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I haven't tweaked any of the software btw since the Creators Update is around the corner, but I never really thought my 290 could be considered a bottleneck for me hah.

Hey Funk, can't wait to hear how it goes. I'm pretty settled on a 1700+AB350M Gaming 3 setup, but I'm anxious about some of the stuff I've seen about other motherboards for Ryzen.

Quick impressions since it's been assembled for all of a half hour.

* Boot time is way better. Got to the not screen in about 6 seconds. Still slower than my Skylake box but do much better
* XMP just worked AFTER I flashed the latest UEFI update. 2933 is the closest Ryzen gets to the 3000 profile of my memory and that's what the board picked
* The same 3.7 at 1.275v works
* Had to reactivate Windows. Meh

Would have been so much happier with this board from the start but I'd never really had huge problems with any manufacturer in the past. I'm sure the Tomahawk will be a good board, just as I'm sure Asus's boards are.

ASUS makes fantastic motherboards. I never buy them anymore because they are especially awful at support. Two email-only 3-week-response-time tickets with extra engrish was enough for me.

Vhalidictes wrote:

ASUS makes fantastic motherboards. I never buy them anymore because they are especially awful at support. Two email-only 3-week-response-time tickets with extra engrish was enough for me.

I still buy them in spite of the lousy support. For me, the better odds of getting something that works right out of the box outweighs the pain of dealing with their tech support on those (rare) occasions where it is necessary to do so.

just brew it! wrote:

Vhalidictes wrote:

ASUS makes fantastic motherboards. I never buy them anymore because they are especially awful at support. Two email-only 3-week-response-time tickets with extra engrish was enough for me.

I still buy them in spite of the lousy support. For me, the better odds of getting something that works right out of the box outweighs the pain of dealing with their tech support on those (rare) occasions where it is necessary to do so.

My Dad feels the same way. He doesn't bother with support any more though - when the motherboards age and SATA/USB ports start to go, he just buys another ASUS board.

I guess that means their support strategy is working?

A day into this Gigabyte system and everything has been good. I've done a handful of reboots throughout the day and the system has never failed to POST or done anything weird. I've stress-tested the crap out of the system, including an overnight Prime95 run, and it was still running when I got up this morning. Just everything about it screams stability, which is awesome. The Tomahawk is on its way back to Newegg.

I guess we're basically done here, except to say I've had a couple dealings with Gigabyte support and they've always been good. Not to mention the Gigabyte-based systems themselves have been very solid—as solid as any Asus system I've built, anyway. If you're happy with your Asus gear, go for that, too.

Hopefully AM4 support turns a corner. All the Asetek-based liquid coolers are still waiting for brackets, and there hasn't been another beta for the Tomahawk in 10 days, but it probably won't be long and everything will be fine.

That's good news. Hopefully that stability will carry over to the ITX board Gigabyte is supposed to be working on at the moment.

My Ryzen build has been completed.

1800X OCed to 4.0 GHz on all cores at 1.35 volts
Corsair H60i water cooler
GIGABYTE GA AB350 Gaming
ADATA DDR4 2400 with timings lowered to 14 14 14 14 30 from the default of 17 17 17 17 39
MSI Gaming X GTX 1080 at 2012 / 5500
WD Blue SSD 240GB + Toshiba Deathstar 7200rpm 2TB
1000W FSP 80+ Bronze
NZXT Phantom
Windows 10 Pro

Can't say I'm displeased to be in the 97th percentile in FireStrike (only 92nd in Timespy though):

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/12082722

http://www.3dmark.com/spy/1424126

That's a nice looking system you've got there, ultima_trev. Should be pretty mighty for a long time to come.

And if you want to laugh and/or cry along with me, MSI has posted a beta BIOS that fixes POST times on the Tomahawk. If you're looking to build a system with it, it's a nice board but the POST times and funky RAM compatibility bugged me. If you build with Ryzen-specific RAM maybe the memory issues go away, and if the POST times are down, the Tomahawk is a very nice board.

http://msi-ftp.de:8080/login.html

login: anonym
pass: (leave it blank)

Go to BIOS > AM4. The Tomahawk is the 7A34 model. The X370 X Power Titanium is 7A31.

Not sure if I should overclock or not. I like my system being mostly quiet.

LostCat wrote:

Not sure if I should overclock or not. I like my system being mostly quiet.

You should do the opposite - keep stock clocks and undervolt. The difficulty and bragging rights are about the same.

I also like my system stable and built to last as long as possible, so there's that.

Wish I could've waited for the 1600X but at the time I didn't know when it was coming.

For me, an all-core 3.7 was candy. Barely over stock voltage and the temps even with the Wraith Spire are low...if you can believe the sensors anyway.

Sensors for the 1700 should be accurate. Supposedly AMD made a 20 C offset between tJunction and tCTL numbers for the 1700X / 1800X for some reason, thus temperatures are actually 20 C lower than what's reported.

I hope so anyhow, seeing Prime 95 had me in the low 90's for a FMA stress test and mid 80's for the blend stress test.

derFunkenstein wrote:

For me, an all-core 3.7 was candy. Barely over stock voltage and the temps even with the Wraith Spire are low...if you can believe the sensors anyway.

Yup as UT says 1700 temp sensors are reasonably accurate.
Using this-http://www.techspot.com/review/1360-amd-ryzen-5-1600x-1500x-gaming/
as a "VERY ROUGH" guide-looking at the 1060 No's your 970 should run fine-with Ryzen bowing to none.............................
enjoy...........
EDIT
I'm guessing memory setting problems are related to Infinity Fabric running at the same speed as ram.
So really important to get it UP there if possible........................................

Forgot about this thingy
https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/ryzen-master
I guess I'll try it. Will probably reset to default when not playing high end games though.
edit: recent Win10 installs won't accept the driver

My opinion so far on Ryzen 1800X versus i5 6600K... I came from an i5 6600K on a GA Z170 HD3 board which I ran 24/7 at 4.2 GHz with RAM at 2666/timings 15 15 15 30. Suicide runs in 3DMark were done at 4.5 GHz and RAM at 2800 (timings identical). RAM at 3000 proved unstable.

I run my 1800X on a GA AB350 Gaming at 3.92 GHz for 24/7 usage and 4.05 for 3DMark suicide runs. RAM (4x8G DIMMs) is too unstable at 2666 for me at any timings so for now I'm sticking to 2400/timings 14 14 14 14 30 (default for my kit is 17 17 17 17 39 BTW).

My only complaint is the variance of Combined Score results in 3DMark Firestrike. I've seen it as low as 5300 and as high as 6605, even if identical settings were used. My i5 on the other hand consistently scored around 9200.

Other than that, in games (I mostly play Witcher 3, Watch Dogs 2, Crysis 3, The Old Republic, WoW and StarCraft II) the experience is identical between them... Except in Witcher 3 and Watch Dogs 2 which seem notably smoother on the Ryzen CPU.

Standard office/desktop apps feel the same between the two.

In conclusion, I thought for sure the i5 6600K OC I had would prove better in normal desktop usage but so far it's pretty much a wash. Considering where AMD was with Bulldozer, Ryzen is all sorts of a winner.

I'm in the top 3% of Ryzen builds in UserBenchMark:

http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/3219849

103% for CPU score. For what it's worth, the average of all i7 5960X baselines is 91% and 6900K 100% even. Now only if Ryzen could overclock as well as Haswell...

Edit: Top 1% in PassMark CPU test. WTF...

http://imgur.com/a/yq2Eo

One last piece of closure for the B350 Tomahawk: MSI apparently got the POST issues solved. I figured they would. Newegg credited me back on the board, though, and after talking with customer service they didn't even hit me with the restocking fee. Apparently a lot of complaints. Anyway, the beta is posted at the link above and here's a feedback thread that seems promising. https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=283885.0

So I guess everyone is getting their collective **** together. Most importantly AMD, I suppose. I can't help but notice that Gigabyte hasn't been quite so aggressive on the BIOS front, but their latest BIOS for the AB350 Gaming 3 is pretty solid. So I'm not complaining.

derFunkenstein wrote:

One last piece of closure for the B350 Tomahawk: MSI apparently got the POST issues solved. I figured they would. Newegg credited me back on the board, though, and after talking with customer service they didn't even hit me with the restocking fee. Apparently a lot of complaints. Anyway, the beta is posted at the link above and here's a feedback thread that seems promising. https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=283885.0

So I guess everyone is getting their collective **** together. Most importantly AMD, I suppose. I can't help but notice that Gigabyte hasn't been quite so aggressive on the BIOS front, but their latest BIOS for the AB350 Gaming 3 is pretty solid. So I'm not complaining.

I haven't had any major complaints with my AB350 Gaming either.

Something's definitely wonky on the Realtek front. Still have to check something before assuming it's a software or hardware thing.

Do you mean the realtek audio or networking? The audio is supposed to be a new chip from Realtek. Not sure about the networking. I'd like there to be some boards with Intel networking onboard, but so far I haven't seen any.

Redocbew wrote:

I haven't seen any.

Gigabyte's Aorus brand motherboards have Intel networking chip along with a Realtek chip for dual Ethernet.

ASRock's X370 Killer SLI/ac and above have Intel for networking. The Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming adds an additional 5 Gb/s Ethernet port from an Aquantia(??) on top of the Intel port.

Asus' Crosshair VI Hero and Prime X370-Pro both have Ethernet from an Intel chip.

MSI's X370 Gaming Pro Carbon and X370 XPower Gaming Titanium both have Intel Inside.

Edit: See https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6 ... te_032517/

Redocbew wrote:

Do you mean the realtek audio or networking? The audio is supposed to be a new chip from Realtek. Not sure about the networking. I'd like there to be some boards with Intel networking onboard, but so far I haven't seen any.

The board I got has an ALC887. I can't really say much about that since it seems it isn't listed on Realteks site yet, but I'm not expecting that to be particularly good among onboard audio codec options.

I have to check if the cases HD audio cable is causing issues (I don't usually even connect those) or one other cable issue could be messing with things (though it's less likely) before giving up on it.

(Also honestly, for casual use based on past experience with the 82567, 82572 integrated chips and 82574 based CT desktop adapter I'd prefer Realtek networking to Intel, though I'm about to add a ASUS PCE-AC55BT so I'm guessing I'll have both in a way...don't know what chip it uses but I assume it's Intel.)

DrDominodog51 wrote:

Edit: See https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6 ... te_032517/

Nifty. Thanks for pointing that out.

haha six edits ugh i've had a weird few weeks sorry

yep, it's Intel (figured I'd try not editing again for a change) just checked the drivers I already downloaded.

who in the heck thinks a 1.5gb driver package is a good idea on that note o.o

derFunkenstein wrote:

So I guess everyone is getting their collective **** together. Most importantly AMD, I suppose. I can't help but notice that Gigabyte hasn't been quite so aggressive on the BIOS front, but their latest BIOS for the AB350 Gaming 3 is pretty solid. So I'm not complaining.

My vanilla GA AB350 Gaming has no updates beyond F2 (dated 2/20/17). Getting it to boot with DDR4-2666 and loose timings is a crap shoot so for now I'm sticking to DDD4-2400 with tighter timings.

The 3 is very important in the AB350 Gaming 3. There's a much more recent BIOS for the fancier board. I expect that all of the vendors are focusing their BIOS support on the top-end of each line. Hopefully whatever fixes have come for the Gaming 3 will make their way down to the plain old Gaming version.

So, I'm back in business with my new build. I got the bricked motherboard replaced by Newegg, and got a couple of other new things, so here's what I have now:

- Ryzen 7 1700X
- Asus Prime X370-Pro motherboard
- 16GB DDR4
- 512GB AData XPG SX8000 M.2 drive
- Windows 10 clean install

So far, everything is working perfectly and it's super fast - I'm sure the M.2 drive has a lot to do with that. I'm still installing programs, so I haven't had a chance to try any overclocking or test it out with any games or benchmarks yet.


On a side note, I've had terrible luck lately with new products I've ordered ... I guess the law of averages is still working. I've rarely had to RMA anything during the 18 years or so that I've been buying computer products, but within the last three months I've had to replace several things. The bricked motherboard was kind of my fault, but these other things just died:

- Corsair AX860i power supply - died after about three weeks; my computer was running, I shut it down, and then it would never come back up. I put the old PSU in and it worked fine.
- Asus RT-AC88U router - quit after about a week; the red "no internet connection" light came on and no amount of troubleshooting would fix it. The old router (which was a freebie from T-Mobile that I had to return) worked fine, so I know it wasn't the cable modem or anything else.
- CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD UPS - after a few days, it started beeping and showed an error code, then lost all it's charge and wouldn't charge or work properly after that

All the identical replacement items are working fine, so I don't think it was anything I did. I'm starting to get a litte gun shy about things I order.