New PC: Ryzen 5 2400G and Gigabyte B450 M a good choice?

[jhanarato]

Hello!

I'm looking into getting a PC custom built. I'd like to use an AMD Ryzen 5 2400G APU and a Gigabyte B450 Aorus M. I've done a few web searches and have not found any major issues.

Is this a good choice? I don't mind tinkering if need be.

Cheers,

J.R.

[backspin]

I just put together a Ryzen CPU system with X570 motherboard, and have had only one major issue. You should be fine with the B450.

[jhanarato]

Good to hear. What was the issue you had?

Cheers,

J.R.

[oldos2er]

I have that same processor, no problems at all.

[jhanarato]

I have that same processor, no problems at all.

Yeah, I think the APU should be fine. Motherboards on the other hand are a bit of a mystery to me. Would I be right in thinking that the chipset (B450) is probably the most important factor?

[CatKiller]

Yeah, I think the APU should be fine. Motherboards on the other hand are a bit of a mystery to me. Would I be right in thinking that the chipset (B450) is probably the most important factor?

Yes and no.

The Zen chipsets are designed by AMD, and they provide the bulk of the UEFI software through their AGESA. That controls things like voltages, speeds, memory access, and so on. To that extent, if any models work, they all should. Bugs in implementation are likely to be shared, too.

Other devices on the motherboard - things like WiFi devices, sensors, LEDs, onboard sound, and so on - can vary significantly from model to model. There are some of those elements that could be poorly supported under Linux. It might boot & run fine, but be lit up like a Christmas tree with no sound, for example.

Really cheap stuff might cut corners to keep the costs down, which means it's non-standard and untested. Gamer stuff, put in as a "value add," tends to be non-standard and only tested with Windows. Middle-of-the-road professional stuff tends to be standardised and well-supported, in my experience.

[jhanarato]

Really cheap stuff might cut corners to keep the costs down, which means it's non-standard and untested. Gamer stuff, put in as a "value add," tends to be non-standard and only tested with Windows. Middle-of-the-road professional stuff tends to be standardised and well-supported, in my experience.

My use-case is an office machine. Most of my work is done in Firefox with Google Docs, Wordpress, Gmail, etc. I also do a bit of Python hacking and would like a machine that will run an IDE like PyCharm without struggling. Having used Linux as my primary OS since the late nineties, this is the first PC I'm actually building with the OS in mind. Up until now my PCs have just been repurposed Windows machines.

I discovered a couple of useful websites - PcPartPicker.com and LogicalIncrements.com. I chose the Ryzen as better value than the Intel Coffee Lake CPUs. Logical Increments suggested the Gigabyte mobo to go with the Ryzen (see the "minimum tier"). I'm planning to add an SSD, 16GB dual channel DDR4 RAM and a PCIe wifi card. I use a standing desk with a relatively small shelf for the tower so I'm going with a smaller tower and micro-ATX mobo.

So, any suggestions are welcome.

[Yellow Pasque]

I recently built a system with a Gigabyte B450 Aorus Wifi Pro and a Ryzen 2400G. I use Debian unstable/sid as my main distro, and everything I used worked there (audio, NVMe, LAN, SATA). I also installed KDE Neon's latest version (based on Ubuntu 18.04) and quickly tested the IGP and wireless there since I don't use them on my main install.

The only thing that didn't work is the ITE sensor chip. ITE doesn't open-source their documentation, so the voltage and temps from that sensor were garbage. (I knew that when I bought it. As long as the BIOS has good fan control and I can see the CPU temp, I'm happy).

[CatKiller]

So, any suggestions are welcome.

I use a Gigabyte X470, and everything's been fine, although I needed a bios update to be able to turn off the LEDs. After a quick look at the specs of the one you're looking at, the only thing I'm not sure about is the onboard network port: I don't have any experience with non-Intel network devices. But you're going to be using a separate one, anyway. Looks to me like it should be fine.

[CatKiller]

The only thing that didn't work is the ITE sensor chip. ITE doesn't open-source their documentation, so the voltage and temps from that sensor were garbage. (I knew that when I bought it. As long as the BIOS has good fan control and I can see the CPU temp, I'm happy).

There is an it87 kernel module that works with most of those sensors. It never got upstreamed and the person that created it didn't want to maintain it any more, so it got abandoned. You can still find it, though, and it will probably work, at least for now.

The cpu temperature is also reported by k10temp, so you're still getting good readings without using it87.