Hi guys, thanks for your help. Build successfully completed. Took on board most of your recommendations, and made a few adjustments based on what was available from one supplier and what had decent reviews.
Corsair 110R
MSI B450M PRO-VDH Max mATX (delivered Ryzen 3 ready)
Ryzen 3200G
8GB Crucial 2666MHz
500GB WD Blue SATA SSD (didn’t want to deal with potential head issues of M2, and this will be plenty fast)
Seagate 2TB HDD
Corsair VS450 PSU
ASUS DVD Writer
Hardware came to £386. The case was maybe £20 pricier than I needed but it was available, looks smart, has a drive bay and good reviews.
Windows 10 64 Home Retail (digital download) £108, Office 2019 Home and Student £103, so £597 total.
Ran Prime95 just for half an hour to make sure it wouldn’t fall over. Aware this is not a full test but this machine isn’t going to get worked hard; just wanted to make sure there were no hardware faults. Idles at 35C and load temp was 67C in a 21C room which all looks fine. Ran a memory test which found no errors.
Two questions I’d appreciate some help with.
The Seagate HDD was badly packaged for shipping. It’s noisy when the system boots up (makes like robotic noises) but that might be normal. I ran CHK Disk which found no errors or bad sectors, but it was so quick I’m not confident I can rely on it. Any recommendations to properly check the disk?
Also Windows shows 6GB available memory. Some googling revealed the other 2GB has been allocated to the integrated graphics. Worked out how to reduce it in BIOS but the question is should I? It’s a little unclear how that works; some articles suggest Windows will take more back if it needs it. My parents are only going to do basic office stuff and wen browsing etc so I can’t imagine the APU will need anything like 2GB. Thoughts?
