Budget: ~800€ for CPU + mobo (ATX, 6 or more SATA ports + m.2) + RAM (16GB) + m.2 (PCI-e, not SATA) Purpose: gaming (RPGs, Adventures, WoW), ripping+transcoding movies OCing: for the time being I don#t intend on OCing the CPU and/or the RAM
Price for the R 1700 has come down quite a bit (345€ -> 305-315€). That's the one I got recommended over the 1600X.
I was going to get the Asus Prime X370 but @Marten made me reconsider with the troubles he has with his mobo. 8x SATA would've been nice and the next best choice seems to be the Gigabyte Aorus AX370 Gaming 5 (for ~50€ more, though). Some people seem to dislike the BIOS on it, saying it lacks in features and options.
To be honest, at this point, with people complaining about the Ryzen mobo + RAM issues, I just want it to work.
In addition to that, @dinscurge tried to explain the situation with RAM and the role of Samsung B-Die with Ryzen....but I just didn't get it.
Can I still not get any RAM kit I want and use it at the advertised speeds and timings? Do I have to have RAM with Samsung B-Die to do that? Those kits are quite a bit more expensive and I would prefer not paying significantly more for the same capacity and speeds.
tl;dr - I need some recommendations of AM4 motherboards and RAM for my upgrade to Ryzen
IMO the "best" AM4 motherboards right now are the ASRock X370 Taichi and ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming. The Gigabyte GA-AX370-Gaming 5 or Gigabyte GA-AX370-Gaming K7 are not bad choices either. But that's really because those four boards have good power delivery, everything else depends on what features you want.
RAM has come a long ways with recent AGESA updates. According to Reddit, just about any RAM will function at least at 2933 (if rated for it), many other types will work at 3200+.
And dual rank will result in even lower speeds? I think I read something about that somewhere a while ago.
They're both way above what I want to spend. Kinda overkill for me.
Read @MisteryAngel 's post in a related thread about that. iirc it's also the case that B350 VRMs are considered quite shite?
I watched Wendell's video of the Aorus AX370 Gaming 5. Not quite as in-depth as I hoped. Looks okay, but for every mobo I look at customer reviews there are always some that have troubles along the lines of "bios update shot the board" and "RAM under no settings stable. Hence my insecurity about choosing a mobo.
Yeah the B350 vrm implementations are pretty poor for most boards. I would definitelly recommend to go with a X370 board. It depends a bit on what you could spend of course.
The Aorus X370 Gaming 5 is basiclly a decent board, it lacks on a B-clock generator. But other then that it basiclly has most main functions you would need. The only downside with Gigabyte / Aorus is often their bios, that could be a bit wonky. However like with every new platform, bios issues allways occure. Thats why its highly recommended to update the bios of a new board.
But it depends a bit on what your particular budget is.
I have posted a list in some topic on the forum for boards that i would recommend.
~800€ for the CPU (~310€) + mobo (150-200€, less is better) + 16GB RAM (preferably ~150€) + m.2 SSD (PCI-E protocoll so it doesn't occupy a SATA port, 240GB, ~130€)
Those are roughly 40-50€ more expensive than other 16GB kits unfortunately.
That sucks. The Gaming 5 would be my next go-to after the Asus Prime X370 Marten had so many problems with. Also, what do you mean with "a bit wonky"? Any specific known issues?
I have no idea what that is.
I've seen the list. The Biostar one seems inconsistent with the quality of components used (some very high-end, others just meh).
The Biostar X370 GT7 doesn't get shipped to my country, so that's not an option. The other ones - except the Aorus Gaming 5 - are more expensive that what I'm willing to pay.
Well i mainlly mean that out of the box Gigabyte bioses can sometimes be a bit buggy. However that basiclly count for pretty much any brand, because the am4 platform is totally new. Nowdays they have bios updates available, and i dont expect any major issues with the bios anymore. The Aorus X370 Gaming 5 is definitelly a very decend board in terms of build quality and vrm design. So as far as that is concerned its fine. B-clock generator could improve manual memory overclockings. However its not really something that is needed persee. Most motherboards nowdays should be able to run memory speeds upto 2933mhz / 3200mhz without too much problems.
I don't really intend to OC anything for now. Just want it to run stable. Maybe then a month or two later I'd look into OCing the CPU a bit, but nothing extreme. 100-200MHz would be okay for me just to get a bit more performance. If I even do it. Afterall, Ryzen has Turbo and that's more than my measly i3-4130 has.
Also, I mean the 8c/16t will be good in the future to have (I sure do hope so), but for now higher clockspeeds might be preferable (-> 1600X). Not sure about that, especially in games. Some are still singlecore heavy or poorly optimized for multicore/thread operation.
edit: Does RAM with less MHz have a significant impact on overall performance? Just noticed that I could get 16GB DDR4 2400MHz for 111€.
@Marten obviously had a problem with that board and now has to deal with the shop he bought it from, which seems to be a frustratingly slow process. That sucks. I just want to let you know that I am running exactly that board and I don't have a single problem with it. I am running the R7 1700 at 3.8GHz for months now, 32GB (4x8) 3200 G.Skill RipJaws V sticks at 2666MHz (could probably get that a bit higher with some fiddling but it just isn't on my list of priorities right now) and three PCIe cards (a Fury, a dual 10GB NIC and a m.2 SSD on a card).
Not here to say Marten is wrong or something. Just maybe don't rule it out that fast.
iirc he had 2 bios updates fail out of two. to be fair, such issues can occur with every motherboard, but I'd rather get one that isn't known to may be rendered useless after a bios update.
for ram, is basically b die is the best choice still if you want to hit the oc/advertised speed
as that speed is basically what they are able to validate on their test system but you may have different results regardless of platform, probably with a bunch of gotchas/asterisks involved.
if you just need the system to work/be stable, most any kit should work at the jedec 2133.
as far as boards unless you want to do ln2/try to get them high oc scores or something, most any decent board which has the features you want should be fine, the power draw isnt that high at all ex: if we assume 1.375v, thats a whopping 145.45amp if that power draw is cpu only. but thats only at full tilt basically, if you leave c states enabled which you can and should do, the power draw during gaming or whatever will be 33-50% lower, if we looked at say [email protected] would be 109.09 amps
so in my opinion if you do the good little boy oc, stay below 1.4v, leave cstates on etc most any board with 6+ phases for the cpu core(theres also phases for soc usually) so something 6+2 6+3, so advertised as 8> should usually be rated with a margin of increase over typical max powerdraw at oc
as, realistically anything above that wont increase oc ability in any appreciable way when your talking long term safe voltages. the super high end boards arent.. 'good enough' or 'fine', they are decadent, like buying a galax hof or evga kingpin etc
I went through every update except the beta one. No problems here. Again, just another perspective.
If your research ends at a failure count of 1, you can't buy any board. So far I have not found the kind of outcry I would expect from a real problem. I found one other topic on a failed update on that board but that was done from within windows and ... you just should not do that ... ever.
1: Asrock X370 professional gaming. 2: Asrock X370 Taichi. 3: Asus Crosshair 6 Hero. 4: Aorus X370 Gaming K7. 5: Biostar X370 Racing GT7
Midrange:
6: Aorus X370 Gaming 5. 7: Asus X370 F Strix. 8: Asus X370 Prime pro. 9: Asrock X370 gaming K4. 10: Asrock X370 Killer sli.
I suppose that you could find one of those for the right price. The midrange boards are basiclly all good enough for R7 cpu´s and overclocking. The Aorus X370 Gaming 5 is the best board from the midrange list in terms of vrm implementation. But those other midrange boards are also fine.
The Strix board is a newly released board from Asus. But from what i see it looks pretty similar to the prime to me, as far as the vrm implementation goes etc. The Strix board basiclly just comes with some rog feutures.
Yeah basiclly the Strix line of boards is Asus gamers budget line. On which the Prime line of boards is their budget mainstream line pretty much. Unfortunatlly there is no X370 prime Deluxe yet, nor is there a X370 Sabertooth unfortunatlly. I would have liked to see those, maybe something for the future who knows.
Ordered the parts. Decided to go with the Aorus AX370 Gaming 5 and just some Crucial Ballistix LT 16GB Kit 2400Mhz (Single Rank and it was only 111€ compared to most other kits starting at 150€).
CPU + mobo + m.2 SSD should arrive on wednesday, RAM on thursday (unfortunately).
