Ryzen

Not sure how many times you did the reboot after the update, but I do know that DDR5 has a really long initialization on the first boot with a new config/BIOS/etc. I did a system with 128GB and it was 5min+. If it is still doing such a long boot every time, perhaps make sure you don't have something in the BIOS forcing that check every time?
 
The first boot cycle or two was extra long though I did not time it. Back in February that X670E system was taking 20 seconds to get to the BIOS with 32GB DDR5-6000, then 40 seconds with 64GB DDR5-6000 (2 RAMs each time). Now it takes 60 seconds to reach BIOS with 64GB, then another 40 seconds to Windows desktop. I think this is literally the slowest booting desktop computer I have ever built (since Pentium MK II). Setting to boot mode that avoids the RAM calibration crashes the system not long after booting, whether the EXPOs are activated or not.

Usually I reboot frequently and in the summer I power the computer off when not needed to reduce the heat differential. My 5950X/X570 with the "old-school" DDR4 takes about 16 seconds to reach the BIOS stage and 35 seconds to boot altogether, so more than a minute faster than 7950X/X670E. They both have a RAID card and a 10GB SPF+ NIC. The numb nuts running the show at AMD need to think about the consumers of their systems. It's not a friggrin server running 24/7. :mad:
 
Your system in the signatures? I assume there are no controller cards or NICs, etc. How do you get data in and out of that computer; does it have the Thunderbowls?
 
The board has 2.5g ethernet on-board. The only local drive is the 2TB M.2. The only card in the system is the GPU, and the only cables are power and front I/O. It is very easy to build a clean looking system these days.

Also, it seems that XMP / EXPO "may" have been voiding your warranty the entire time....
 
I'm not very interested in warranty, since I don't have time to wait for replacements. In the MSI BIOS, you have to accept the T&C when going into the OC menu. I assume that is not just AMD, but iNtel as well.
I don't mess with manual settings since the CPUs overclock themselves in recent years and XMP has worked fine for RAM. IIRC the Hasbro E was the last CPU I used manual overvoltage/OC to get a sustained +20% speed.
 
ddrueding said:
Also, it seems that XMP / EXPO "may" have been voiding your warranty the entire time....
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IIRC, Intel has always said use of XMP (or any form of overclocking) is not covered under warranty. Since enabling XMP may overclock the IMC (integrated memory controller), hence its use voids the warranty. This has been in affect since Intel added an IMC to the CPU.

2020 post: https://community.intel.com/t5/Processors/XMP-Warranty-void/m-p/1196241
2017 post: https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/5p8apq/tfw_when_intel_support_tells_you_xmp_may_void_the/
Google shows posts as far back as 2011...
 
LunarMist said:
I was looking at the Dell Alienwaresand they are using the JEDERC RAM settings of 4800. Maybe the speed doesn't matter with the INtel.
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AMD architecture supposedly benefits more from increased memory bandwidth in general. It might not be as essential on that side. It may also be that Dell is more willing to leave some performance on the table to create some additional product tiers in its offerings.

This whole situation reminds me of the early, flawed Pentium CPUs. AMD took a big swing with Zen 4 and between poor contact in the heat spreaders and wonkiness with DDR5 and overclocking "support", consumers wound up with a suboptimal product in this generation.
 
Pentium had a calculation error. This reminds me of the 8th gen after the BIOS update sucked 10% of the CPU. Then Windows suckerd more. I think Intel removed the defect before my 11th gen.
 
Apropos of nothing, does anyone else think that it's completely insane that premium desktop motherboards are selling for north of $500 these days, like $500 B550 boards? For a pair of 2.5GbE ports and some extra aluminum around the VRMs?

I had an occasion to stop in Microcenter today, looking for something AM4 and ITX-ish. Asus seems to be the worst offender for pricing. Asus can be justifiably proud of its displays and some of its laptops, but seeing an Asus logo on motherboard is in my experience a warning that an excess of quality is not something that will be found in that box.

Anyway, big props to Asrock for having something reasonable on the shelf, because nobody else did.
 
It's probably mfg. cost going up and sales volume going down. Other than gamers or a few others, who builds a desktop computer anymore? The majority of individually owned "computers" are cell phones, laptops, or tablets.
 
My last board is MSI X670E because it was the only one <$600 with 4x M.2 and all the other stuff including the bifurctating PCIe. My computer is completely maxed out. The only issue is that the two M.2 slots on the CPU lanes are double sided, but the two M.2 slots on the chipset are single sided. Therefore one of the 4TB SN850X runs quite warm compared to the others. The boot drive (970 Pro) is naturally single sided.
 
LunarMist said:
It's probably mfg. cost going up and sales volume going down. Other than gamers or a few others, who builds a desktop computer anymore? The majority of individually owned "computers" are cell phones, laptops, or tablets.
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Gaming is not the only reason to want computer with expansion capability. It's not really useful for fleet systems, but for home users, there's a whole world of unknowns surrounding the needs of a user and there's a good argument for having places to plug in a drive or expansion card. We don't think about these things very often, but for example I know some HAM radio guys and sewing/quilting hobbyists who prioritize perfect RS232 functionality above all else. It's more or less impossible to get that from a USB adapter.

As I understand things, Asus and AsRock are both spin-offs from Acer or AOpen. The companies are something closer to step-siblings than direct relatives. I will absolutely agree that AsRock has been going in a good direction. I like AsRock Rack hardware a lot and I'd probably look at its offerings next time I build a workstation for myself in preference to Gigabyte. MSI and Asus motherboards aren't up for consideration IMO.
 
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Mercutio said:
Apropos of nothing, does anyone else think that it's completely insane that premium desktop motherboards are selling for north of $500 these days, like $500 B550 boards? For a pair of 2.5GbE ports and some extra aluminum around the VRMs?

I had an occasion to stop in Microcenter today, looking for something AM4 and ITX-ish. Asus seems to be the worst offender for pricing. Asus can be justifiably proud of its displays and some of its laptops, but seeing an Asus logo on motherboard is in my experience a warning that an excess of quality is not something that will be found in that box.

Anyway, big props to Asrock for having something reasonable on the shelf, because nobody else did.
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Yes I've definitely been annoyed at how high cost these boards have gotten. Gone are the days where a very high end motherboard might be $200 and even since then I don't feel like I've seen much benefits to $300+ boards. I've also seen others on YouTube begin complaining and comparing this more in-depth about this trend.

My current AM4 MB is ASRock and even though the price was higher than I normally spend, it hasn't been the most stable board. I've had all kinds of quirky behavior over the few years I've owned it. Some BIOS updates have helped but I occasionally get this weird situation after booting where my Ryzen 3950X won't clock past 1ghz after booting. My system is so incredibly slow and the only fix is to power it off and unplug for a minute and then boot again. That usually fixes the issue.
 
+1 for Asrock... and we've used several of their Asrock Rack motherboards at work in servers over the years and they have been rock solid even if they are missing a few features (compared to Supermicro and Tyan in the DIY server space).

My current desktop is based on a Asrock H97M Pro4 motherboard (8.5yrs old and no issues) and I've only heard decent things about them recently.
I will have to note, that they seem to have an A and B team in development that focuses on either Intel or AMD, so in some series of generations the AMD based stuff is top notch, but the Intel ones seem mediocre in the same year. (The Z190's/Z290's weren't great especially VRM design, but the same era AM4 stuff was really good). And a few years later, it seems to switch over (Intel boards had the A team, and the AMD boards got the B team), thus the quality/reliability of the boards swaps over.

IIRC, Asustek was a group of ex-Acer engineers who created the company in 1989, and then in 2002 spun off Asrock as an OEM to compete with Foxconn (Asus used Asrock to build some of their boards as an ODM/OEM), and then in 2010 Asus spun off another company Pegatron (as the ODM/OEM for Asus) and Pegatron purchased Asrock shortly after...
 
Handruin said:
My current AM4 MB is ASRock and even though the price was higher than I normally spend, it hasn't been the most stable board. I
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X570 Taichi ? If so, check your memory voltages or your memory configuration. Buildzoid noted some oddities on these boards in regards to memory configuration that lead to stability issues...
 
Chewy509 said:
X570 Taichi ? If so, check your memory voltages or your memory configuration. Buildzoid noted some oddities on these boards in regards to memory configuration that lead to stability issues...
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Yep that's my board. Not sure what to check with my memory config but if you happen to have a link/pointer I'll read up on it (I'll also search Buildzoid). I don't recall messing with the ram voltages and I don't OC my CPU.
 
I find I don't have much trouble with ASRock, but their stuff does tend to be a little on the weird side. I bought my B450M Pro4 because it was the most reasonable option in my price range at the time. These days I don't know if I'd do the same, frankly I don't much care for any particular motherboard vendor because I've had at least one poor experience with all of them.
 
sedrosken said:
These days I don't know if I'd do the same, frankly I don't much care for any particular motherboard vendor because I've had at least one poor experience with all of them.
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Likewise, who's providing the "better" product tends to ebb and flow between vendors...
But at the moment, Asrock seems to be pretty consistent in the reliable category...
There were a lot of brands that were #1 that don't exist anymore or a tiny fraction of what they used to be... Abit? DFI ? ECS? (Well ECS was never great)... ;)
 
I was using Abit back the 20th century. BIOS were primitive back then with few options.
However, all my internal organs were present and working fully back then. :D
 
I understand why it's consolidated as much as it has, but at the same time, I wish there were more than the same few options. Pour one out for Abit.
 
It's much the same as with everything else. Used to be you had more than just two options for hard drives. More than the three (four?) options for video cards. Hell, you even used to have a third or fourth option for CPUs -- compatible with your motherboard and all. I also understand why it's consolidated as much as it has, but I'm not certain why it's been allowed to do that. Used to be this kind of behavior got the US government really interested. Now they just don't care as long as they're bankrolling a senator or two.
 
sedrosken said:
It's much the same as with everything else. Used to be you had more than just two options for hard drives. More than the three (four?) options for video cards. Hell, you even used to have a third or fourth option for CPUs -- compatible with your motherboard and all.
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The days of Socket7...
Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT WinChip and Rise Technologies CPUs all on the same socket...
ATi, Matrox, S3, Rendition, 3Dfx, nVidia, PowerVR, SiS, Trident for PCI video...
Creative, Yamaha, VIA, Turtle Beach, Gravis, C-Media, Ensoniq and Roland for audio
Seagate, WDC, IBM, Hitachi, Toshiba, Maxtor, Samsung and Fujistu for Hard drives (not to mention ATA vs SCSI)

"Now get off my lawn!" ...
 
I never used those socketed CPUs. I don't think they had very much RAM capacity. My first computer was maxed out at 384MB RAM. The CPU was on a vertically mounted thing with heavy heatsink and no fans.
 
You forgot Transmeta, Chewy, but I'm surprised you remembered Rise. I can't fully tell if the tech Transmeta developed actually went anywhere and was just licensed by every tech company under the sun, or if it just died on the vine, but apparently the company that held all its assets died in 2009. FWIW, AMD'sicensing of DEC's system bus tech for the Alpha processor are what led to the creation of the Athlon product line and AMD's path out of the doom that came to Cyrix.

Cyrix didn't die, actually. VIA bought it and IDT AND S3 and turned tried really hard to spin the result into a low-power x96 SoC for embedded systems. Apparently, it just sold the last remnants of all that back to Intel so it can concentrate on the Zhaoxin CPU. Wikipedia says that the Zhaoxin CPU is a joint venture between Via and the Shanghai Municipal Government and its next-gen product line will support DDR5 and have performance in line with the 1st generation Ryzen. That's a lot better than I would've guessed.

PowerVR is the GPU core for a lot of ARM SoCs. Matrox is still up and running, even if the market it serves is extremely niche.

Creative Labs is still making sound cards.

And I think we all know that not all SSDs are created equal and there's tons of competitors in that space.
 
That's a fair point on the SSDs, though I wonder how many of them use the same NAND chips from Micron or whoever.

Chewy also forgot Aureal and Crystal audio, though to be fair Aureal chipsets usually found themselves sold on Turtle Beach PCBs. For graphics vendors, a couple other notables would be Cirrus Logic and Tseng Labs, albeit by the time PCI came around neither was really in their golden years anymore. Conner and Miniscribe for HDDs, though as I recall both ended up folded into Maxtor? Also Quantum. I have a Bigfoot TX on a shelf -- it works fine, it's just slower than an SD card. Toshiba is still in the game in a limited capacity I think, and the best parts of Hitachi/HGST and IBM's hard disk division ended up with WD anyway.

I had forgotten about Rise, myself, I've only read about them, but thinking about it I've had some rare birds in hand indeed. I had a thin client based on the Crusoe a while back, I found it performed about 75% what an equally-clocked Deschutes or Katmai chip would do in integer and gets absolutely demolished in floating-point. My old blacktop Pentium Pro build disappointed and fascinated in the same turn in much the same fashion. Some chips I want to knock off my bucket list are the original K5, the MP6, and the Nehemiah-core Cyrix III.

VIA didn't buy Cyrix directly as I recall reading about it -- they bought National Semiconductor, who had purchased Cyrix some years before I think?
 
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Thinking about all the slow crap there used be, Intel, AMD and Apple are not the worst CPUs.
I used a mini-laptoc with Transmeta CPU IIRC. It was so slow, as if going backwards in time.
Somehow it did not naturally run Windows, but used a kind of simulator. 🤯
 
Right, the actual core was a VLIW thing I think, and it emulated the x86 instruction set. There was an optimization engine that supposedly made repetitive tasks a bit faster the more you did them, but I don't know how well that would work on a more complicated operating system than Windows 9x.
 
I vaguely recall the NEC V20 and v30 chips, plug-compatible with Intel 8088 and 8086, resp., but supposedly 20-30% faster.

In a previous millennium, I worked in data analysis for a mid-sized biotech firm, and convinced them to let me replace all their PCs' CPUs with the NECs.

Could you imagine that scenario happening in more modern times? Sure, lets let some code monkey hack away at our hardware.
 
NEC also implemented some 186 instructions. Hilariously I think that let them run some things that normally "required" a 286 or better -- I think the VGA driver for Windows 3.0 used said instructions. There's a patched version floating around now that gets around that for whatever use-case one has for an XT-class running Windows 3.0, of all things, since I maintain that was just a marketing stunt meant to look cool in a computer store, not actually be useful.

I imagine today the fuss would be more over just paying for the upgrade chips and losing the factory warranty on the computers in today's IT landscape. Companies would much rather have a block they can exchange for another block and hold another company accountable for than handle actually repairing their own computers. Sure, you can swap AMD 5600Gs into most 2200G systems and have a much more capable computer with a lot more staying power, but the cost is almost comparable to just buying new computers entirely and taking the tax deduction for donating the old stuff.
 
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Corporate IT is a very different animal from anything that makes sense for any other context, but on the other hand, simplifying the environment is the biggest favor support people could ever have to deal with.
 
I have to admit I've come around to their point of view. What works in my personal home office doesn't do so hot in a company where the turnaround for a breakdown means lost revenue.
 
Ah, Transmeta, something that could have been... I was sticking to the Pentium 1 era stuff, and Transmeta was P2 / P3 era with AGP already widespread.
Forgot about Aureal despite being quite big at the time. For audio, there's also ESS, Realtek, Analog Devices, Philips, Winbond, etc.
 
Naming AC'97 and HD Audio codec suppliers might be a bit of cheating. ;)

Yeah, I have no excuse for forgetting ESS either, I have and quite enjoy one of their AudioDrive cards. I'm intrigued by the Solo-1 and how it supposedly offers full DOS sound support on PCI without any emulation shenanigans from the drivers, but that card is somewhat expensive on eBay for some reason.
 
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