Well I did scare up a R7 260 for $140 in Canadian beer coupons, but it's an hour or so away, but comes with an older A series APU and motherboard too... bonuses, but not really much cheaper.

I brained out that it'd probably be 18 months for the power consumption difference to pay between a 260 and running the 290 full bore 24/7 if I had to pay much for one... I guess I might look at undervolting and underclocking, it might chop the wattage in half and it's not like it really will run full tilt 24/7.

So I searched for a similar looking "260" to the one the dude mentioned above is selling, and to quote Bobby Singer..

Yeah, it's an R7 250

IDK though, ima bookmark the package deal and if he drops the price I might go for it anyway, fairly okay setup to upgrade someone in the fam a bit.

Bah, I'm driving myself nuts... 3 days since I saw another "deal" and I still can't move on it...

(Boring whine: I had covid for the first week of Jan, that went away, but it left me knackered and open to... a sinus infection, yay, first round of antibiotics was weak sauce, nearly nailed it though, but 2 days later it was coming back, now on the high octane antibiotics, not sure if it's those or the infection kicking my ass.. only got energy or concentration in 5 min bursts, keep thinking yah I'll be doing better tomorrow....)

So oddly some other dude literally 4 blocks away from first dude is selling a "Doesn't work" system for cheap with an actual R9 260 in it... which is also AMD APU based.... it'd definitely be worth driving an hour for both lots.... if I could drive at the moment... well even with a driver I'm too blah to do it still really.

I got it into my head somehow that I need GCN 2.0 or above, but today I'm looking at stuff and GCN 1.0 has Vulkan support, dang. So crappy old Olands and Cape Verdes are also in play. 240s, 250s, 340s etc (and 7750, 7850 and up) ... still 7xxx APUs though.

Still shaking off the sinus infection, but maybe fate/providence stayed me from being hasty, as now I have found parts listed that would let me piece together a Ryzen system cheap and have Vega 7 graphics. Still a "maybe tomorrow" thing though for serious chasing of them.

So both APU models and Ryzen G are meant to have something where you run light duty on the iGPU and it only fires up the main GPU for heavy duty. Where can I find out what combos of APU and Ryzens work with what separate GPUs?? ... and is it a full power off or does it still leave it idling? .. 'coz normal desktop use with the GPUs power control on full whack basically just has it idling, at the 60 or 70W that the high end of range stuff idles at.

Edit:... (and re-edit, with no comments it didn't date the edit, February 17th two ohhhhhhh two two.)

Update... with feeling like crap and weather events making driving around a PITA or not very wise at all at certain points, I missed out on all those possibilities. Attempts to purchase equivalent FirePro cards were frustrated... decided to pick up cheap https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/quadro-k620.c2600 cards for my "not a space heater" with Vulkan support jollies.