I’m not usually a big Black Friday shopper. For starters it was never a big thing here in Canada until the last 5 or 10 years and it’s been slowly ramping up since then. So when I decided it was time to finally upgrade my desktop I figured I would wait for Black Friday. In the end it only saved me a little and I went ahead and spent those savings elsewhere but lets take a look at what I ordered.
AMD Ryzen 2400G
I’ve been intrigued by this processor for some time now. To be honest I was going to order it about a year back and never did. Surprisingly it hasnt’ really been replaced by a newer version yet but I’m sure that will happen soon now that I’ve pulled the trigger.
The price was $209.99 on Amazon.ca with Amazon Prime. A savings of $10. And I’ll be straight up here, I’m pretty sure it was $10 of when I added it to my wishlist a few weeks back so I wasn’t really saving anything here.
MSI Tomahawk
The decision on which motherboard to get was probably the hardest part of this whole upgrade and was a big part of why I held off so long. And anyone who knows me well will be surprised to see that I have no order an Asus motherboard as I almost always do. In the end it came down to cost, the Asus was almost $80 more for the same tier of motherboard and I also figured it was time to try something new.
I also had some pretty big requirements, I wanted at least 6 SATA ports, 4 DIMMs, I wanted ample PCI and AMR slots as I knew I’d have the board awhile. On top of that i was hoping to get built in WIFI (something I had to sacrifice) and it absolutely had to support dual monitors. I had to do a lot of reading there to get a good answer on that but it sounds like in general if there’s two video out ports on the board and the BIOS is up to date most B350 motherboards will support dual screen. The only warning I saw there was Gigabyte boards were still having some issues. In the end I settled on the MSI board, it had some great reviews, had a great name I wouldn’t forget and it looked pretty darn slick too. Plus I hear it’s pretty easy to overclock on this board so that will be fun to tinker with.
The price was $119.99 on Amazon.ca with Amazon Prime.
Corsair Vengance 3200MHz RAM
This is the one area I ended up saving some cash. I had originally picked the white ones but happened to notice that the exact same ones in black were almost $30 cheaper for some reason. Since I will probably never look at my RAM and I actually prefer the black I just switched my order to that. But all in all I think they will serve me well, I ‘ve always had good luck with Corsair’s RAM and there were comments from people saying they had no issues with it working with Ryzens, always a good sign. And of course I had to get 3200MHz to get the most out of my Ryzen.
The price was $181.40 on Amazon.ca with Amazon Prime.
Amazon Dot Echo
After saving $30 on my RAM and seeing there was a great deal on the Amazon Dot Echo I decided to pick one of those up too. Oddly it was only eligible for 2 day shipping and not 1 day, so I will not be receiving that with today’s order. Oh well, as long as I can complete my build for now I am happy.
This Dot Echo will great with all the home automation projects I’ve been working on lately. Unfortunately all of my door sensors and Sonoff devices I recently ordered are stuck in Hong Kong due to the postal strike 🙁
Oh, and the price on the Dot Echo was $24.99 on Amazon.ca with 2 day shipping.
And of course with this being a Ryzen build that uses an APU I did not bother ordering a GPU. I’ll hold off on that, with Bitcoin tanking right now I’m thinking the prices should be coming down soon and I can get a much better card down the line. In any case I made sure the motherboard I bought would would support a GPU down the road.
Other than that I will be using the same hard drives, DVD burner, monitors, keyboards and mouse from my previous build to save costs. As for my old Phenom 9950 and motherboard and RAM, I might actually try selling that on eBay once the postal strike is over. I hear there’s still quite a demand for them. If not it will sit in the closet for an eternity like all of my past motherboards and CPUs.
A seasoned Senior Solutions Architect with 18 years of experience in technology design and implementation. Renowned for innovative solutions and strategic insights, he excels in driving complex projects to success. Outside work, he is a passionate fisherman and fish keeper, specializing in planted tanks.