Well, I have finally and officially joined the Cult of Ryzen and put together the parts I've been sitting on since August. I had some debate with myself about changing directions and going with Coffee Lake (as it seems has just about everyone else), but for the time being due to availability as well as pure heat output I think I am going to stick with Ryzen and maybe re-assess in 6 months or so.
So far I'm very pleased with the platform and have had none of the growing pain issues that people were reporting. Even the RAM was issue free and booted right up with the XMP profile set (thank the gods because I was in no mood to fight with this and went out of my way to make sure I was getting quality sticks).
When I get some time I'm going to dig in and go for a 3.8 or so overclock assuming that my temps remain reasonable.
The last piece of the puzzle will be finding the right G-Sync monitor for what I want, but to be honest I don't think they exist yet as I was hoping the HDR, Ultrawide, G-sync, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious marketing speak monsters would be out by now. In the meantime I was given a basically brand new Dell 30" before being laid off, which I think will be just fine to hold me over.
Build info for anyone interested.
Notes on the build and above components:
- The goal for the build was the best combination I could get of small footprint, performance, and heat/noise minimization.
- Using the NCase M1, which is tiny and challenging to build in, but extremely high quality and well put together.
- The PNY SSD is actually the 480GB model which I don't see any longer on PCPP (got a pretty good deal on this at $161 with some Jet.com sign-up shenanigans, otherwise would've gone Samsung)
- I got lucky and purchased the RAM a few months ago at what now seems like a great price. For some reason for like half a day the red version I purchased was $150 while the identical sticks in gray were $180 (actually it seems like that same random $30 price disparity is happening now).
- I went with the X370 board mostly because at the time no reviews or info was available and I wasn't sure if all of the OCing options and what not would be included on the lower-end board. Knowing what I know now I'd save myself $50 and go with the B350.
- The godforsaken gigantic and terrible front USB 3.0 connector pulled out of the motherboard and took some pins with it, so I am without front USB (I'll deal with this later if I need to, but for now I just want a working PC and it's not an issue)