New Ryzen 2700x + Gigabyte X470 Aorus gaming 7 build unstable on Linux

Hi Folks,

I’m looking for some ideas on debugging my new build. Does anyone have any experience with the new Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 Wifi motherboard with Linux? I’m finding my system crashes after a few seconds running the latest Ubuntu or Fedora LiveCD. Not sure if this is a hardware or a software issue.

Here is my new “silent workstation” setup:

  • motherboard: Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 Wifi
  • CPU: Ryzen 2700x
  • Cooler: Be Quiet Dark Rock Pro 4
  • RAM: 64GB Crucial 2400Mhz ECC (on the QVL; maybe will try overclocking later)
  • GPU: GIgabyte Radeon 550
  • Power: Corsair 550W
  • SSD: WD Blue 3D NAND 2TB
  • Case: Fractal Design Define C

Problems:

  1. As I’ve mentioned, both the Ubuntu and Fedora liveCDs crash (total system freeze) after running for a few seconds. The exact number of seconds varies.

  2. For some reason the SSD was not detected – does not show up in the bios and also did not show up in the CentOS installer – so for the moment I’ve removed it.

  3. Also, I noticed the BIOS reports very low CPU temperatures, ~14-19 C, whereas all the other temperature readings have been ~25 C. This seems strange to me. The ambient temperatures here have been 60-70 F recently. I didn’t think to check if the CPU was below ambient temperature when I was working on it, which might make sense to do.

I’ve run Memtest86 and no errors were reported, and also swapped out the graphics card for an old one, but the problem persists. Gigabyte has some BIOS updates so I could try that. I could also maybe try Arch linux, which might have a new kernel, or Windows (would have to buy a copy). I was looking for boot CDs which could test the CPU or motherboard, but couldn’t get anything to boot (probably UEFI issues).

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Definitelly update the bios if Gigabyte has a newer bios version.

Can we create a sticky thread, that warns users of incompatibility of new hardware with day1 linux support?
Or are we going to comment on every thread about how to allow developers some time to add the hardware for full support on every motherbord/cpu/apu/laptop etc?

Try running a newer kernel to see if the problem persists. Otherwise buying newly released hardware and expecting linux to work on day1 is pretty optimistic my dude (even though optimism is good)

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Yeah, maybe I was over-optimistic, but a video from this website had good results with two other X470 motherboards, and the same CPU, on slightly older linux versions:

I bought this particular board because of the offical ECC support (with actual part numbers listed in the memory compatiblity list).

I’ll try updating the BIOS and then maybe Arch linux if that isn’t sufficient. Thanks for your thoughts guys.

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Well the X470 chipset boards and the Zen+ cpu’s are basiclly just a refresh of Ryzen and X370 chipset with some minor improvements.
So it basiclly should work on newer hardware enablement kernels for the most part.

But Gigabyte biosses on first releases can be a littlebit wonky in general.
So as soon as there is an update, then its highlly recommended to apply.

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It seems the issue was the CPU VCore voltage, which I had lowered from the default of “auto”, which tends to run pretty high (according to what I have read), ~1.4V. When I reset it back to “auto” it stopped crashing. I wasn’t able to get it to run even at 1.35V.

The SSD is still not recognized, even after a bios update, so my best guess is that it is just faulty.

WiFi is not recognized on the livecd but that’s the kind of problem I would expect.

Hoping I can get everything working!

Refresh or not. Improvements are made. Full compatibility takes more than 1 day. So no there is absolutely no guarantee that it will work. (which is why a sticky thread for it, is a good idea)

Also bios updates, may be good for the motherboard overall (depending on what it improves) still that does not make it magically work with linux in 99% of cases.

It turns out I was plugging the SSD into the wrong M.2 slot; only one of them has SATA support, namely, the other one. Thanks to Gigabyte tech support for pointing this out. However, I need an extra standoff to secure the SSD to the motherboard, and neither the SSD nor the mobo came with one … the existing ones do not come off. Sigh.

These general comments aren’t particularly helpful. In fact it turns out my issues have had nothing to do with linux so far (except perhaps the wifi, which I am not worried about at the moment). Maybe you can discuss them in a separate thread … ?

Well, just want to thank everyone for reading and commenting. The system works fine and linux is stable. It is super quiet and runs cool under load. The sound works. The wifi wasn’t supported out of the box (on Ubuntu), but I haven’t spent much time trying to get it to work; i have a little USB wifi nub that works fine.

However, I realized after getting this thing working that Intel MKL library is specifically not optimized for AMD processors, and I use MKL for my work, so, after all this wrangling I’m going to return things and build an Intel system … oh well!! Life!! Wish I realized it earlier but the new Ryzen processors were so tempting and I just didn’t think of it at the time.

Cheers,
Chris

Whilst i do agree with the thread sticky, it’s because i think it is necessary because this should be something we can expect, as Windows is compatible generally on day 1.

Driver support is one thing the average joe might expect issues with but system crashes is not.

I’m just curious:

  1. Did you get ECC mode working ?
  2. Have you any experience of how faster MKL , or any particular routine of it, is on Intel compared to AMD?