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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I went for a microatx b350 chipset motherboard, ryzen 1500x (overclocked by 300 MHz), and a $85 geforce1030 2GB for my home media system. The geforce1030 has far superior H265/HEVC and similar GPU-assisted video decoding than anything possible with currently shipping intel or AMD CPUs. Same architecture as the 1060/1070/1080 in a low power fanless version. You wouldn't want to use it for 3D gaming but for high bitrate 4K video, it's perfect.

The highest bitrate movie I have plays with about 22% CPU usage spread across all four cores.

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Is this still accurate with the release of the new ryzen apus? I have my doubts.

Specifically in the 1500x price point, the r5 2400G seems to have performance on par with a gt1030.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12425/marrying-vega-and-zen-t...

If I were doing the same build two months from now, probably not. But I don't think the new APUs are shipping in any commercially available real quantity yet, and many ryzen socket motherboards do not yet support 4K at 60Hz for their onboard HDMI outputs.

For 3D gaming (not video decode GPU-assist performance), to me, neither the gt1030 or the ryzen 2400G look like they have acceptably smooth framerates (45-60 fps) at 1080p high settings:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12425/marrying-vega-and-zen-t...

Its available now: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911...

a B350 chipset motherboard linked from its product page:

"Supports 2 x HDMI with max. resolution up to 4K x 2K (4096x2160) @ 24Hz / (3840x2160) @ 30Hz"

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681315...

motherboard support isn't quite there yet...

According to heise/c't magazine[1] (highly respected German tech publication), the Vega-based APUs support HDMI 2.0 even if the motherboards only advertise HDMI 1.4 support, as the pins are directly routed from the APU package. DisplayPort 1.2 works for 4K@60Hz as well of course. I suppose there's a risk the motherboard traces might be too low quality to carry HDMI2 signal speeds on some boards; hopefully board makers will revalidate and update specs for their boards. On the other hand, it may be worth waiting the 5-8 weeks until 400 series chipset boards come out which will presumably be designed with Ryzen G in mind.

[1] This is mentioned in their Ryzen G motherboard review/roundup (paywall): https://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/2018-5-AM4-Mainboards-fuer-A... - also the review of the CPUs: https://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/2018-5-Ryzen-Prozessoren-mit...

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