Question Zen 4 builders thread

[Markfw]

I know its early, but as someone pointed out, I better get my ram now before the scalpers are all over it.

To go with a 7950x, what do you think of this ram:

https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-288-pin-ddr5-sdram/p/N82E16820374369?Item=N82E16820374369

(edited for my best recommendation, 12/5/2023)

 

[In2Photos]

it's possible. One of the youtubers the one that's a fair bit wide with silver hair, Jay i think had a similar issue of being able to boot with crashes and lockups, and then booting into the nothing ether of a black screen. he narrowed it down to psu, mobo, ram or cpu. I didn't catch the end but from what I gather now it was the ram slots causing trouble on a new board. this seems to be an issue with amd boards recently and I'm not sure why. does the x670 spec use a unique ram topology compared to Z690/790?

Yup. He had an Asus board fail on him. As I was reading the post from pj I was thinking this sounded a lot like JayzTwoCents issue.

 

[A///]

Yup. He had an Asus board fail on him. As I was reading the post from pj I was thinking this sounded a lot like JayzTwoCents issue.

sorry I think you misread mate. the board or something failed on him, it didn't fall on him. Your post doesn't make much sense! His and this forum member's troubles are two of the several I've seen recently. initially i understood it to be an asus issue but i've seen similar issues mentioned elsewhere with other makers, which is why i asked if the am5 boards use a unique ram topology compared to z790. it could be a bad batch of onboard components going to all the aibs because I don't think they manufacture everything but assemble it all. idk what the board component crossover is like with z790 and I'm shooting blind here.

 

[In2Photos]

sorry I think you misread mate. the board or something failed on him, it didn't fall on him. Your post doesn't make much sense! His and this forum member's troubles are two of the several I've seen recently. initially i understood it to be an asus issue but i've seen similar issues mentioned elsewhere with other makers, which is why i asked if the am5 boards use a unique ram topology compared to z790. it could be a bad batch of onboard components going to all the aibs because I don't think they manufacture everything but assemble it all. idk what the board component crossover is like with z790 and I'm shooting blind here.

So you said you didn't catch the end of the video and you're telling me I'm wrong? Okay.

 

[A///]

So you said you didn't catch the end of the video and you're telling me I'm wrong? Okay.

not quite. upon rereading your post it looks like I misread it. I thought you said the board fell on him not failed, I read fail as fall and wondered what you were on. Last time I try reading without glasses on.

 

[MarkPost]

Insanely long boot times vs my old 3770k rig which was nearly instant on a dinosaur ssd. I feel like I am back on my old Pentium 133 rig with a spinning drive.

Go to BIOS and set "memory context restore" to enabled (and to avoid issues with this setting, set "dram power down" to enabled too)

 

[DrMrLordX]

Full tower with 20 Gbps port built in? gr701 or check out phanteks but their stuff may be limited to 10. Corsair full towersworth checking.

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811173052

$500 is steep but very unique look to it.

It's bigger than I would like. Part of the reason why I want to get away from my Thor v2 is that it's a pita to lug it around when I need to move it. That front panel is perfect though.

Use the EATX board in a different PC. You know, as a backup when the primary one is busy doing something else with all cores at 100%.

What? No! This is going to be my main rig, why would I do anything like that?!?

 

[IEC]

I spent all day yesterday swapping in the new parts and everything worked fine with DOCP II and PBO enabled with -15 curve optimizer all core... Was getting some BSODs / boot failures so I started backing off on the offsets until it was basically -15 on everything except two cores which were -20.

If your RAM passes stress testing... it's most likely your CPU undervolt.

I had a similar experience and this is why I don't use curve optimizer any more, period. Both major CPU vendors default behavior is to boost to the moon (i.e. overclocked at stock). Everything seems fine on moderate to high CPU loads when testing as max frequency decreases for the load, but any light load like loading windows or near-idle can trigger instability as you can instantaneously boost to 5.7GHz+ and the undervolt hits a brick wall at the limits of the silicon. In the worst case, you corrupt and hose your windows install. I had to restore from an image the last time I messed with CO... which fortunately was only a few days old.

 

[Timmah!]

If you turn on the PBO enhancement, it has some CO changes built-in within the setting, right?

If yes, what happens if you still enable CO and set-up the values manually? Will it over-rule the values that are part of the Enhancement setting?

I was playing with it the other day, tried several more or less basic approaches. Out of the box (with BIOS 805) the performance as measured by CB23 was bit disappointing, under 2K ST and about 37,3k MT score, as the cpu boosted barely past 5GHz, not even 5GHz on all the cores in MT.

So aside of turning on DOCP IO, i tried simply turning on PBO Enhancement lvl 3 - this increased the single core score to cca 2030, but the MT one was still under 38k, cause the clocks were still about 5075 on average.
As an alternative i tried the AI optimized setting for Core Ratio, this improved MT to almost 39k, cause clocks now 5250/5175 in MT, but the ST ones 5500 max and scores once again under 2k.

Finally i tried the Dynamic OC Switcher, set all-core to 5250/5175, and PBO per core to 5750/5550 per ccx (with 2 best above 120SP cores to 5850), additionally turned Enhancement lvl3 on, as well Medium Boostit. Kept CO at auto and any voltage settings as well. This finally brings both high ST and MT clocks and scores (2050~2070ST, 38,8k MT). The MT power-draw is about 212~218W though and the temps are indeed 95C (actually during CB 30min run it did climb at one point to 97C). Anything i can do with that aside of playing around with CO?

Havent tested for stability yet, but i really dont intend to do any 6 hour Prime95 runs to find out. I will just try some games (Sins2, MW2), try my usual workflow and we shall see. So far it did not crash once, not even in that CB 30min run (guaranteed that means nothing), GoogleEarth, which i presume might be fairly demanding on single core, worked fine as well. Fingers crossed.

 

[pj-]

Power supply ?

It's possible but I've been using this PSU for a couple of years without any issues, including up to last weekend when the system had a 5950x.

it's possible. One of the youtubers the one that's a fair bit wide with silver hair, Jay i think had a similar issue of being able to boot with crashes and lockups, and then booting into the nothing ether of a black screen. he narrowed it down to psu, mobo, ram or cpu. I didn't catch the end but from what I gather now it was the ram slots causing trouble on a new board. this seems to be an issue with amd boards recently and I'm not sure why. does the x670 spec use a unique ram topology compared to Z690/790?

I rewatched that and several similarities do stand out, particularly the BSODs, and just a few minutes ago I had the same thing as him where the mouse became stuttery right before a crash.

Is there any chance reseating the CPU would help? Aside from that I might just throw in the towel and take the asus mb back to microcenter and get something else.

 

[A///]

It's bigger than I would like. Part of the reason why I want to get away from my Thor v2 is that it's a pita to lug it around when I need to move it. That front panel is perfect though.

you know what they say. Bigger is better. No time like the present to mess up your back!

 

[utahraptor]

Go to BIOS and set "memory context restore" to enabled (and to avoid issues with this setting, set "dram power down" to enabled too)

Thanks I'll try that tonight. I found out there was a new chipset driver on the AMD website. I guess I should have known better than to trust Asus and their Armory Crate to provide a recent or current driver. That fixed my stuttering issue I think. I'll look for those ram settings.

 

[A///]

Is there any chance reseating the CPU would help? Aside from that I might just throw in the towel and take the asus mb back to microcenter and get something else.

It's always worth reseating the cpu, ram and making sure everything is plugged in. worth keeping an eye on this issue to see if it's affecting more asus boards or all x670 boards at the moment. If you end up returning it for another board of the same model or a different brand board I'd ask the service personnel if people have been returning all x670s or asus only for this issue.

 

[eek2121]

Any trouble fitting the 4090 in your mini ITX case? (I vaguely remember you have one from Fractal Design)

Actually I have a FormD T1. The 4090FE is only one of two models of 4090 that would fit, and it takes up basically all the space. A machine with my config cannot get any smaller. Surprisingly components remain cool thanks to the 240mm AIO.

I am impressed with the size, performance, low noise, energy efficiency of this build. It wasn’t cheap, I paid over $4,000 for everything, but it was worth it. The only change I would possibly make would be to swap the 7950X out with the 7950X3D, but I will probably wait on that.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Aside from that I might just throw in the towel and take the asus mb back to microcenter and get something else.

MSI or if you want quickest boot time, Gigabyte.

 

[In2Photos]

It's possible but I've been using this PSU for a couple of years without any issues, including up to last weekend when the system had a 5950x.



I rewatched that and several similarities do stand out, particularly the BSODs, and just a few minutes ago I had the same thing as him where the mouse became stuttery right before a crash.

Is there any chance reseating the CPU would help? Aside from that I might just throw in the towel and take the asus mb back to microcenter and get something else.

There's a chance, but I think it might be slim.

 

[pj-]

It's always worth reseating the cpu, ram and making sure everything is plugged in. worth keeping an eye on this issue to see if it's affecting more asus boards or all x670 boards at the moment. If you end up returning it for another board of the same model or a different brand board I'd ask the service personnel if people have been returning all x670s or asus only for this issue.

I reseated the CPU and redid the thermal paste, didn't help. Same thing as before, it ran OK for a bit, survived a couple of Cinebench runs, then crashed on about the 6th loop through timespy. Pins and pads all looked fine. I'm definitely not the only one with these random crashes. I'm now pretty certain that the failures to get into windows were due to one of the crashes being at a very unfortunate time and corrupting some important file(s).

I found a reddit post which said they had a similar issue which was "fixed" by entirely disabling boost. Trying that now and so far its survived longer than any other attempt. Not holding my breath, maybe I just got a good roll from the RNG crash generator.. I'm going to let timespy loop for at least an hour before I even think of claiming success.

Then of course the question is who's to blame? CPU or MB? Obviously not acceptable if the thing can't run without crashing at 100% stock settings

 

[In2Photos]

I reseated the CPU and redid the thermal paste, didn't help. Same thing as before, it ran OK for a bit, survived a couple of Cinebench runs, then crashed on about the 6th loop through timespy. Pins and pads all looked fine. I'm definitely not the only one with these random crashes. I'm now pretty certain that the failures to get into windows were due to one of the crashes being at a very unfortunate time and corrupting some important file(s).

I found a reddit post which said they had a similar issue which was "fixed" by entirely disabling boost. Trying that now and so far its survived longer than any other attempt. Not holding my breath, maybe I just got a good roll from the RNG crash generator.. I'm going to let timespy loop for at least an hour before I even think of claiming success.

Then of course the question is who's to blame? CPU or MB? Obviously not acceptable if the thing can't run without crashing at 100% stock settings

There are a lot more components on the motherboard that could cause problems. I'd lean that way.

 

[pj-]

There are a lot more components on the motherboard that could cause problems. I'd lean that way.

Makes sense. Just crashed again with the cpu capped at 4.2ghz. Motherboard is going back to microcenter, hoping I have better luck with Gigabyte.

 

[IEC]

All right, here's my mini-preview of the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 (micro ATX) motherboard, for all of $120 smackeroos.

Quick observations form building it into a case:
1) It has adequate fan headers for a microATX board. I counted at least 4 (2 top right, 2 mid bottom) but only needed to use two.
2) It has ZERO headers for ARGB or RGB. Depending on your style this is either a non-issue or a deal breaker. You'd need to step up to at least the Riptide line from ASRock for rainbow vomit.
3) It is very clearly a budget board built to a budget price point. No captive m.2 heatsink screws, no quick install m.2 turnkeys, adequate but cheaply made heatsinks, cheap audio codec, few USB ports etc.
4) Wifi not included, though a m.2 E-key slot is present. $20 Intel AX200 desktop wireless kit was utilized to add Wifi 6 capability.
5) Features where it matters - PCIe 4.0 for GPU slots, but manages to have PCIe 5.0 for primary m.2 slot and PCIe 4.0 for secondary m.2. 2.5G LAN. Two front panel USB3 headers.

If you want a review of it, HUB already did one. Spoiler: It's pretty decent for a budget build as long as you are aware of the limitations.

System specs for now (heavily recycling spare parts):
Corsair Air 240 microATX case ($free - this thing is circa 2014)
Ryzen 7700X (hand-me-down from my primary rig after 7800X3D upgrade)
ASRock B650M-HDV/m.2 ($120ish online)
Arctic Cooling 240mm AIO (this thing is about as old as the case - reused the 4x120mm fans too)
TeamGroup 32GB DDR5-5600 CL36 (Hynix M die, $130 originally - hand-me-down from primary rig)
Solidigm P44 Pro 1TB Gen4 PCIe m.2 drive ($70)
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 8GB card
Corsair RM650x PSU

Now for the breakdown of what I want to do with this rig. This rig will house my old spinning HDDs, an Optane m.2 drive in the 2nd m.2 slot, and a few old 2.5" SSDs. The Air 240 case has 3x HDD bays and 3x 2.5" SSD bays so the 4x SATA ports on the B650 board are the limiting factor (unless I buy a PCIe to m.2 adapter card). It'll give me enough for a compact server build to let me play around with TrueNAS, ZFS, etc.

 

[utahraptor]

Thanks I'll try that tonight. I found out there was a new chipset driver on the AMD website. I guess I should have known better than to trust Asus and their Armory Crate to provide a recent or current driver. That fixed my stuttering issue I think. I'll look for those ram settings.

Well those setting would not allow my PC to boot or reboot. At one point it got to a "sorry your windows may be corrupt, do you want to try advanced repairs or try booting again?" screen. I guess I will have to live to 60+ second boots or reboots. This is with the memory set at EXPO settings. If the graphics card issues are resolved I guess I can live with this. I'm not happy by any means. If $5000+ dollars can't buy sub 1 minute boot times I guess this world is in decline.

 

[MarkPost]

Well those setting would not allow my PC to boot or reboot. At one point it got to a "sorry your windows may be corrupt, do you want to try advanced repairs or try booting again?" screen. I guess I will have to live to 60+ second boots or reboots. This is with the memory set at EXPO settings. If the graphics card issues are resolved I guess I can live with this. I'm not happy by any means. If $5000+ dollars can't buy sub 1 minute boot times I guess this world is in decline.

sorry to read. Its weird, those two settings usually work well together and reduce boot time to ~30 seconds (from pushing the power button to reach desktop)

 

[AdamK47]

Well those setting would not allow my PC to boot or reboot. At one point it got to a "sorry your windows may be corrupt, do you want to try advanced repairs or try booting again?" screen. I guess I will have to live to 60+ second boots or reboots. This is with the memory set at EXPO settings. If the graphics card issues are resolved I guess I can live with this. I'm not happy by any means. If $5000+ dollars can't buy sub 1 minute boot times I guess this world is in decline.

I don't know why people get hung up on this one party trick.

Sure, it's fun to show your friends how fast your PC boots, but does it really matter? I'd rather have slower boot times if it meant absolute stability. I roll my eye when people post about Memory Context Restore. Just let the memory train properly.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'd rather have slower boot times if it meant absolute stability.

Exactly, the Zen family of architectures is "Not your father's Sandy Bridge". It has a lot of complexity to it. Let it do it's thing. Shouldn't need to reboot, unless you're a benchmarker.

 

[IEC]

I'd expect the boot times to continue to improve though. Boot times were long when AM4 first launched but subsequently became much faster.

 

[A///]

All right, here's my mini-preview of the ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 (micro ATX) motherboard, for all of $120 smackeroos.

Quick observations form building it into a case:
1) It has adequate fan headers for a microATX board. I counted at least 4 (2 top right, 2 mid bottom) but only needed to use two.
2) It has ZERO headers for ARGB or RGB. Depending on your style this is either a non-issue or a deal breaker. You'd need to step up to at least the Riptide line from ASRock for rainbow vomit.
3) It is very clearly a budget board built to a budget price point. No captive m.2 heatsink screws, no quick install m.2 turnkeys, adequate but cheaply made heatsinks, cheap audio codec, few USB ports etc.
4) Wifi not included, though a m.2 E-key slot is present. $20 Intel AX200 desktop wireless kit was utilized to add Wifi 6 capability.
5) Features where it matters - PCIe 4.0 for GPU slots, but manages to have PCIe 5.0 for primary m.2 slot and PCIe 4.0 for secondary m.2. 2.5G LAN. Two front panel USB3 headers.

If you want a review of it, HUB already did one. Spoiler: It's pretty decent for a budget build as long as you are aware of the limitations.

System specs for now (heavily recycling spare parts):
Corsair Air 240 microATX case ($free - this thing is circa 2014)
Ryzen 7700X (hand-me-down from my primary rig after 7800X3D upgrade)
ASRock B650M-HDV/m.2 ($120ish online)
Arctic Cooling 240mm AIO (this thing is about as old as the case - reused the 4x120mm fans too)
TeamGroup 32GB DDR5-5600 CL36 (Hynix M die, $130 originally - hand-me-down from primary rig)
Solidigm P44 Pro 1TB Gen4 PCIe m.2 drive ($70)
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 8GB card
Corsair RM650x PSU
View attachment 79423
Now for the breakdown of what I want to do with this rig. This rig will house my old spinning HDDs, an Optane m.2 drive in the 2nd m.2 slot, and a few old 2.5" SSDs. The Air 240 case has 3x HDD bays and 3x 2.5" SSD bays so the 4x SATA ports on the B650 board are the limiting factor (unless I buy a PCIe to m.2 adapter card). It'll give me enough for a compact server build to let me play around with TrueNAS, ZFS, etc.

not wanting to look stupid here but how exactly do you plan on putting all those drives at the bottom and not sacrifice airflow?