Testing Games on Linux with the 5700G Mini PC and Proton

Finally, I can start testing here and first up we have cyberpunk 2077. I'm actually impressed by the performance it's definitely not perfect. We're at 720p low settings but this is working really well for an APU. Did turn V-Sync on with this one because there was so much screen tearing and it's really trying its hardest. Unfortunately, we do get those dips even down into the 30s and this is the third time I had to restart the game because it kept crashing just like this.

Next up we've got The Witcher 3 720p low settings and I actually got an average of 64fps. You'll see it go much higher than that in some spots but 64 on average isn't bad and with V-Sync on this can definitely be played on this APU at 60fps 720p low. Another one I wanted to try was Project Cars 2. Unfortunately, I don't own Forza on Steam I only have it with the Xbox and Game Pass. We're at 720p with a low-medium mix and I got an average of 65 fps out of this one. It's really not that bad and again V-Sync is your friend when it comes to these APU. It will help out with all of that screen tearing but I wouldn't mind playing this game at 60 the way it looks right now.

Here we have God of War original settings 720p no Fidelity FX on right now. We're gonna try it in a second but with the settings I have right now I got an average of 35 fps. It would be really nice to get a higher frame rate but you know we're working with an APU right now. They've done a great job porting this over to PC and the Proton version actually works way better than I ever thought it would. But I still think we can get a little more out of this game by turning Fidelity FX on.

So if we go to Performance from the settings right now our screen resolution is 720p with no scaling at all this is basically gonna take that resolution down for us. It's kinda like resolution scale but at performance when I go back into the game we're getting much better performance here and it's so close to sticking at sixty. So I just turned the V-Sync on to see what we could do.

I was really hoping that we could get a constant 60 out of this original settings 720p Fidelity FX set to Performance uh and the final game I wanted to test here was Elden Ring. It's really funny because this actually feels just like it's running on the Steam Deck. This is about the same performance I get there I average around 38 to 41 on the Steam Deck and that's really what we have over here but on this we've got 18 cores 16 threads and that older Vega 8i GPU is overclocked to 2300 megahertz. Remember we're still running DDR4 here. The Steam Deck has DDR5 and the new RDNA 2i GPU so overall when running Linux on the 5700G and playing our games through Steam with Proton I'm not seeing much of a difference in performance versus Windows 10 or Windows 11 with the 5700G. They're really not that far off from each other but in Windows I do get a little better frame rate in each of these by three to four frames which really isn't much at all. It's something you'd probably never notice.

But now that I've run these games in Linux I will test them in Windows and I'll create a short video just giving you a comparison if you're interested in it. Let me know in the comments below but I don't see a reason why you shouldn't install Linux on a mini PC like this. I mean unless you absolutely have to have Windows for certain applications and something like Game Pass is really important to some people so in the end it's really up to you.

But I had a few people asking about this video so I figured I'd go ahead and create it. If there's anything else you want to see running on this mini PC in Linux just let me know in the comments below. And like I mentioned if you're interested in building something like this whether you install Windows or Linux on it I'll leave links to all the parts used in this build in the description but that's it for this one.

Like always thanks for watching

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta primebag here again today we're gonna be putting together a pretty powerful small form factor ryzen powered mini gaming pc and when i do these builds i usually install windows but for this one we're going to be running linux on it with the recent release of the steam deck i've had a lot of viewers asking me to build something like this just to see what we could do with one of these ryzen 5000 series apus i would love to install steamos 3.0 on here but as making this video it's not available to install on a pc like this but we can install manjaro so that's what we're going to be running here it's based on arch we do have steam pre-installed there there's a lot of different things we can do with it and obviously since we're running linux on this but we want to play a lot of pc games we'll be using proton and steam just to see how this whole setup performs and if it would be worth putting something like this together specifically with linux installed moving right over to the parts used in this build as you can see there's not a lot of stuff here and we don't need a lot of stuff because we're going to be utilizing a ryzen apu i will leave links to everything used in this build in the description and when it comes to the case i opted for one of my favorites this is the in-wind chopin pro it's got a 200 watt power supply instead of the 150 with the original version but it's mini itx we've got 16 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 4 400 megahertz a 512 gigabyte nvme ssd the motherboard is an rog strix b550 gaming board and with this one i bought it refurbished unfortunately it didn't come with the i o plate little upset about that but i got it for a really good deal and i'm not going to complain because i can definitely get by without this i o plate right now i did order one but it's going to take a few weeks to get in so we're going to build it without it but we're going to get a little extra cooling in this in-wind case and we can definitely use it with the apu we're using because when this is overclocked it can actually pull a lot of wattage up to 180 watts because this is the ryzen 7 5700g it's based on zen 3 with 8 cores 16 threads and built-in radeon 8 graphics up to 2000 megahertz but for this one we're going to overclock them to 2 300 megahertz and to keep everything cool and make it fit inside of the small form factor case i'm using the thermal right axp90i with a noctua fan on top of it this is one of my favorite little low profile coolers it's 47 millimeters tall and it's constructed of copper so this is actually a really simple build i've got my cpu in place i've got my ssd in place and my cooler i'll just throw the ram in here when it comes to these ryzen apus the faster the ram the better performance you're going to get out of those integrated graphics now in the future they're going to be swapping over to ddr5 but right now i went with about as fast as i could without breaking the bank 4 400 megahertz it's running in dual channel 16 gigabyte this board has two m.2 slots we've got one on the rear and we've got the one on the front where i've placed this 512 gigabyte nvme ssd so now that i have my motherboard set up i'm going to go ahead and slide it inside of this in-wind show pan remember this is the pro version with a 200 watt pre-installed power supply no i o plate was included with this motherboard so we're gonna leave it off for now got one on the way but it does fit in here really nicely without that i o plate sometimes it just gets in the way all that's really left to do is mount the motherboard inside of the case and plug everything in try to make it look as nice as possible but this is a pretty tight case but with the way in win has this case set up if you tuck these cables properly it doesn't look too overcrowded so now what i need to do is go ahead and install linux on this nvme ssd it's a really simple process i went with the plasma version of manjaro i downloaded it from their website i flashed it with etcher to a four gigabyte usb drive i'm going to go ahead and boot to that usb drive and we'll do a quick install really easy to set up it's going to give you a nice little installation walkthrough we need to choose our location our keyboard layout the location we want to install manjaro i'm going to erase this m.2 ssd choose the name for the pc i'm going to set up a password and personally i like to set this up to log in automatically you can also encrypt the disk if you want to but for this video here i'm just going to leave that blank if you've ever installed any operating system at all you can definitely get this done manjaro has made this really easy to get this set up so now we're installing to that ssd give it a few minutes to finish up and once it's finished it'll look something like this i've just changed the desktop background all right first things first i always like to make sure i'm updated here so we'll go to updates it's going to check for updates if anything's available you can apply it right here next thing i would recommend doing is just going to the search bar and typing in hardware hardware configuration and from here you can see our video device which just happens to be a radeon vega 8. if you install the latest version of manjaro it's pretty up to date but sometimes you might want to auto install open source driver uh if you're running into issues i would recommend doing this test it out first but i'm going to go ahead and install this and as you can see i'm already up to date it just skipped it so we're good to go on the gpu driver manjaro does come pre-installed with steam so if we head down here to games you can see we have steam it'll automatically create a desktop shortcut for us log us in and if we go down our list here let's say we wanted to install uh elden ring this is going to be grayed out that's because we don't have proton enabled this is actually only built for windows but we can use proton so we're going to go to steam settings steam play and from here enable steam play for all other titles so you can use proton experimental which i've actually been doing i personally prefer using this or you can pick one from the list and if you head over to the proton database i'll leave a link in the description some games do work better with different versions so it's really up to you and the game you want to play but i'm going to go with experimental i've enabled it for all of the games choose ok steam has to restart and once steam restarts let's go back to eldon ring we can now install it so i'm going to go ahead and install a bunch of games because that's really what this is about i want to see how this performs with pc gaming in this apu while i'm waiting for some steam games to download i figured we'd test out a little bit of emulation and first up here we have ps3 using rpcs3 one thing a lot of people might be noticing since i'm running linux here is the graph on the left hand side this is giving me basically all the information i need and it definitely looks very similar to the one on the steam deck this is known as mango hud i've got it installed i actually just built it but there is an aur for it and you can enable installing aurs really easily in manjaro but we're getting really good performance here i'm sitting at 1080p and uh with this i haven't overclocked the cpu we just went to 2300 megahertz on the gpu side of things if i take this up a bit we're gonna get a lot more heat especially when playing something like this because it does use a lot of course and threads and as you can see we're already about 85 to 86 degrees celsius here but uh running this at about 4.4 gigahertz with a better cooler will definitely increase performance with rp cs3 but in my opinion this is definitely playable and we're running at 60 as you can see down there in mango hud not bad and given that we're running the 1080p does look a lot better than the 720p stock resolution so ps3 is really great with this setup here there's still some games that aren't going to work very well like god of war let's move over there now i'll just show you exactly what's going on but uh when it comes down to it this performance does have a lot to do with the games compatibility and rpcs three with a much more powerful system i've actually been able to get this to run pretty decently but i've never really been able to get a stable 60 especially in this beginning part here there's just a lot going on in the future this will definitely work a lot better on lower end systems but even if you go over to their website and check the compatibility of this game it just says in game and not playable now that my games are finished downloading i can finally start testing here and first up we have cyberpunk 2077 i'm actually impressed by the performance it's definitely not perfect we're at 720p low settings but this is working really well for an apu i did turn v-sync on with this one because there was so much screen tearing and it's really trying its hardest but unfortunately we do get those dips even down into the 30s and this is the third time i had to restart the game because it kept crashing just like this next up we've got the witcher 3 720p low settings and i actually got an average of 64fps you'll see it go much higher than that in some spots but 64 on average isn't bad and with vsync on this can definitely be played on this apu at 60fps 720p low another one i wanted to try was project cars 2. unfortunately i don't own forza on steam i only have it with the xbox and game pass we're at 720p with a low medium mix and i got an average of 65 fps out of this one it's really not that bad and again vsync is your friend when it comes to these apus it will help out with all of that screen tearing but i wouldn't mind playing this game at 60 the way it looks right now here we have god of war original settings 720p no fidelity fx on right now we're gonna try it in a second but with the settings i have right now i got an average of 35 fps it would be really nice to get a higher frame rate but you know we're working with an apu right now uh they've done a great job porting this over to pc and the proton version actually works way better than i ever thought it would but i still think we can get a little more out of this game by turning fidelity fx on so if we go to performance from the settings right now our screen resolution is 720p with no scaling at all this is basically gonna take that resolution down for us it's kinda like resolution scale but at performance when i go back into the game we're getting much better performance here and it's so close to sticking at sixty but since we're not sticking at sixty we got a lot of screen tearing going on so i just turned the v-sync on to see what we could do i was really hoping that we could get a constant 60 out of this original settings 720p fidelity fx set to performance uh and the final game i wanted to test here was eldon ring it's really funny because this actually feels just like it's running on the steam deck this is about the same performance i get there i average around 38 to 41 on the steam deck and that's really what we have over here but on this we've got 18 cores 16 threads and that older vega 8i gpu is overclocked to 2300 megahertz remember we're still running ddr4 here the steam deck has ddr5 and the new rdna 2i gpu so overall when running linux on the 5700g and playing our games through steam with proton i'm not seeing much of a difference in performance versus windows 10 or windows 11 with the 5700g they're really not that far off from each other but in windows i do get a little better frame rate in each of these by three to four frames which really isn't much at all it's something you'd probably never notice but it's still a little early for gaming on linux i mean this is really gonna blow up since the steam deck was released and as soon as steam os 3.0 is officially released and we can install it on different pcs there's going to be a ton of optimizations for all of these games but now that i've run these games in linux i will test them in windows and i'll create a short video just giving you a comparison if you're interested in it let me know in the comments below but i don't see a reason why you shouldn't install linux on a mini pc like this i mean unless you absolutely have to have windows for certain applications and something like game pass is really important to some people so in the end it's really up to you but i had a few people asking about this video so i figured i'd go ahead and create it if there's anything else you want to see running on this mini pc in linux just let me know in the comments below and like i mentioned if you're interested in building something like this whether you install windows or linux on it i'll leave links to all the parts used in this build in the description but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching youhey what's going on everybody it's eta primebag here again today we're gonna be putting together a pretty powerful small form factor ryzen powered mini gaming pc and when i do these builds i usually install windows but for this one we're going to be running linux on it with the recent release of the steam deck i've had a lot of viewers asking me to build something like this just to see what we could do with one of these ryzen 5000 series apus i would love to install steamos 3.0 on here but as making this video it's not available to install on a pc like this but we can install manjaro so that's what we're going to be running here it's based on arch we do have steam pre-installed there there's a lot of different things we can do with it and obviously since we're running linux on this but we want to play a lot of pc games we'll be using proton and steam just to see how this whole setup performs and if it would be worth putting something like this together specifically with linux installed moving right over to the parts used in this build as you can see there's not a lot of stuff here and we don't need a lot of stuff because we're going to be utilizing a ryzen apu i will leave links to everything used in this build in the description and when it comes to the case i opted for one of my favorites this is the in-wind chopin pro it's got a 200 watt power supply instead of the 150 with the original version but it's mini itx we've got 16 gigabytes of ddr4 running at 4 400 megahertz a 512 gigabyte nvme ssd the motherboard is an rog strix b550 gaming board and with this one i bought it refurbished unfortunately it didn't come with the i o plate little upset about that but i got it for a really good deal and i'm not going to complain because i can definitely get by without this i o plate right now i did order one but it's going to take a few weeks to get in so we're going to build it without it but we're going to get a little extra cooling in this in-wind case and we can definitely use it with the apu we're using because when this is overclocked it can actually pull a lot of wattage up to 180 watts because this is the ryzen 7 5700g it's based on zen 3 with 8 cores 16 threads and built-in radeon 8 graphics up to 2000 megahertz but for this one we're going to overclock them to 2 300 megahertz and to keep everything cool and make it fit inside of the small form factor case i'm using the thermal right axp90i with a noctua fan on top of it this is one of my favorite little low profile coolers it's 47 millimeters tall and it's constructed of copper so this is actually a really simple build i've got my cpu in place i've got my ssd in place and my cooler i'll just throw the ram in here when it comes to these ryzen apus the faster the ram the better performance you're going to get out of those integrated graphics now in the future they're going to be swapping over to ddr5 but right now i went with about as fast as i could without breaking the bank 4 400 megahertz it's running in dual channel 16 gigabyte this board has two m.2 slots we've got one on the rear and we've got the one on the front where i've placed this 512 gigabyte nvme ssd so now that i have my motherboard set up i'm going to go ahead and slide it inside of this in-wind show pan remember this is the pro version with a 200 watt pre-installed power supply no i o plate was included with this motherboard so we're gonna leave it off for now got one on the way but it does fit in here really nicely without that i o plate sometimes it just gets in the way all that's really left to do is mount the motherboard inside of the case and plug everything in try to make it look as nice as possible but this is a pretty tight case but with the way in win has this case set up if you tuck these cables properly it doesn't look too overcrowded so now what i need to do is go ahead and install linux on this nvme ssd it's a really simple process i went with the plasma version of manjaro i downloaded it from their website i flashed it with etcher to a four gigabyte usb drive i'm going to go ahead and boot to that usb drive and we'll do a quick install really easy to set up it's going to give you a nice little installation walkthrough we need to choose our location our keyboard layout the location we want to install manjaro i'm going to erase this m.2 ssd choose the name for the pc i'm going to set up a password and personally i like to set this up to log in automatically you can also encrypt the disk if you want to but for this video here i'm just going to leave that blank if you've ever installed any operating system at all you can definitely get this done manjaro has made this really easy to get this set up so now we're installing to that ssd give it a few minutes to finish up and once it's finished it'll look something like this i've just changed the desktop background all right first things first i always like to make sure i'm updated here so we'll go to updates it's going to check for updates if anything's available you can apply it right here next thing i would recommend doing is just going to the search bar and typing in hardware hardware configuration and from here you can see our video device which just happens to be a radeon vega 8. if you install the latest version of manjaro it's pretty up to date but sometimes you might want to auto install open source driver uh if you're running into issues i would recommend doing this test it out first but i'm going to go ahead and install this and as you can see i'm already up to date it just skipped it so we're good to go on the gpu driver manjaro does come pre-installed with steam so if we head down here to games you can see we have steam it'll automatically create a desktop shortcut for us log us in and if we go down our list here let's say we wanted to install uh elden ring this is going to be grayed out that's because we don't have proton enabled this is actually only built for windows but we can use proton so we're going to go to steam settings steam play and from here enable steam play for all other titles so you can use proton experimental which i've actually been doing i personally prefer using this or you can pick one from the list and if you head over to the proton database i'll leave a link in the description some games do work better with different versions so it's really up to you and the game you want to play but i'm going to go with experimental i've enabled it for all of the games choose ok steam has to restart and once steam restarts let's go back to eldon ring we can now install it so i'm going to go ahead and install a bunch of games because that's really what this is about i want to see how this performs with pc gaming in this apu while i'm waiting for some steam games to download i figured we'd test out a little bit of emulation and first up here we have ps3 using rpcs3 one thing a lot of people might be noticing since i'm running linux here is the graph on the left hand side this is giving me basically all the information i need and it definitely looks very similar to the one on the steam deck this is known as mango hud i've got it installed i actually just built it but there is an aur for it and you can enable installing aurs really easily in manjaro but we're getting really good performance here i'm sitting at 1080p and uh with this i haven't overclocked the cpu we just went to 2300 megahertz on the gpu side of things if i take this up a bit we're gonna get a lot more heat especially when playing something like this because it does use a lot of course and threads and as you can see we're already about 85 to 86 degrees celsius here but uh running this at about 4.4 gigahertz with a better cooler will definitely increase performance with rp cs3 but in my opinion this is definitely playable and we're running at 60 as you can see down there in mango hud not bad and given that we're running the 1080p does look a lot better than the 720p stock resolution so ps3 is really great with this setup here there's still some games that aren't going to work very well like god of war let's move over there now i'll just show you exactly what's going on but uh when it comes down to it this performance does have a lot to do with the games compatibility and rpcs three with a much more powerful system i've actually been able to get this to run pretty decently but i've never really been able to get a stable 60 especially in this beginning part here there's just a lot going on in the future this will definitely work a lot better on lower end systems but even if you go over to their website and check the compatibility of this game it just says in game and not playable now that my games are finished downloading i can finally start testing here and first up we have cyberpunk 2077 i'm actually impressed by the performance it's definitely not perfect we're at 720p low settings but this is working really well for an apu i did turn v-sync on with this one because there was so much screen tearing and it's really trying its hardest but unfortunately we do get those dips even down into the 30s and this is the third time i had to restart the game because it kept crashing just like this next up we've got the witcher 3 720p low settings and i actually got an average of 64fps you'll see it go much higher than that in some spots but 64 on average isn't bad and with vsync on this can definitely be played on this apu at 60fps 720p low another one i wanted to try was project cars 2. unfortunately i don't own forza on steam i only have it with the xbox and game pass we're at 720p with a low medium mix and i got an average of 65 fps out of this one it's really not that bad and again vsync is your friend when it comes to these apus it will help out with all of that screen tearing but i wouldn't mind playing this game at 60 the way it looks right now here we have god of war original settings 720p no fidelity fx on right now we're gonna try it in a second but with the settings i have right now i got an average of 35 fps it would be really nice to get a higher frame rate but you know we're working with an apu right now uh they've done a great job porting this over to pc and the proton version actually works way better than i ever thought it would but i still think we can get a little more out of this game by turning fidelity fx on so if we go to performance from the settings right now our screen resolution is 720p with no scaling at all this is basically gonna take that resolution down for us it's kinda like resolution scale but at performance when i go back into the game we're getting much better performance here and it's so close to sticking at sixty but since we're not sticking at sixty we got a lot of screen tearing going on so i just turned the v-sync on to see what we could do i was really hoping that we could get a constant 60 out of this original settings 720p fidelity fx set to performance uh and the final game i wanted to test here was eldon ring it's really funny because this actually feels just like it's running on the steam deck this is about the same performance i get there i average around 38 to 41 on the steam deck and that's really what we have over here but on this we've got 18 cores 16 threads and that older vega 8i gpu is overclocked to 2300 megahertz remember we're still running ddr4 here the steam deck has ddr5 and the new rdna 2i gpu so overall when running linux on the 5700g and playing our games through steam with proton i'm not seeing much of a difference in performance versus windows 10 or windows 11 with the 5700g they're really not that far off from each other but in windows i do get a little better frame rate in each of these by three to four frames which really isn't much at all it's something you'd probably never notice but it's still a little early for gaming on linux i mean this is really gonna blow up since the steam deck was released and as soon as steam os 3.0 is officially released and we can install it on different pcs there's going to be a ton of optimizations for all of these games but now that i've run these games in linux i will test them in windows and i'll create a short video just giving you a comparison if you're interested in it let me know in the comments below but i don't see a reason why you shouldn't install linux on a mini pc like this i mean unless you absolutely have to have windows for certain applications and something like game pass is really important to some people so in the end it's really up to you but i had a few people asking about this video so i figured i'd go ahead and create it if there's anything else you want to see running on this mini pc in linux just let me know in the comments below and like i mentioned if you're interested in building something like this whether you install windows or linux on it i'll leave links to all the parts used in this build in the description but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching you\n"