All posts by Caiden Krefft

About Caiden Krefft

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AMD Ryzen 5 5500 Review: Cheap yet Good (Human Revision)

CPU reviews, NT IT Reviews,

Good evening, friends. I’m again going to focus on a more budget-focused product, I’d like to review the AMD Ryzen 5 5500 CPU. It has an AM4 socket, so it’s a bit older than your AM5s or STR5’s, but give it a chance; It’s way better than it seems.

First off, lets go over some basic info. Its clock speed is 3.6GHZ,  it has 6 x 32KB of cache for both the instruction L1 and data L1 caches, 6 x 512KB for L2, and 16MB of L3. Now, the main pull factor for this thing is that It is DIRT cheap. I snagged mine from a tray pack on Newegg for $87.49, which for a pretty decent CPU, is astonishingly cheap. Granted, it didn’t come with a fan due to it being from a tray, but with a fairly cheap fan or even a Cooler Master, it runs just fine. According to Passmark’s CPU benchmarks, it has one of the best value for its price on the market. This thing has a single thread score of 3061, and a multi-thread score of 19295, which, for $90, is a steal.

The main issues I see is that 1: The L3 Cache isn’t that good, at only 16 MB, 2: it can only use PCIe 3.0, and 3: Similar Intel processors may be more viable (according to the review from Tom’s Hardware, as I myself am not too knowledgeable about Intel’s processors), which are some valid things to be concerned with, and probably why it’s so cheap. However, for budget builds, this thing is superb and i would definitely recommend it for anyone looking for good performance with a great price.

(Note: This review was part of a class project.)

MSI B550 PRO-VDH WIFI Motherboard Review

Motherboard reviews

Often with reviews its not common to see more budget-friendly options shown off, but today we’re going against the grain with the confusingly cheap B550 PRO-VDH WIFI from MSI. This motherboard costs only around 90 dollars on Newegg, which is pretty insane, even for a considerably dated motherboard like this one.

Micro-ATX in form with the AM4 PGA CPU socket, this motherboard is well suited to low-budget builds. It uses the B550 chipset and utilizes 4 sticks of DDR4 RAM, up to 128GB total. The “WIFI” in the name is of course, for the WIFI connection ability. The motherboard comes with two WIFI antennae that connect to the rear I/O panel and while rather obviously most would prefer having a LAN connection instead, its very useful for more mobile setups.

As for quality, its not bad. The only issue that could really be found was that the USB ports were a bit easy to bend out of shape. Good soldering, and the reinforcements to the PCIe connectors are very nice (though, for a budget build, it doesn’t quite make sense to get a super heavy GPU). Good quality for the pricing!

The motherboard has a variety of features, like the M.2 Shield Frozr (Essentially, a heatsink for your SSDs), and a dedicated flash BIOS button that are shown in better detail by the official MSI website linked here.

There really isn’t much else to talk about with a motherboard, other than maybe the chipset. It uses the B550 chipset. Basic but it’ll get the job done for older Ryzen CPUs.

That’s pretty much all I can think of about this thing. Affordable, and not bad.

Note:  This review is part of a classroom project.