Hello everyone,
Just wanted to give my experience, good and bad, on building an affordable first gen Ryzen computer. I’m a hardware guy and I always build best bang-for-the-buck systems for myself and a few friends. I’m not a power user and I don’t need the best available hardware. It would be like paying for an exotic sports car just to go get groceries, my ford taurus works just fine. So in March of this year I decided to take advantage of the price reduction of AMD’s price reduction of it’s first gen cpus and motherboards. I was also building a system for a friend and so I purchased two 8 core cups as well as two B350 motherboards, one from Asrock and one from MSI.
You might want to cover your ears now. My friend runs Windows…Ok, safe to put your hands down now. I built his system first, loaded his OS, and ran a lot of stress tests to make sure there was no problems with his system. After a week or so of tests and running it real time I shipped it off to him.
Then I built my system. I initially loaded Linux Mint and had random lock-ups and reboots. So I switched to MX-Linux and had the same problems. After going through Xubuntu and Manjaro and still having these problems I figured I had faulty hardware. I swapped out memory, videocard, power supply, cpu, and motherboard with no fix in sight. By this time it was mid to late summer and many dollars later. I tried to search for others having these same problems and asked my friend if everything was working well for him. He was having no problems. I finally saw a video from Chris Titus Tech on youtube where he had the same problems with a new build and his fix was to change the Kernel on his system. This was what finally fixed my problems.
It is now November and with two Asrock motherboards and MSI motherboard my systems are the most stable on Liquorix series of kernels. You can find this at https://liquorix.net/ and if you’re on MX-Linux it is in the Kernel section of the popular software.
The down side to all this is that I can’t seem to get Virtualbox to run now. Not sure if it’s my kernel or my lack of understanding about what Virtalbox needs. With my old AMD-FX hardware I never had problems with it running.
I hope this saves someone out there a lot of time, money, and frustration!!!
God bless and take care,
JT