Is Ryzen 3000 Ready?

[maddogmcgee]

Mine just "puked" a moment ago. Monitor suddenly goes blank, in the middle of scrolling, USB wired keyboard and mouse lights go off, cannot even use hardware RESET button, have to force power-off. Power-on, all is fine and dandy again.

I am using 3600 RAM, and had my FCLK set to 1800 to match, so there's that, and of course, the fixed 4000Mhz OC, using a middling voltage that stock uses too, so I don't really see the problem with that.

Are we as end-users expecting too much? Spoiled by Intel platforms, where the "max turbo" is generally easily achievable as an all-core speed, with the right motherboard (Z390, or other overclocking-capable chipset), and sufficient cooling (which, with certain Intel CPUs, meant de-lidding as well).

As opposed to AMD's Zen2 platform, where "max boost" is rarely, if ever, achievable in the Real World, and heaven help you if you want a true all-core OC, running AVX2 loads. Time to underclock, to prevent screen black-outs.

Anyways, I'm back down to stock settings, except for setting XMP (DDR4-3600), not going to even adjust FCLK (defaults to 1600, so mis-matched with DRAM right now). I want to see if I get "black outs" with these settings. If I do, I might ring AMD for an RMA. Or try my luck with a 3700X next month instead.

Edit: This is all under 240mm AIO WC, and I've had the A/C going (recently cleaned my A/C, so it's actually nice and chilly in here now).

Edit: Running 12 threads of PrimeGrid PPS LLR, at "stock" CPU settings, HWMonitor is reporting my Vcore at 1.384-1.395. That's at stock. CPU speed is roughly 3.917Ghz. So not too far off from my fixed manual 4.000Ghz 1.365V manual OC. If anything, I wasn't giving it quite enough voltage, and that's why I got the blank-screen / "puke" symptoms twice thus far.

most people don't overclock so a CPU getting close to its limit at stock is actually a good thing. I still wouldn't call that 1.365 a middling all core voltage. when you are at stock it's checking the current,power and temp limits constantly and adjustingvoltage and clocks many times a second based on its boost table. with an all core overclock you are turning all that off and the letting the sustained current hit higher levels than it would otherwise.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I voted "Other." I was lucky to get a 3900X a couple days after launch, but I couldn't decide how to proceed from there based on lack of motherboard reviews, anecdotal reports of issues with many of the motherboards, and memory issues. The memory issues seem to be fairly under control, but the voltages, temps, and clocks still seem to be a work in progress. So, I ended up selling my unopened 3900X to a fellow AT member and I'm looking forward to his reports. I'll re-evaluate in the fall to decide if I want to make the leap back to another 3900x or 3950x, or maybe just a 3700X for my X370 Taichi. By then, I'm confident all the issues will be worked out.

 

[Kenmitch]

most people don't overclock so a CPU getting close to its limit at stock is actually a good thing. I still wouldn't call that 1.365 a middling all core voltage. when you are at stock it's checking the current,power and temp limits constantly and adjusting voltage and clocks many times a second based on its boost table. with an all core overclock you are turning all that off and the letting the sustained current hit higher levels than it would otherwise.

Takes the fun out of it, but it's basically how it goes with these offerings at this point in time.

Open Ryzen Master and you can somewhat see it in action. Happen so fast that we most likely only see a tiny percentage of what's going on.

I guess I got the perfect capture to enforce your talking points!

 

[yepp]

Intel Sandy Bridge was wildly successful and prompted a huge number of purchases, yet I don't remember any issues with this CPU family or any other Intel CPU family for that matter (though to be honest I haven't followed them closely). Everything just worked out of the box.

There was that whole SATA issue with P67/H67 chipset.

Edit: extide already highlighted this.

 

[IAteYourMother]

I'm running stock 3600 with the crappy stock fan and idle <50C, but I don't really push my system. 3200 cas 16 ram which is what my ram is rated for.

 

[Space Tyrant]

"A bit warm" sounds like an understatement. I have yet to see a single person whose Ryzen 3000 CPU runs below 45C at idle with an air cooler.

As I type this, my 3600X CPU temp is at 39C and my CPUTIN is at 38C (the high for the day, btw). I have Firefox with several active tabs, a terminal, and two monitoring programs active. I'm running a Wraith Spire w/120mm fan.

The CPU peak for the day occurred earlier (52C) when I ran a short benchmark thread on each core concurrently.

The CPU has jumped between 38 and 44C in the time I've typed this. At actual idle it stays consistently at 38C in a 26C ambient room -- inside my open-front desk cubby.

I don't remember the temps when it was running stock, but I did measure the entire system idling at 34.5 watts.

Granted, the stock behavior is aggressive to the point of nearly obsoleting OC'ing. Perhaps that is your complaint? I'm not a fan of the factory OC either. But here's the good news; it's trivial to turn that off.

 

[Dave3000]

I had a 3600 die on me within a day (stock settings). Was able to get it swapped, and the replacement is a little warm with the stock cooler, but totally manageable with one of my old 212 evos. It freezes up if I apply XMP profile with 3200 Bdie, but if I manually set 3000Mhz it's fine. Personally it's been way jankier than my experience with multiple Zen+ builds.

You said your PC with the Ryzen 3600 freezes up on you if you use the XMP 3200 profile but not when set to 3000? What are the non XMP profile speeds on that memory? If the memory is advertised as 3200 then it should run at 3200 without issues and if not then it's defective as you did not get what you paid for and the Ryzen 3600 officially supports up to DDR4-3200 so that CPU should not have issues with DDR4-3200.

 

[Markfw]

You said your PC with the Ryzen 3600 freezes up on you if you use the XMP 3200 profile but not when set to 3000? What are the non XMP profile speeds on that memory? If the memory is advertised as 3200 then it should run at 3200 without issues and if not then it's defective as you did not get what you paid for and the Ryzen 3600 officially supports up to DDR4-3200 so that CPU should not have issues with DDR4-3200.

Its also heavily dependent on what motherboard and what bios. I had a horrible time with my x470 until tech support emailed me a beta bios.

Its not the memory usually at this time with early bios.

 

[amrnuke]

There's a new investigation on r/AMD:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ch1kkl

Might be worth looking into.

Memory at 3600?

Zen 2 IMC is rated for 3200. 3600 is an overclock. It's worth looking into but ultimately irrelevant. The vast majority of people running Zen 2 with 3200MT/s RAM on supported motherboards are having no issues. It's the overclockers and the people who claim they should always be able to hit max advertised boosts who are having issues. That's a whole other story.

Granted, I will say that for those buying a 3900X, AMD should realize that when they themselves label the RAM MT/s sweet spot as 3600-3733, then you should probably support it better.

My answer would be - the Wraith Prism is nice. But if you're going beyond rated IMC speed and tinkering, just do the sensible thing and apply proper cooling solutions to ensure that the increased IF power draw and system heat production doesn't hamper your performance.

 

[rbk123]

Another "AMD really screwed up their release" thread. Yawn. We average about 1 a week now.

 

[lopri]

Eh, Intel hasn't had anything new since 2015. So their BIOS should be well tuned by now. X58 was a dreadful release for example. Took them months to get that sorted.

X58 was really terrible. Though the worst of them all was nForce 600/700 series. I do not remember how many times I had to reformat HDDs due to corruption.

 

[lopri]

There's a new investigation on r/AMD:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ch1kkl

Might be worth looking into.

I can confirm this. On my system it's the same way. Memory frequency equal to or higher than 1800 will keep the vcore high.

What's your cooler? What's the ambient temp? What's your thermal paste?

Cooler: Scythe Mugen (1st gen)
Paste: Generic stuff
Ambient temp: Hard to say but AC is set at 72F.

 

[Arkaign]

X58 was really terrible. Though the worst of them all was nForce 600/700 series. I do not remember how many times I had to reformat HDDs due to corruption.

Some of the old VIA chipsets were absolutely dreadful as well. And Irongate 750 or whatever the initial Slot A thing was. Oh, and Intel 820(?), the Pentium 3 RDRAM one was terrible also lol. We're almost spoiled by modern 'problems' haha.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Some of the old VIA chipsets were absolutely dreadful as well.

What, you don't like the KT266 ide controller corrupting your filesystem?

 

[extide]

Some of the old VIA chipsets were absolutely dreadful as well.

Sure they had issues, but out of all of the 3rd party chipsets back then the VIA ones were typically the best. The SiS and ALi chipsets were truly terrible!

 

[DrMrLordX]

Sure they had issues, but out of all of the 3rd party chipsets back then the VIA ones were typically the best. The SiS and ALi chipsets were truly terrible!

SiS735 rocked. It would be awesome if someone offered that level of value for Ryzen 3000 users today. ECS K7S5A 4 life!!!

 

[nicalandia]

The only condition is that I don't want to buy a new platform with certain serious issues which have been overlooked by reviewers (I don't blame them since they had little time and also they are not home users, so probably they were not concerned).

Don't buy it then, very few will miss you as a beta tester

 

[birdie]

Don't buy it then, very few will miss you as a beta tester

As I said in my OP I still have my eight years old system running perfectly (everything is the same aside from a new SSD and a new GPU) and I just want to make sure that my next purchase will be as durable. Also, "being a beta tester" doesn't really inspire confidence. Meanwhile I've decided to postpone my purchase for a few months - currently I have no pressing issues with my old system to justify any sort of hurry ;-)

 

[VirtualLarry]

As I said in my OP I still have my eight years old system running perfectly (everything is the same aside from a new SSD and a new GPU) and I just want to make sure that my next purchase will be as durable. Also, "being a beta tester" doesn't really inspire confidence. Meanwhile I've decided to postpone my purchase for a few months - currently I have no pressing issues with my old system to justify any sort of hurry ;-)

Well, you know, your loss (of performance).

 

[Arkaign]

Sure they had issues, but out of all of the 3rd party chipsets back then the VIA ones were typically the best. The SiS and ALi chipsets were truly terrible!

Haha, yeah the SiS were typically slowwwwww.

Irongate was trash. The thing that stood out about Via was the original KT133 and KT266 boards (noted directly by our beloved Anand Lal Shimpi himself on this very site) had some legit problems, fixed by the KT133a, and then the KT266a. I don't think the KT333 had issues at least.

It was one thing that definitely bugged me, went from an Epox KT266 to KT266a with an AXP 1700+ OC to 2500+, then later a 2500xp I ran at 3200+, and I remember having to buy a new board to get it to work feasibly well. Even then, the USB and HDD performance was way behind my 2.4B@3.2 on an 845 DDR board. CPU wise AMD had a fantastic product, but it wasn't until Athlon64 that I felt the mobos caught up and were golden, even starting with my early Opty socket 940 build it was just a world of improvement in QOL. Granted, I didn't spend much time with the first gen Nforce boards on Socket A, but in dealing with them with customer builds it seemed intriguing but flawed.

Socket 939/940 became far preferred by me over the 915/945 Intel boards in general.

 

[Arkaign]

SiS735 rocked. It would be awesome if someone offered that level of value for Ryzen 3000 users today. ECS K7S5A 4 life!!!

Haha oh man the Fry's special! Did you ever run any of those custom bios builds out there? That thing was completely fascinating, at one point I knew all the minor revisions and tweaks and best 4-in-1s and mods. Lot of fun budget builds.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Haha, yeah the SiS were typically slowwwwww.

Irongate was trash. The thing that stood out about Via was the original KT133 and KT266 boards (noted directly by our beloved Anand Lal Shimpi himself on this very site) had some legit problems, fixed by the KT133a, and then the KT266a. I don't think the KT333 had issues at least.

It was one thing that definitely bugged me, went from an Epox KT266 to KT266a with an AXP 1700+ OC to 2500+, then later a 2500xp I ran at 3200+, and I remember having to buy a new board to get it to work feasibly well. Even then, the USB and HDD performance was way behind my 2.4B@3.2 on an 845 DDR board. CPU wise AMD had a fantastic product, but it wasn't until Athlon64 that I felt the mobos caught up and were golden, even starting with my early Opty socket 940 build it was just a world of improvement in QOL. Granted, I didn't spend much time with the first gen Nforce boards on Socket A, but in dealing with them with customer builds it seemed intriguing but flawed.

Socket 939/940 became far preferred by me over the 915/945 Intel boards in general.

Nforce 2 was great, I had a couple of a7n8e-deluexe's with Barton cores.... Does anyone remeber that sub game that was a staple benchmark back then should go and play it againsee what it's like.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Does anyone remeber that sub game that was a staple benchmark back then should go and play it againsee what it's like.

https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Benchmarks/AquaMark.shtml
?

 

[birdie]

Tom's HW reports:

• Only one core on our Ryzen 5 3600X processor will hit AMD's rated boost frequency. AMD confirmed some cores in Ryzen 3000-series processors are faster than others, which is denoted in Ryzen Master. That means that not all cores can hit the single-core turbo frequencies. Instead, there are a mix of fast and slow cores.
• We recorded up to a ~75 - 100MHz difference between the fastest and slowest cores, with only one core reaching the single-core boost frequency. AMD hasn't shared the definition of the frequency that is acceptable for slower cores (it is rational to expect this to be the base frequency). While we recorded relatively small frequency deltas in our sample, it impacts performance and denotes a shift in AMD's binning strategy compared to the per-core turbo performance of Zen/Zen+.
• Previous-gen Ryzen processors can reach boost frequencies on all cores. Intel also says its processors can reach the turbo frequency on all cores.
• Workloads running on Ryzen 3000's slower cores experience lower frequencies than the chip's rated boost speed, and thus lower performance.
• The combination of Windows 10's new Ryzen-aware scheduler and AMD's chipset drivers allow the operating system to schedule single-threaded tasks into the fastest cores (thread pinning). AMD has previously disclosed the Windows 10 scheduler and the CPCC2 feature, but not that the combined features assign threads to the fastest cores. This functionality requires the latest version of Windows 10. This is somewhat similar to Intel's Turbo Boost Max 3.0 on its HEDT processors, but Intel doesn't set this as a requirement to reach the normal Turbo Boost 2.0 clock speeds.
• Older versions of Windows cannot schedule threads into the fastest cores as efficiently, thus resulting in lower clock frequencies and performance for Ryzen 3000-series processors in some workloads, which may be at the root of many user complaints.
• Most test utilities do not measure performance fast enough to catch bursty frequency boost activity. They also do not measure certain types of power states that could indicate higher boost activity.
• We theorize the slower cores could be a contributing factor to low overclock ceilings with Ryzen 3000 processors. Ryzen 3000 series processors hit all-core overclocks 200-300MHz below the single-core boost frequency. Slower cores simply may not be able to achieve/sustain higher frequencies, thus serving as the weakest link in the chain.

 

[naukkis]

Intel also has turbo boost max with preferred cores, they assign single core workloads to best performing core and boost it to beyond other core's max frequency. It's a way to get best performance out of silicon.