Inexpensive 1080 Linux gaming PC

[ChadD]

So for xmas this year I built my teen daughter a new PC. Mainly we wanted her to be able to play with her digital pics from her Canon Rebal dslr (nothing fancy still dealing with big raw files the under powered little HP laptop she has wasn't really enough) Her grand parents bought her a new Canon photo printer this year as well. (They bought her the camera last year). Anyway after considering picking her up a new laptop, the wife and I decided instead perhaps a basic low ball desktop would make more sense.

Anyway I hit a pretty tight budget. Building her a basic little box.
AMD Ryzen 3 2200g
Asus Prime a320-k board. (I know it doesn't overclock had no intention of overclocking anything and its a decent board
8GB basic Micron DDR4 2400
adata su800 256gb SSD (board has a m.2 but got a nice deal on a su800)
Corsair CX450
Used an old case I had around.
Hit right around 400 bucks Canadian (aprox 300 US). Which seemed reasonable to us, considering a new laptop in that price range wouldn't have been better then the 3-4 year old low end HP she's been using.

Anyway she put it together (ok not much to do really still it was her first lol) She installed Manjaro in about 10 min... and spent way to long downloading wallpapers. (she is a teenager) But ya she got things updated and started grabbing software. (she has been using manjaro for about a year or so on a ancient intel core machine)

Anyway to get to the point of the thread. She logged into my steam account to grab a few games. She mostly plays games like bastion, transistor, Dust and torchlight so she installed that stuff. Of course they all run silky smooth maxed out at 1080. She plugged her machine into an older 46" sharp TV I had around. (She claimed it as her netflix screen long ago) Oh not that it matters to much but she dug out an older Pioneer reciever I had around that's got hdmi pass through on it. So she has a couple of my old hitachi floor speakers from the 80s (they where never that expensive but ya she can drive us insane now with teenage girl spotify lists)

To see what the little Vega 8 could do though we installed a few Staple games. (we'll have to do some more proton testing yet)
Borderlands 2 1080p high everything minus ambient occlusion was a nice stable 65-75 fps
Bioshock Inf 1080p high again without AO is pretty steady 50-70 fps it dips down to around 50 but mostly runs just under 60
Tomb Raider 1080p high again 60-70 fps
Fallout New Vegas this one runs via proton. 1080 high settings rock solid 60. In fact I assumed I had Vsync on... confirmed it was off and still rock solid 60. Its almost odd game seems to sit at 60. Not sure if its a proton thing or the FPS is reporting wrong or what. (although it does dip on load screens so it seems to be working fine)

Only other proton games she is running are not really worth reporting. The Lego games run great via proton again high at 1080 60fps territory... and Castle Crashers runs great. lol

Oh she also plugged her Asus Bluetooth adapter in and has been using her PS3 controllers with no issue. Next weekend I think we'll dig the old wii controllers out of the closet and see if we can't get some Dolphin going. Playing the marios and zeldas at 1080p might be fun if the Vega8 can handle it.

I uploaded a few pics. Running Gallium_HUD its a little more useful the the built in steam fps overlay. Anyway just thought I would post. I know you can throw the same machine together and run windows. Just thought I would post how smooth my daughters cheapo pc build is handling some basic lite type 1080p gaming. Haven't really had to give up to much. Yes you can't really flip some of the nice post processing stuff on, but high textures and detail settings are mostly fine. Also someone is going to mention it yes I didn't flip FXAA in borderlands 2, if I do the vega8 drops about 5-10 fps which isn't bad it is running in the 70s. Probably will turn it on next time we fire it up. (and before anyone is too brutal remember 300 bucks all in basically.... total system price was less then most of us spend on mid range CPUs lol)

 

[DogsofJune]

I have been wanting to bust my Linux test box up to specs like this. Undecided to do the 2200g or 2400. Been eyeballing the MSI 450 mobo too.
Nice to hear your daughter enjoys it.

 

[ChadD]

CPU usage is pretty high at times on the 2200. I imagine the 2400 would be better in that regard. Not sure you would be able to flip anymore settings on graphically or anything. It would be nice to see if someone had a Ryzen 5 if they could flip things like ambient occlusion on without a major penalty. I think AO looks great in a game like borderlands but on the Ryzen3 its a good 15fps penalty which is a bit to costly imo. To use it I had to drop things to medium... and high without it just looked better imo. Also I guess FXAA and stuff might be easier to turn on. I'll have to turn it on in borderlands, shes plugged into a 60hz TV anyway so as long as she is hitting right around 60fps average I think shes golden.

For myself I think I'll hold off and see what AMD has in store with the 3000 line. I'm not sure what sort of G part they have... might be another vega part and not navi yet. Still even if its a small bump it might make an almost perfect 1080p box. (I really don't care about 4k... and don't see myself caring about 4k much for some time anyway) As crazy as it sounds I might build myself a integrated machine. Seems so wrong. lol

 

[DogsofJune]

Seeing what AMD has in store is why I held off. I'd like to upgrade my 3770k box too. Cheapest option I suppose, is to replace the 750k Athlon with the 3770k and build a replacement. What I'd like to do is replace the 3770k with a newer generation of Intel, but we will see.

 

[Frobozz]

That's pretty impressive. I've been really curious about the Ryzen APUs on Linux and am excited to see 1080p performance to be solid. Not bad at all for $300. From the reading I've seen, you made a good choice by going with a rolling distro for the latest processor and graphics support.

Thanks for doing the write up and sharing the story!

 

[Mazzspeed]

Fallout Las Vegas runs at 60fps no matter what on my rig also - Smack on 60fps, no higher, definitely no lower. The game actually plays really well.

I ran 4k under Windows for a while, I then dropped back to 1080p under Windows because the improvement really wasn't worth the hardware demands. Now I don't care for Windows and 1200p is perfect for me. Good job ChadD!

 

[ChadD]

That's pretty impressive. I've been really curious about the Ryzen APUs on Linux and am excited to see 1080p performance to be solid. Not bad at all for $300. From the reading I've seen, you made a good choice by going with a rolling distro for the latest processor and graphics support.

Thanks for doing the write up and sharing the story!

I read some horror stories from earlier this year for sure. I think AMD got raven ridge support into the kernel early last year, but for a few kernel revisions it was buggier then expected. Ya its rock solid on 4.19 or 4.20 with recent mesa. I hear mesa made a lot of progress this year as well.

I guess the next test will be the 3000 g chips. If AMD has the driver end sorted now... hopefully that launch will be a lot smoother. AMD has got vega 20 and a bunch of other AMD IDs that must be u and g parts into 4.21... which I hear just got officially bumped to Kernel 5.0.

All I know is things are running nice now. I have been a manjaro user for a good while now. Don't see myself running anything else anytime soon. Its rolling in the way windows 10 is supposed to be. lol Its based on arch but they hold all the arch packages for 2weeks to 2 months depending on testing. The same way MS is supposed to have their testing circles that apparently get ignored. Manjaro doesn't ignore. lol
To be honest for the most part they simply skip the first version revisions. so they will skip a 18.3.0... and wait for the first or second bug fix like 18.3.1 as an example. Although I guess detailed what they did with the most recent Mesa revision. They skipped pushing .0 and shipped .1 just last week. In general it makes their distro rock solid and easy to deal with. If you really want a brand new version the day it hits you can just grab the .tar package from the unstable repo.

 

[ChadD]

Fallout Las Vegas runs at 60fps no matter what on my rig also - Smack on 60fps, no higher, definitely no lower. The game actually plays really well.

I ran 4k under Windows for a while, I then dropped back to 1080p under Windows because the improvement really wasn't worth the hardware demands. Now I don't care for Windows and 1200p is perfect for me. Good job ChadD!

Ya game is smooth under Proton at 1080... I double checked vsync but perhaps it stays on internally no matter what or something. Ya odd but game play is solid.