Mame Cab 2006 era PC dies, replacing it with Mini AMD 7735 based APU System...how to tune it?

[HeadRusch]

The 2006 era Athlon X64 chip is probably fine but either the power supply or something on the MB has given up the ghost, and because only Daphne and a Mame build from the early 2000's were on there, salvaging the vintage hardware inside is not a priority. Besides, if I did that, I wouldn't be able to buy SWEET, SWEET NEW SHIT with a CLEAN CONSCIENCE.

I decided to go with one of those "System In A Box The Size of A Rubiks Cube" type of builds, pre built mini-PC....in my case I gave myself a budget of $500 or less and the best I could do is the 7735m with the 680m RDNA2 gpu, which is just ABOUT as fast as you can get this generation....1tb ssd, 32gigs of ram....enough to do it all. I don't game much on PC anymore,
but I wanted a GPU that could at least game if I wanted to, and I'd load up my steam library so I had gaming wherever the PC box moved around to. And, when I wanted to use my mame cab, I'd just use this box as an interface with Hyperspin or Batocera at this point I guess.

Does anyone here know of a video or web comparison that shows the improvement in 680m speeds you get moving from slower 4800mt/s ram (which comes standard on most of these budget boxes) to faster but more expensive 5600, 6000 or 6200+ RAM? I would imagine at some point faster ram will produce no faster frames, but I believe moving from 4800 to 6400 will deliver something like 10-20% additional framerates because of how APU's work. Right now, not using this box for gaming directly, I wouldn't need to upgrade..but it would be nice to know as SODIMM prices drop and speeds increase, that picking up 10+ fps is available with a simple ram swap. Right now that Ram is a little pricy for someone who isn't going to daily drive games on this thing, its more about knowing if I DID buy some game during the steamsale that I'd be almost guaranteed to be able to get a locked 30fps console-like experience out of the mini pc, if not even do better than that.......

Also I know there are some 3rd party apps you can use to up the power limits on the APU's and get a litte more out of them if the cooling system implemented by the manufacturer is up to higher wattages, are there any specific I need to use and more importantly are these apps idiot proof, or do you have to be careful about playing with the sliders for "moar power" and "moar speedz"....if anyone has any tips I'd appreciate it.

Thx for the read.

 

[Dopamin3]

Does anyone here know of a video or web comparison that shows the improvement in 680m speeds you get moving from slower 4800mt/s ram (which comes standard on most of these budget boxes) to faster but more expensive 5600, 6000 or 6200+ RAM?

Here is an example comparing 4800 vs 6400 on a 680M (slightly different CPU but should be close~ish to what you would see on the 7735)

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7VV_PxuLws

I'd just be a slightly weary if you can even change the RAM speed on a cheap prebuilt mini PC. 7735HS does support LPDDR5-6400 so hopefully the board will let you run it at that.

 

[HeadRusch]

Thanks for the link, I hit a few on YouTube and maybe missed this one above.....looks like the way APU's work they'll work faster with faster RAM but there's a point where that must drop off due to the capacity of the actual CPU power delivery and frequency its set to run at....or so I guess. <shrug> I suppose worst case, try the ram, no uptick in performance....send that sheet back.

For the record: This bios is locked, and I cannot add faster ram or overclock the RAM at this time, but the overclocking utility that everyone uses to squeeze out a few more frames of performance from this thing does work very well. Hopefully someday they will unlock the bios and we'll be able to add faster RAM than the 4800mhz its locked to now, putting 6400mt/s dimms in there looks like it should really provide a boost to the GPU side of things on this chip, the cores on the CPU side of things are already screamers.