Ryzen short cuts

Well the vrm implementations on B350 boards are all pretty poor from i have seen till now.
B350 boards shouldnt really be used with R7 cpu´s, especially not wenn overclocking.

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Maybe this helps:

This may be educational regarding B350 VRMs. The guy who made this video used to be on the Asus Overclocking team and does know his stuff.

absolutely, i should have gotten a better quality x370 board. that was a mistake, and yes, upgrade is on my short list of things to do. only meant to say that i doubt this had anything to do with my particular problems.

Yeah well i have done vrm analytics on motherboards and video cards,
pretty much since the X58 era of motherboards.
i have looked into most of the B350 board vrm implementations.
And all i can say is, they are all very poor.
I’m very dissapointed seeing the actual components that are used,
in the vrm implementations on B350 boards.
And also some of the actual layouts of said boards are not very great either.
But yeah of course there is a reason why they are that cheap.
I just dont recommend to use an R7 cpu overclocked on any B350 board really.
But rather just invest a few bucks more and buy a decent X370 instead.

List of best Ryzen AM4 X370 boards in order to buy.
Based on vrm implementations and feutures.

  • Highend:

1: Asrock X370 Professional Gaming.
2: Asrock X370 Taichi.
3: Asus Crosshair VI Extreme.
4: Asus Crosshair VI Hero.
5: Aorus X370 Gaming K7.
6: Biostar X370 Racing 7.

  • Midrange:

1: Aorus X370 Gaming 5.
2: Asus X370-F Strix Gaming.
3: Asus X370 Prime pro.
4: Asrock X370 Fatality Gaming K4.
5: Asrock X370 Killer Sli.

  • The best of the poor B350 boards in terms of max current capabilities on the vrm.
    But they are still pretty poor regardless.

1: Msi B350 pro gaming carbon.
2: Msi B350 Krait gaming.

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Its been awhile now with my RMA system. I only flipped one thing. Since it got back

Even with VM’s and gaming at the same time which I wanted struggle to hit temps of 50C.

The problem is I run an RX 480 so from the benchmarks I see I dont dont need to overclock the CPU anymore regardless and its hardly trying. Maybe I am over shooting to all the tech tuber testing with 1080TI’s that I wont have that performance for 4 years when it down to $200USD.

Im tending to agree with you. It seems like new gen CPU’s now there are core wars need VRM cooling and MB makers are use to just putting cool looking plastic over them so clear cases look good and it’s biting them in the arse.

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I agree 100%

I really don’t understand why none of the manufacturers have not worked out that there is a a market for a higher end B350 board with a decent VRM. The Asus Strix board comes closest but it still leaves a bit to be desired i think.

There is room for a bit of price overlap between high end B350 and low end x370. Give me 6 sata ports,some more USB, a decent VRM and BCLK adjustment and I would consider paying $150 for a good b350 board. I dont need the SLI functionality but as it stands now, to get what I want, I have to go x370.

Unfortunately, because of the years of piledriver that only the budget end of the market would consider, the manufacturers are still stuck in the budget mindset when it comes to designing boards. If Im honest, it still seems to me that all the Ryzen boards in design language terms are about 4-5 years behind where say a z270 board is.

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z270 is OC-capable, premium-ish chipset, which compares more with x370 than b350, imo. Design-wise, I’d say the prime x370 pro is pretty decent no frills offering, but memory support isn’t where it should be.

Uhm … running ripjaws V 3200 at 2933 on 4 x 8GB. Sooo, it’s not that horrible.

grateful for the data point. :wink:

Yeah i´m kinda dissapointed about that aswell.
A higherend B350 board would have been nice.
Maybe we get some better B350 boards in the near future who knows.
Ryzen is really starting to become a succes formula as it seems now.

Yeah of course it depends allot on which particular platform,
and what kind of motherboards you look at.
vrm heatsinks on certain boards are really a laught yeah.
Especially on the lowerend entry level market.
Believe me, motherboards with decent feuture set for cheap are cheap for a reason.
And that reason is pretty much allways the vrm implementation.
Thats why i allways recommend to not cheap out on a motherboard too much.
The motherboard is still one of the most important parts of a system imo.

B350 and x370 are also OC capable. You are right, the designs are “no frills”. That is exactly my point.

I am not saying that Ryzen is in anyway bad, just that the design language is about 5 years behind Intel boards.

Remember that these are the first boards for AMD that natively support USB 3,
They are the first boards that support PCIe 3.0
The VRMs for the most part are lacking compared to intel.
No Thunderbolt,
No Optane/Micron equivalent support

In terms of features, they are not really any more advanced than a z77 board

Well A88X fm2+ boards also had pci-e 3.0 support.
This was the platform for the Kaveri apu´s and such.
But am3+ boards for FX series processors didnt indeed.

the USB 3 would have been a manufacturer add on, not part of the chipset.

AMD CPUs only started supporting PCIe 3.0 with Ryzen. Previous to that it was only PCIe 2.0 as far as I am aware… I am not coming down on AMD CPUs, just telling my reasons for feeling that the x3709 and B350 boards feel dated. z77 was a good chipset

I think you have just become used to look at high end Z170 and Z270 boards. The Crosshair was a day one board, the Taichi, the Aorus whatever they called the top dog… there are already some really nice boards available and the new ones are on the same level as their Z270 counterparts, at least.

OK, TB and optane are intel exclusive as far as I know. And to be honest both technologies are kind of pointless in their Z270 implementation. VRM design is fine on higher end boards and subpar on the cheap ones. No difference to the Intel side. And ports… well they have those, what is your point?

Where? I don’t see it?

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You seem to be missing the point. Z170 and z270 are the competition to which they are being compared. I am not saying that the AMD boards are trash or faulty, some like the taichi are good boards, just trailing behind in the latest cutting edge technology. I also understand that AMD does not have the same levels of R&D budget as intel as well but to a consumer, that doesnt really matter when they are spending their hard earned $

Optane is the Intel brand name of a joint Intel/Micron development. Micron have the opportunity to sell their own range of products that have stemmed from that development. There is no reason why, for example, AMD could not have incorporated the Micron branded equivalent.

Likewise, thunderbolt is just a mechanism to extend the PCIe bus outside the case while wrapping it in a proprietary wrapper. There is actually a standard for external pcie that is not thunderbolt. USB-C is open and just an electrical connector that is already supporting x4PCIe traffic wrapped in thunderbolt 3 protocol.

There is no reason why they could not have included an external pcie connector, even through USB-c if they wanted to. There is no need to encapsulate the pcie traffic in a wrapper. They already support ECC memory, setting up 32GB/s communications backplanes that can be daisy chained between ryzen, threadripper and epyc machines has just taken the entire bottom half of the supercomputer market for the cost of a few connectors given that threadripper and epyc at least has solved the problem of having more pcie than most people need problem.

eGPU for laptops becomes trivial, imagine an affordable rx 570 gaming laptop playing games running in crossfire with an enclosure that only costs $100.

Affordable 8GB/s external storage enclosures anyone? You can potentially do all that with thunderbolt now provided you are happy with the intel tax. It seems that the market is not overly interested in doing that though.

All that happens and it kills thunderbolt pretty much immediately. Zen is already engineered to split off pcie lanes down to the x1 level so implementing and creating a brand for it would not be that difficult for AMD to achieve. external pcie adapter cards for non amd PCs would be fairly easy to produce as well if you wanted to really open up the market.

As it stands now, other than the Zen based chips, there is nothing except nvme on AMD motherboards that was not available on a z97 motherboard from 2014. If you exclude the two usb 3.1 gen2 ports, Then it dates back to z77.

Optane as a disk cache, IMO will be as successful as IRST SSD caching was but where I do see potential with that type of technology is to turn it around and make the tech into a multi gigabyte L4 cache for CPUs using a DIMM form factor instead of an M.2 slot

Aside from the fact that even theoretically TB3 tops out at 5GB/s, those use cases are just not interesting on a desktop mobo. TB3 or any form of external PCIe could be great on mobile devices. But as long as we are talking desktop mobos you just put your drives and GPUs into the damn computer. If you want to deal with external everything … hey, you could buy a trashcan mac. :wink:

We already have a multi gigabyte L4 cache, it’s called RAM. Optane (or the micron whatever) tech is amazing, no doubt. But let’s not make it a bigger thing than it is. Optane is for drives, like current NAND tech. And we don’t need any special implementation for that.