Based on their past behaviors, I’d actually assume that it’s largely because they fight hard against selling to scalpers. If they just wanted to clear things out, they wouldn’t limit their stellar deals to in store only AND 1 per household. This sign is a good indicator of their corporate philosophy.
An update on my son and his computer travails…
Quick recap: he’s been wanting a new gaming computer; he liked my G509 but didn’t want to make the trip to MicroCenter; bought an iBuyPower gaming PC from NewEgg instead, which had some sort of serious video issues, so we sent it back-- fortunately NewEgg refunded the entire amount; he’s been dithering since then on his next move.
He finally decided to get the G509 from MicroCenter. I drove him and his younger brother yesterday because younger son needed a new mouse and I wanted to pick up a gaming mouse. Older son got his G509 (still on sale, but $1300 instead of the $1200 I spent. Still a great deal though). I looked longingly at a curved widescreen monitor but stuck with only the gaming mouse.
Held my breath while he got it set up and benchmarked, hoping it wouldn’t have any issues (with his computer luck, would not be surprised). Did not want to deal with another meltdown. One tense moment when the screen went black like the iBuyPower would do, but it was just due to updating the video card driver. After a couple hours, he pronounced it good (whew).
My G509, after over a month, is still working nearly flawlessly. A concern about a week ago when I woke the computer up from sleep, only one of my monitors was working, and it wouldn’t recognize the second display port; but a reboot fixed it and it hasn’t happened since.
Glad to hear it’s all working well!
I finally ordered something to replace the broken and returned Dell.
The AMD Ryzen 5700G was down to $320 ($300 with a promo-code, but I can’t use those through my business account), so it seemed like a good time to order.
Ryzen 5700G
Gigabyte B550 Auros Pro motherboard
Fractal Design Define Mini C
matching Fractal Design Gold power supply
That all came to just about $600 with shipping, and then I’ll add in some RAM, NVMEs and other bits I’ve already got, which would add $250-300 if included in the price.
I didn’t get the tiny case I wanted, but that turned out to be just too annoying to sort through. The Define Mini C is smaller than what I already have, and will take a proper ATX power supply.
Comparing benchmarks of the Ryzen 5700G to my current i7-4790K, the new CPU will be something like 3 times faster for compute loads, and a gazillion times faster for graphics stuff.
I’ll post a followup in a few weeks once the parts are here and it’s all put together. (A promise like that usually indicates this will be the last time somebody ever posts.)
More than a few weeks, but between winter break and extended working at home duo to Omicron closures, I’ve not used my new desktop nearly as much as I’d expected.
Got all of the parts, put them together, and…it didn’t fit. I needed to buy some power supply cable extenders to actually connect the power supply to the motherboard. In the Fractal Design Define Mini C case, the power supply goes at the bottom in a walled off tunnel. There are some passages to run power cables behind the motherboard, and then around to the front to connect, but requires cables just a bit longer than what Fractal Design puts on their power supply.
One week later
With the cable extenders in place, everything is put together and buttoned up. Despite the long cable routing path, I really like the Fractal Design Define Mini C case. You know how lots of cases have sharp edges, and anytime you work inside the computer you end up with those paper-cut like scratches on your fingers? Not here. The edges are all smooth, and the case is powder coated, painted, or something. All of the metal is nice and solid, and the supplied fans are very quiet.
The Gigabyte B550 Auros Pro motherboard seems fine. I mean, it has hundreds of poorly documented settings in the BIOS, which is exactly what everybody expects from an enthusiast board. I couldn’t get the Q-Bios thing to work. That supposedly lets you install an updated BIOS from USB without a CPU. Everything happened like it was supposed to as far as flashing lights and what not, but the BIOS wasn’t actually updated.
Fortunately the board would boot up with the “unsupported” CPU, and some 10 year old video card I had lying around. I updated the BIOS the normal way, took out the old video card, and everything started to work with the CPU’s builtin graphics.
The Ryzen 5700G is a very fast CPU. Obviously there’s stuff out there you can buy that’s faster, but for $320 I’m satisfied with the speed. The builtin graphics are fine, but I’m much less impressed with them than the CPU. Much, much faster than any Intel builtin graphics, but still slower than the Quadra T1000 in my year old laptop.
The only intensive thing I plan to do with the GPU is encode video, and that pretty much sucks. AMD doesn’t support computing on their builtin GPUs, so lots of that stuff isn’t available. There are some hacks to get around that, but when I finally got it working, it turns out that GPU accelerated video encoding is slower than just using the CPU.
CPU encoding on the Ryzen 5700G is roughly equivalent in speed to GPU encoding on the Quadra T1000, but the CPU software has far more options and produces better output, so not a huge loss, but disappointing.
I tried overclocking a bit, but I had some crashes. I’m not sure if that was due to overclocking, or some of the other stuff I was doing. Once I know everything is stable, then I’ll try overclocking again, and I can be sure any crashes are due to overclocking.
Overall, I’m sure it will be fine, but I did have the stupid kinds of problems that I hoped to avoid when I originally bought the Dell Precision (which was essentially DOA, even after a replacement motherboard).
That’s interesting about the Q button not letting you flash the BIOS.
And yeah, integrated graphics are much better on AMD then Intel, but that’s like saying some gross food you hate tastes much better than dogshit. The bar is so low it’s misleading.
I feel like integrated graphics in 2021 should have been on par with a 1050 ti, but they just weren’t. (If I’m understanding right, the 1050 TI was the entry level budget gamer card from 5 years ago.) And I don’t think this year’s will be much better. Well, again, I think they will be much better then the AMD 5000 series, but that bar is still so low.
Yeah, like I said, it looked like it was working, but it didn’t work… It could have been my mistake, the USB drive, or something else very simple. I didn’t pursue it because the board would boot with the unsupported CPU.
I definitely wanted integrated graphics, because this computer will not be used for any gaming, so I really didn’t want to spend $150+ on a crap graphics card that’s just going to add heat and noise. The original Dell, with it’s “workstation” class graphics card would have been more expensive to build myself—the discount from Dell on the old mid-tier Radeon card was enough to offset Dell’s markup on the other parts.
They Ryzen 5700G builtin graphics has proved to be perfectly fine for desktop use. It is completely unnoticeable for things that the old 7th gen Intel graphics had trouble with, like scrolling the browser without tearing. The much newer 10th gen Intel graphics on my laptop is fine for that, too.
In order of speed
| Intel 7th gen IGP | Barely adequate for desktop use |
| Intel 10th gen IGP | Fine for desktop use, poor for gaming and compute |
| Ryzen 5700G | Fine for desktop, marginal for gaming, but poor for compute |
| Nvidia T1000 (somewhat slower than a GTX 1650) | Too hot for desktop, fine for gaming (but only reduced resolution on the 4k screen), good for compute |