrated graphics. What would you guys suggest? I've looked around at some builds on Ebay as well and for about the same price point I could probably land a system running an i3 processor, 8gb of ram, and an Nvidia GTX 1050 GPU. What are the pros and cons of each setup and which one would offer the best upgradability going forward. She's been gaming on a MacBook Pro from 2012 that has an early generation i7 processor, so it's time for an upgrade. Thanks for the help guys!

 

[k19_window_maker]

if you are intending to build a ryzen PC it is perhaps wiser to wait for the new ryzen 2 .

 

[camieabz]

Running an APU here and it's not for serious gaming. However, the 2400g APU should have gfx comparable to a GT 1030 (about 3x my own APU's gfx). It's a very affordable way to get a decent all rounder system, as long as you don't want serious gaming. The CPU itself is comparable to a Ryzen 5 1400.

APUs depend on system RAM, so if 8GB is installed you'll have to give up some of it for gfx in the BIOS, so 8GB becomes 6GB of system RAM if you allocate 2GB to gfx. Recommend the fastest RAM that the mobo / CPU will work with, because the gfx needs all the speed it can get.

Some motherboards might need a BIOS update to run with the new APUs, so check with supplier first or go down the route of possibly having to get a 'boot kit' solution.

Just a guess spec:

2400g APU
G.Skill or Corsair 8GB DDR4-3200
Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD

That's been my general spec if I decide to upgrade to another APU system in the future, although, I'd be looking at 16GB and a 960 Evo M.2 solution. Your budget won't allow for that. Even without an M.2 solution, it should be a pretty fast system for a low-budget.

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The GTX 1050 will be about double the 2400g in gfx terms (benchmark score), and also consider the 1050 Ti, as it's price difference isn't massive, but you'll get double the gfx memory.