A little over a year ago, I built this system for a customer who was looking for a low cost Home Theater PC to replace an Amazon Firebox, Google Chrome Stick and Blu Ray Player. This was a project for freeing up some space on a battery backup, some space on in the entertainment center and providing a better experience with browsing the web.

The system worked great for running a variety of streaming services and even some lower requirement games, but over time, the needs changed up a bit. Originally built with a Ryzen 3 3200G, the system was more than capable for running Blu Ray, and streaming from any of the streaming services. It was also more than capable of running many games from years past, but with more current games? It was definitely struggling.

With the limitations of the case and the existing hardware, the only options were to upgrade to a more powerful AMD Ryzen processor and seek out the best video card that will fit in the case. With limited options, the Ryzen 5 3600 (Matise) and a Zotac Low Profile GTX 1650, with 4GB of GDDR5 RAM were chosen for the upgrades. This CPU was chosen because it would maintain the same 65watt TDP of the CPU it was replacing, meaning that the only additional power draw would be from the addition of the GTX 1650 Low Profile graphics card.

Before making the changes, a few performance tests were ran. Due to timing, these were not performed in a scientifically rigorous manner, which would require a battery of tests repeated over and over to obtain a baseline. Just two games were chosen and a number of screen shots were taken with the MSI Afterburner overlay showing FPS, GPU and All the Cores being used on system.

Original Build Specifications:

Upgrades Specifications:

With the initial configuration, the following charts show understandably dismal performance. While the Ryzen 3 3200G is an acceptable processor for streaming your favorite shows, playing Blu Ray discs and running low requirement games of today, it provides just playable framerates on low settings with a vanilla installation of Fallout 4, a AAA title from 2015.

With the upgrades, even when moving some of the settings to medium to high, the combination of the Ryzen 5 3600 and the Zotac GTX 1650 Low Profile GPU are able to steadily produce 60 FPS, which is the maximum refresh rate of the television this Home Theater PC is displaying to.

The biggest change is seen with Star Citizen, a currently in development video game3. At the time of this writing, the most current release is Alpha 3.11. On the initial configuration, the system struggled to produce frame rates, with heavy stuttering, and was headache inducing. The upgrade, produced a surprising and playable boost to frame rate, but this still features some stuttering.

Star Citizen was chosen as an example to show the significant increase in performance by switching the CPU and adding a dedicated GPU to this system, as it is a very resource intensive video game.

To reduce more of the stuttering in Star Citizen, this Home Theater PC would need to have it’s ram doubled to 32GB and replace the SATA SSD with an M.2 drive. At this point in its development, Star Citizen demands high amounts of memory and as low a latency as possible from the storage device.

Here are a few sample screenshots, from similar vantage points taken during all tests.

FALLOUT 4