I wouldn't shy away from a r5 1600/r7 1700 if found for a good price either. It will likely OC as much as the R3 CPUs but have 6(r5) or 8(r7) cores instead of 4. Has SMT too. If you could stretch your budget the 2600 is one of the best mid range CPUs out now. If you are in the US and have a microcenter close by see what kind of walk in deals they have on cpu+motherboard combos as sometimes you can get some insanely good deals. I just wish they were up in Canada too.
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total
$497.43
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-05-14 00:11 EDT-0400
I prioritized spending on the CPU and GPU and cheaped out on the case and PSU. Now that PSU isn't a bad one and won't blow up your system and 450w is more than ample to run it. I did add a solid motherboard that has 4 ram slots so you can afford to take 2x4gb of ram for now and then you have 2 ram slots free for upgrading later on. As SSDs are cheaper than ever a 480GB SSD would be better than a 1TB HDD as it can still hold a number of games and your operating system and will run faster. I didn't pick the cheapest SSD but did get a good one nonetheless. You will be using the stock cooler that comes with the CPU for now so I doubt there will be much overclocking yet (perhaps OC all cores to match single core turbo of 3.6). The case is a cheaper one but still has front intake fan, back exhaust fan, and front panel USB 3.0 which you really cant find in a $25 case and you will not have to buy fans separately.
This should give you some decent performance with just about every game out now if your goal is 1080p@60hz on high settings most games.
Get Ryzen 3 2200g for now and purchase dedicated GPU later. You can play games on the 2200g, you just have to dial settings down including resolution (720p although many older titles run great at 1080p). Depends which games you play. It would be slightly better to get the Ryzen 5 2400g - better graphical capabilities and the processor is a very good 4 core 8 thread that trades blows with Intel i7's from Sandy/Ivy Bridge period. However, this processor will cost around $40-$50 more to get. You can get something working with either Ryzen chip and you can add a GPU at a future date.
For a similar price look into a Ryzen 5 1600, some stores (like Microcenter) offer them for $100 or less, used market they are less, or even other locations have them for only a few bucks more.
I must say, your user name is epic, I needed something to smile about.
As for Vega Graphics, nope not a requirement if you use a dedicated GPU. AMD have a couple of CPU's with integrated Vega Graphics (so called APU) - these chips are very useful for home PC builds (light gaming/web browsing/word processing and so on) and are actually capable enough of harder tasks as well. AMD no doubt released these to directly compete with Intel on the home/business PC front - i.e. the plethora of locked i3's/i5's/i7's that power monitors on Integrated Graphics only. The other Ryzen chips certainly require a GPU be inserted in the PCIe slot.
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