It’s hard to believe that AM4 is nearly a decade old. The platform was initially introduced in September 2016, and quickly grew on to become one of the most popular and long-lasting platforms in the history of consumer desktops. In fact, it’s still very, very popular to this day.

I managed to grab a leftover budget build, centered around an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G from a friend, and I’ve put it to good use as a proper desktop. I’ve saved hundreds by not upgrading to AM5 — and I honestly think it’s good enough for the price. AM4 is still that good.

Building the PC around the Ryzen 5600G

Specifications and resolutions

This particular PC was a hand-me-down from a friend and was built on top of the AM4 platform, with an AMD Ryzen 5600G at its heart. It was on top of a modest, very entry-level A320M motherboard, which isn’t particularly high-end.

More importantly, though, the PC had a pretty generous 16GB of DDR4 RAM, which meant I could use it as-is. If you’re planning to build from scratch, Ryzen 5600Gs goes for around $120 on Amazon. The 16GB of RAM will cost you around $100, bringing the total to $220. Of course, prices will fluctuate, and I’d recommend looking in the used market instead to save up on other upgrades.

Still, this was enough to get me started and swap out parts on my own here. I started by swapping out the A320M for a B550 (more specifically, a Gigabyte B550M DS3H R2) m-ATX board. I wanted a smaller build, but mini-ITX boards were way out of my budget, so I settled for an m-ATX form factor.

For the GPU, I had a recently repaired Nvidia RTX A2000 (6 GB, unfortunately!) lying around, which I added to the build. The RTX A2000 doesn’t use any external power connectors, drawing its 70W from the PCIe slot.

For storage, I had a couple of drives lying around, and I chose a 1 TB NVMe SSD as my sole boot and game drive. I could always add in storage later.

Finally, for the power supply, I added a Corsair RM750e. It’s modular, quiet, and efficient — and happened to be a leftover part from my previous eGPU build. The PSU is likely overkill, and any decent 500-650W PSU should do fine, modular or not.

Assembling the PC proved to be a bit of a challenge, since I hadn’t built one in years. It didn’t help that the case I used was from some random off-brand retailer and had a few questionable design choices.

Still, for $25 and four pre-attached fans (including a glass panel!), I won’t be complaining.

With the PC assembled, I connected it to a single 1080p display, which would be the resolution I’d expect this kind of build to work best at.

A surprisingly capable machine

Performance and benchmarks

The first thing I did was apply a BIOS update, since this board hadn’t been updated in over a year. One reboot later, I wiped the disk clean and installed a fresh copy of Arch Linux.

Going through the usual setup process (and all the annoyances of setting up an Nvidia GPU in Wayland), I ended up on my Niri desktop with DMS. I could never get Nvidia to work properly as the primary render device, though, and so I ended up setting it to the iGPU instead for something a bit more stable. At the cost of 2 GB RAM, that is.

One Steam install and a few downloads later, I was ready to test out some games. I started with DOOM Eternal, which the PC absolutely crushed through. This was followed by some Batman Arkham Knight and the more recent 007 First Light.

DOOM Eternal was an easy 100 frames per second at the Nightmare preset, followed by 90 FPS (capped) on Batman Arkham Knight with everything maxed out. 007 First Light ran pretty well at around 35–40 frames per second, but that paltry 6GB of VRAM was proving to be a problem — and I really wish I had that 12GB model right now to avoid those stutters.

Gaming on this AM4 budget build is “good enough.” It most certainly will not impress you, but it is enough to get you started on some entry-level PC gaming. The RTX A2000 is very capable, given its slim form factor (and its 70W power limit), and can run games reasonably well at 1080p. More importantly, it sets up an upgrade path, and adding in something like an RX 6600 will help tons later on, just by the fact it has two extra GB of VRAM alone.

Of course, you might want to look into games that are a generation older for the best results. That’s still fine if you ask me, and there have been some amazing releases in the past 3–5 years alone that are still worth checking out.

Oculink makes for a desktop-level experience

I still have one trick up my sleeve. One of the advantages of a desktop form factor over something like a laptop is its expandability. You can connect a ton of peripherals using PCIe, some of which simply aren’t doable using Thunderbolt.

Using an M.2-to-Oculink adapter, I connected my RX 9070 to one of the motherboard’s M.2 SSD slots. Everything worked surprisingly well, and Linux didn’t seem to mind the “abomination” one bit.

The RX 9070 was a massive upgrade over my RTX A2000, and my frame rate essentially tripled. There’s still performance to be gained, though. The Ryzen 5600G caps out at PCIe 3.0, which, coupled with the 4x lane restriction of my Oculink adapter, meant I was losing out on performance.

A possible upgrade path (outside boosting the RAM to 32 GB), would be to get a newer CPU. A Ryzen 5700X seems like the best pick right now, and it has PCIe 4.0, which should provide a sizable boost to the Oculink connection on top of being a nice upgrade CPU-wise. Or, the Ryzen 5800X3D, assuming you could possibly stomach its absurd asking price.