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APU vs 3100 for office build

RandomMonkeH

RandomMonkeH

RandomMonkeH

Associate
Joined
18 Oct 2019
Posts
341
Location
U.K.
My dilemma:

I need to build a secondary system before Christmas, which will primarily be used for office type tasks and occasionally as some sort of media device to hook up to a LFD. No gaming anticipated.

I already have access to a MSI B450 Mortar, so my initial thought was something like a 3200G or 3400G. I was hoping there might have been an imminent 5000G on the horizon that would have crashed the price of the current APUs.

However, I'm now wondering if this is the smartest route or if I would get more value for money going for a cheap GPU and something like a 3100.
 
4000G are not released yet... 5000G is months away.

Your choice is either the Ryzen 3 3200G like this:

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £118.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)​
​


Ryzen 5 3400G:

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £178.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)​
​

Or to cancel the desktop build and go with some type of Ryzen 4000U or H mobile device.
 
The plan was always 3200G or 3400G. The only hope was a newly launched APU might reduce the price of the old SKU.

The question is whether to go for an APU or get a 3100 + some sort of super cheap GPU.
 
How is the 3400g so expensive? I am literally buying full machines (705 g5 mini's) with them in and I was able to source the entire machine in the mid 300's and that has nvme, mini form factor, 8gb ram etc all included.
 
Those prices look too steep for the APUs compared to what they used to be, perhaps it is because stock is so low on this stuff.

If its just an office PC, do you really care how much CPU grunt your machine has, what will be its use case, my missus still does most of her accountancy work on a 10yr old i7, so you could go super cheap with something like a 200GE or Athlon 3000g with GPU etc for under £40 or even last gen APU, still plenty capable for general office stuff.

I have a 2400G I picked up used and can recommend that APU, generally my daughters machine is a very strong machine even if benchmarks suggest it is weak compared to new stuff, blimey I have even played games on it when my machine was out of action with some massaging of settings.

In addition to that my daughter does all of her work when not at desk with Office 365 on a dual thread celeron laptop, which is less powerful than most phones.

For reference Geekbench 5 scores of these weak machines are

celeron - 300/575
'09 i7 - 478/1444
2400g - 1009/4255

As you can see the 2400g is leagues ahead but running the same office type tasks you'd barely tell these machine apart unless you have a heavy presentation/spreadsheet, the only weakness in the celeron is the driving DRM heavy things like Sky Go, Silverlight or whatever it is punishes the CPU/GPU at 1080p, so it can't run anything else at the same time, its fine for all other streaming stuff like youtube, netflix etc.
 
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