Building my Ryzen rig

Hello dear steemians and thank you for following me and reading my content, as well as maybe also watched my videos :)

Today however, I want to start using my Steem account to write about some other things that are important to me. Some might be comedic in tone, whilsts others like this one, will be more in the blog-type random information department.

And in the spirit of Shadowrun September, I think I’ll start talking about computers.

Recently I managed to finally build myself a current/modern computer. In case you’ve already read my Fallout 4 article, I mention my then-rig. For the past 3 years I’ve been using a 17-inch Medion laptop to do everything, from surfing the web and writing articles, to playing games, recording audio and editing my videos.

Suffice to say, both video recording and video editing are quite sluggish when you’re limited to a dual-core processor and a definitely non-gaming minded mobile graphics card. This also limited the scope of gaming that I could engage in, since I couldn’t really run pretty much any sort of modern 3D-intensive game out there.

This wasn’t a problem per se, since I prefer playing older and indie games anyway, but on occasion there is the odd modern title that I want to play - such as Tyranny or Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds.

Then in terms of video editing - I was limited to recording video in smaller resolutions and then outputting them to 720p max - because the rendering times would be insanely large. For a simple video of about 10 minutes, that only implied cuts and basic transitions, my laptop would need around 45 minutes to render.

During this time it would heat up quite a bit and I couldn’t use it for anything else.

All of these being said, the laptop has served me very well, these three years including one and a half years of schoolwork so I am not ungrateful for having had it to start with. And it will still serve me well for hopefully years-to-come on trips and whenever I’ll need to leave my house and also have some computing power with me.

But now onto the new rig: my Ryzen 5 rig.

Until spring of this year I wasn’t sure I could actually afford a new computer because I had made my old budget with Intel processors in mind.

But then came April and the release of AMD’s Ryzen 5 series of fresh processors. Sporting Intel i5-like capabilities but at considerably lower prices, it meant that I could maybe get a new computer sooner rather than later.

So with the help of a friend - who had done some super fresh research into new computer components because he was looking to upgrade his as well - he suggested a pretty solid editing/gaming rig loadout, with the accent being on the content creation aspect.

What AMD did incredibly well with their Ryzen range is that they saw a gap in the market and they attacked it hard. They saw the large number of Internet content creators out there - be they game streamers or video makers - such as myself - and noticed that Intel’s offering was pretty much non-existent. If you wanted anything more than 4 cores - and you do - you’d have to pay through your nose.

And here comes the Ryzen 5 1600 series. A 6-core segment of processors ideal for both running current games more than decently - because honestly, that’s more of the GPUs domain anyway - as well as more-than fast video rendering speeds. Not only that, but it was at a serious discount than the equivalent Intel offering, so once the Ryzen 5 was launched I re-did my calculation and saw that a new rig was more achievable than I had thought.

So here are my current rig specs:

Ryzen 5 1600
MSI GeForce GTX 1060 3GB Aero ITX OC
Asus Prime B350-Plus
Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4-2666 8GB
SanDisk SSD Plus 120 GB SATA III
Corsair VS650 PSU
WD Desktop Blue 1 TB
Corsair Carbide 100R Window Edition

What I’ve learned

I haven’t built a computer in a long-ass time. The last time I built one was around ten years ago and even though I’ve been keeping abreast with the major changes in technology and whatnot I was not aware that nowadays, pretty much every motherboard producer has their own Qualified Vendor Lists for RAM.

Well, I found out the hard way because I had purchased a different type of RAM initially, which would simply not work with the motherboard, which lead to me troubleshooting all of the components for the better part of a day.

Finally I narrowed it down to the RAM and managed to test this conclusion with some RAM that was on the QVL. I got to finally see my computer work. So I had to purchase a new set of RAM that was from the QVL list. Which I did, and everything’s been working quite well ever since.

Choosing the Ryzen 5 1600 over the 1600X

Purchasing the CPU was by far the most important factor when planning out this rig. I was looking for as many cores as I could buy within my price range, since video editing and especially video rendering is a very multi-core heavy process. Basically the more cores, the faster you render.

Which it is. Not only can I render things 3 to 4 times faster than I used to with my 2-core laptop - granted, the much stronger graphics card also helps thanks to the huge number of CUDA cores - but now I can also surf the web, watch HD 1080p videos and use Photoshop, while my next video renders in the background.

This is an incredible thing considering the fact that I used to start rendering a video before I went to bed, so that I would not be practically locked-out of using the laptop while it was rendering. Which is what normally would happen.

The choice between the 1600 and 1600x was quite simple, because the 1600 comes bundled with a cooling solution - one that is actually quite good - for less money, and the various clock differences between the 1600 and 1600x are only down to the silicon lottery.

Testing my Ryzen 5 with AIDA 64 Extreme, at 100% for ten minutes - which rest assured, no real-world application will ever get your CPU anywhere close to 100% - the temperature stabilized at 58 Celsius.

Though you have to keep in mind that I live in Denmark so my overall temperature will most likely be slightly lower than yours, and that helps since the air that is circulating through the computer is itself cooler.

So if you’re to take anything away from reading this, here’s the main things:

1. AMD’s Ryzen line is extremely well suited for Internet content creators who also like to game and stream games.

2. Always make sure to buy RAM from your motherboard’s Qualified Vendors List.

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