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Hi all

I've finally decided to upgrade my ancient i5 3550 from 2012to a Ryzen 5 2600X, and I was looking for a budget but quality board to pair it with. I was thinking about purchasing the Gigabyte AB350 Gaming3 micro ATX motherboard, but I have two questions:
- Do you think there is a noticeable increase in performance between these two CPUs to make the upgrade worth it?
- Is the motherboard compatible with 2nd generation Ryzen out of the box without having to update the BIOS (I don't have any other AM4 CPU on hand).
- Will the B350 chipset hinder the performance of the Ryzen 5 2600X?

Also, I was going to purchase 16 GB of DDR4 in two 8GB sticks from Kingston, model HyperX Fury @ 3.2 GHz. Do you think this memory is good enough for the CPU?

Thanks in advance.

Depends on what you do with your computer, but probably.

Should be just fine. They had issues with the APUs but I haven't heard of 2nd gen Ryzen having issues. Would probably want to update once you get going, though.

No.

I've heard 2ng gen Ryzen are buck less picky with the memory. That's about the sweet spot for Ryzen in terms of cost and performance.

DragonDaddyBear wrote:

Depends on what you do with your computer, but probably.

Should be just fine. They had issues with the APUs but I haven't heard of 2nd gen Ryzen having issues. Would probably want to update once you get going, though.

No.

I've heard 2ng gen Ryzen are buck less picky with the memory. That's about the sweet spot for Ryzen in terms of cost and performance.

lol man you gotta proofread your posts when posting from your phone.

The B350 chipset lacks nothing the X370 has in terms of overclocking functionality. X370 just gets you more USB3 and SATA ports as well as the ability to run two GPUs.

If you're buying a B350 board make sure it has the sticker on the box saying "Ryzen 2000-series ready" since most old B350 boards sitting around in warehouses for more than 6 months are probably going to need a BIOS update to boot.

As for performance, you won't notice a huge difference in current games. There is only a small handful of titles that currently show a significant performance improvement if you give them >4 cores but expect that number to increase over time. The 2600X is probably 25% faster than your old i5 in single-threaded performance, so you'll notice a small boost to FPS if you run low-detail, high-framerate settings. At high/ultra details your GPU will still be the bottleneck in games and you'll notice no improvement, most likely.

Ryzen's real benefit is that it multitasks and multithreads like a champ. You can fire up a game, leave your browser downloads going, have streaming music services running in the background and all sorts of other stuff and it'll run smoothly. If you software encode to H.264 or H.265 it'll be around 3x quicker than your i5. Also, the move to a newer platform with NVMe support, USB 3.1 and UEFI boot will probably make just as much of an impact as the new CPU.

Finally, DDR4-3200 is pretty much the sweet spot for Ryzen. If you can afford the crazy expensive, ultra-fancy RAM, then you can also afford an 8700K

You won't notice an issue with performance on the B350 boards, but from my research it appears that the VRM on B350 boards is not as robust as the X370 series, so overclocking might not be as feasible. That said, Ryzen seems to have limited OC headroom in general, so may not be a concern for you.

Personally, if I was going for a B350 board, I'd do the Asus B350 Strix-F.

Yeah, don't worry about VRMs too much - there's little point to overvolting Ryzen to push your overclock.

When GloFo's 14nm process hits the wall, throwing more voltage makes it much hotter but not really any faster.