Thoughts on my AMD parts selection for video editing system

Hi.

I'm considering building a PC that will sit on a shelf under my desk instead of a tower, so I'm looking at a Micro-ATX setup. The PC will be mostly for video editing, no gaming, so I'm thinking onboard graphics with an AMD Ryzen 5 3400G, MSI B450M Pro-VDH motherboard, and Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB single stick. I need the two PCI slots on the board for my sound card and Wi-Fi card.

Any thoughts on this setup before I buy it? Thanks.

Hi Michael,

I can certainly offer my opinion on your build. First, with video editing, you can often reap performance benefits up to 5x that of a CPU using a graphics card in conjunction with software supporting hardware-accelerated rendering. NVIDIA touts Movavi for this feature, and Adobe uses some level of HA as well.

Second, are you building this machine on a tight budget? If so, it would greatly influence my opinion if we knew that info as well but based on the specs you have mentioned above, I can only assume yes in this case.

For starters, there is no reason to go with B450 anymore. It's a dead platform with B550 now taking its place, especially at the roughly ~$170 price your MSI B450M Pro-VDH has currently. So, for this, I will recommend you look at the MSI MAG B550M Mortar or ASUS TUF B550M-Plus, both having the same $169 street price and offering more features, including built-in Wi-Fi 6, so you no longer need to run that PCIe Wi-Fi card.

As for the memory, one of the first rules of Ryzen is, don't run your memory in single-channel. So, I'm going to recommend you steer away from that single 16GB stick and opt for a 2x8GB kit if you want 16GB usable or even better, go for 2x16GB AMD Optimized, getting you way more performance from the dual-rank configuration.

Now to the CPU with the Ryzen 5 3400G. While this CPU has the shiny Ryzen 5 3xxx name behind it, it's somewhat misleading because this processor is actually an APU on the Picasso architecture with RX Graphics instead of the Matisse architecture we know from the rest of the 3X series. This is why I would push you towards the Ryzen 3 3300X if you want to stay budget-friendly, adding on a single slot GPU like a GT 710 or 1030 for around $50.

Good luck!

Last updated: Nov 3, 2020 at 07:09 pm CST