I'm building a home PC and I'm not sure what CPU and GPU to get as I'm looking for budget but also need to run programs such as SolidWorks and CAD.
I'm tossing between
AMD 3400G with no GPU $225
Or
AMD 3600 + Asus Radeon RX 570 $430
is the extra $200 worth spending? Will I have issues with the programs on just 3400g ?
P.S I don't do much gaming
The 3500x is a sweet spot for gaming, you could skip the GPU and see how you go to start.
If your CAD / Solidworks needs are demanding, consider the new new AMD 5500 xt.
Will you ever use it for gaming?
If you want to run. 3500x you need a GPU, it doesn’t have onboard graphics.
Also 3500x is not available in Aus AFAIK, but maybe can order through Aliexpress?
Don't buy an AMD GPU to run 3D rendering / productivity apps. Their drivers are incomplete (missing features) & unstable for use with them.
Unfortunately they have nowhere near the $ Nvidia have, so tend to spend it optimising gaming performance. Even there they have been quite bad lately. Tried a few 5700XT's, before giving up moving back to RTX cards.
AMD GPU's (Reference and higher-end cards such as the MSI Gaming X model were tried) were blue screening in windows and some games. Nvidia card's no issues at all when installed in the same high-end systems.
Buy the fastest CPU, and the most amount of RAM your budget allows.
System example listing types of hardware used with the AMD GPU's:
This man speaks the truth. Nvidia GTX and RTX cards have better performance and stability for CAD applications than AMD's offerings.
For a budget build, I'd be looking at 3500X, 16GB of fast RAM, and GTX 1650. GPU can be improved to better Nvidia options as budget allows. This will be a fast and very capable platform which is also capable of decent gaming.
If you're not planning to game at all, maybe consider picking up a used enterprise GPU like the Quadro K2000, which has driver optimizations aimed specifically at CAD applications.
If you can afford it then go the AMD 3600 as it is way more powerful (CPU Mark score of 9961 vs 19867) and has 2 extra cores so should give you a much better experience for multi threaded workloads. It also has a better performance to cost ratio making it arguably better value even at the higher price…