Finally got my Ryzen 2400G APU up and running, overclocked, nice and snappy!

[VirtualLarry]

Still haven't gotten benchmarks, been slightly busy. Sorry.

But I did receive my other "Goody" today (yesterday). My Ryzen 2200G APU.

I was planning on doing another build with a Biostar A320MH PRO board. But when I got to thinking about it, I decided to pop it in to my ASRock AB350M Pro4, the mobo that had given me such troubles with my 2400G. Well, strangely enough, I dropped it in, and it ... booted right away, with the single stick of Corsair DDR4-2667 that I had picked up and tried to use previously with the 2400G.

So, ASRock does work with Ryzen APUs, but only the 2200G in my case, and not the 2400G.

I'm now thinking that my secondary VRM plane may be damaged on that board, and not able to supply enough power for the more powerful iGPU in the 2400G. Either that, or some sort of straight-up incompatibility, or borderline binning of the 2400G? Strange stuff.

But now I'm happy, and maybe these boards aren't as bad for Ryzen APUs as I've made them out to be?

I'm still on UEFI 4.70, btw. No doubt, there will be a new one in a week or so.

I didn't get mine from Newegg, but here's the link for reviews. It's getting hammered pretty hard, only three eggs.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113481

 

[Timorous]

I don't think that this case will take one of my water-cooling kits, either. These APUs would do well under water, I think. At least, I didn't seem to be power-limited? I wasn't stressing CPU + iGPU at the same time though.

I have my 2200G under the CoolerMaster ML240L and at 3.9Ghz / 1.5Ghz it does not even hit 60c with the fans in silent mode. I might be able to push the clocks more but it plays the games I want well enough.

I finally got around to trying Path of Exile and it can run 4k at 30fps when nothing is going on. It runs fine at 1080p though.

 

[chrisjames61]

I didn't get mine from Newegg, but here's the link for reviews. It's getting hammered pretty hard, only three eggs.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113481

Larry, read the negative reviews. They are either by people who don't even own the cpu or by people who don't know a bios from their elbow. Some people just shouldn't be attempting to build pc's.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Larry, read the negative reviews. They are either by people who don't even own the cpu or by people who don't know a bios from their elbow. Some people just shouldn't be attempting to build pc's.

While this is true, I had to put in some substantial "elbow grease" to get my 2400G APU build to come together, after swapping an R5 1600 in there to flash the BIOS on my Gigabyte Gaming 3 B350M board. And what's up with my AB350M Pro4, accepting my 2200G right off the bat, but refusing to work entirely with my 2400G? Severe BIOS bugs? Or something slightly out of spec with the VRMs, especially the secondary plane that feeds the iGPU? Something else?

Let's admit it, AMD hasn't quite had the smoothest of releases for their Desktop Ryzen APUs. Especially requiring BIOS flashes for existing boards, which is a pain, when those new BIOSes are rushed out and are not fully debugged.

And I'm an experienced builder, no wonder these noobs are having issues.

 

[chrisjames61]

While this is true, I had to put in some substantial "elbow grease" to get my 2400G APU build to come together, after swapping an R5 1600 in there to flash the BIOS on my Gigabyte Gaming 3 B350M board. And what's up with my AB350M Pro4, accepting my 2200G right off the bat, but refusing to work entirely with my 2400G? Severe BIOS bugs? Or something slightly out of spec with the VRMs, especially the secondary plane that feeds the iGPU? Something else?

Let's admit it, AMD hasn't quite had the smoothest of releases for their Desktop Ryzen APUs. Especially requiring BIOS flashes for existing boards, which is a pain, when those new BIOSes are rushed out and are not fully debugged.

And I'm an experienced builder, no wonder these noobs are having issues.

I agree with you Larry. My problem is people doing reviews who either don't own the product or who did not do any due diligence before they bought the cpu. Too many times PEBKAC is the main issue.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hmm, now I'm wondering about "downsizing" my rigs for summertime. Converting R5 1600 rigs, to Ryzen 2200G APUs, and selling / mothballing the dGPUs? I'll keep one R5 1600 rig, though I might remove one of the two GPUs, as with two, they get fairly warm, and I have to power-limit them to keep them from overheating.

Edit: All is not well with my 2200G in my AB350M Pro4. I installed Linux Mint 18.3 on it, in a dual-boot, and it seemed OK. I had it overclocked to 3.90Ghz, because someone else mentioned having their 2200G at that clock speed, and my 2400G handled it just fine.

But Linux would freeze up, somewhat, and not wake from monitor sleep. But it also happened with Win10, so I removed the OC. Booted Linux again, and it did it again.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ok, I opened my second 2200G, and put it in a Biostar A320MH PRO, that have previously been flashed to the newest (Mar 2018) UEFI, supposedly with the Pinnacle Ridge AGESA (newest released).

Well, I put in a 4GB Kingston stick of DDR4-2400, which has 4 chips on it, instead of 8.

Had some really strange weirdness, after Win10 was installed. Strange, graphical anomalies, flashing bands on the screen, fonts that were garbage, unsure if it was the auto-installed driver, or my Kingston RAM.

Might have something to do with running Edge in 1709 too. Not sure how mature the Vega iGPU drivers are for Edge's HW acceleration.

Seems to have mostly straightened out now.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Been using my first 2200G, in my AB350M Pro4 ASRock, board, in Windows 10, and haven't really had it go into monitor sleep mode, and it hasn't frozen up or anything.

I'm wondering, if the "freeze" I thought happened before, was really just the monitor failing to wake from sleep mode, which happens sometimes with this UHD TV, and some various AMD drivers. (They've had that bug before, it was really awful with my Westinghouse 24" 1080P TVs, and my R7 260X 2GB cards, at the time.)

Now they have HDMI Link Assurance, a checkbox in the drivers, which doesn't come enabled by default, but I installed the newest Vega iGPU drivers and enabled it, so hopefully, no further problems.

Now I just need to figure out how to overclock the iGPU using the ASRock BIOS. Not quite sure where that's hidden, as the CPU multi OC is right in the OC tweaker menu, but I didn't see any similar option for iGPU OC.