I picked up the Ryzen 9 7900x combo yesterday. I miss the power button that was on the Aorus Master, otherwise the B650E-F MB is great. I was able to turn on XPO in the BIOS and it worked the first try. The combo price is what the 7900x CPU's MSRP was at launch. I wonder how MC does it as you are not forced to buy a bunch of other stuff while in the store?
My 1TB M.2 boot drive would not work, while booting it also said it needed to enter repair mode. Unlike with the previous attempts it actually did. Nothing I tried fixed it. I tried booting from USB Win 11 install disk and repairing, then ended up wiping and reinstalling and it didn't work. I attached a 256GB SATA SSD that had been used on other system in dual boot mode Win/Linux. It had only Mint Linux installed. Widows could not use it. So, I tried installing Linus Mint, but until I manually deleted the partitions and recreated them Linux wouldn't install. So, I've ordered a new M.2 SSD that will be here tomorrow. In the meantime I can play Linux.
Linux Mint does not have drivers for Radeon Graphics yet. So, there is no video hardware acceleration. Things like YouTube work, but I've had 2 Firefox tabs crash. After going through Windows install with both 10 and 11 multiple times yesterday, then installing Linux Mint I'm really impressed at how some things just work better on Linux. With Linux you boot into it from USB drive, then it sees that you have WiFi and wants to connect. I press WPS button and instantly I'm connected with no need to type in password. You can run it like that to check it out, then you click an icon to do the install.
Before heading out yesterday morning I read a review on PCWorld for the 7900x and they made a big deal about the TDP being really high. I was concerned that the 240MM AIO would not be enough to cool it properly. I actually asked a manager at MC about taking the 7700x from another combo, he said that couldn't be done. On my 1.5 hour ride home I remembered that ECO mode can drastically reduce the heat and not make that much difference in performance. So, that relieved my angst. As you can see from the picture below, I'm doing my setup with a Noctua air cooler and no issues.
Well, all I can do now is await the M.2.......
John