Ryzen

[Stereodude]

Flakey motherboard and/or CPU.

The memory test is still running... It's at 53% and says it needs another ~24 hours and the total time keeps going up.

I had a clean Windows 10 install that gave me fits on my Dell XPS 13 laptop with all sorts of wonky behavior. Not exactly like this, but all sorts of odd things. Another clean install of the exact same windows 10 version on the XPS 13 and it works fine. So, I'm not quite as skeptical about a clean install potentially fixing the issues on the Ryzen 9 system as I might otherwise be.

Otherwise, I either need to buy a different motherboard or another AM4 CPU for continued troubleshooting since I don't have access to another of either. I'm not certain that using a non Zen 2 CPU will be as useful for troubleshooting as a Zen 2 CPU. It's possible a Zen+ CPU, like the Athlon 3000G might work fine in my X570 board even though the motherboard is bad. Similarly I'm not sure that using a non x570 motherboard will be all that helpful either. It's possible the CPU is defective, but might work fine in a B450 board whereas it fails in a x570 board. They're probably small possibilities, but would prevent the troubleshooting steps from being as conclusive as they could be.

I suppose the most conclusive things would be to buy another of the exact same hardware for swapping, but even that has a potential coverage miss as maybe it's an issue with the specific motherboard I have and the other hardware I've put it in and another x570 board wouldn't have the issue.

 

[Stereodude]

The first memory test took around 54 hours to complete and found nothing. The second did 4 passes overnight and found nothing. Now I've got the system stripped as bare as it gets (optical drive and HDD's disconnected + 10gig nic out) and am seeing if I can get any of the glitchy/quirky behavior to manifest after some hours of a Prime95 SmallFFT load. If that fails, I will try with x265.

 

[Newtun]

This thread seems to have gone dormant for some reason. I did follow The Dude's HW issues with some interest, from here in the "bleacher seats".

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd-microcode-bug-destroyed-my-weekend
I'd been "window shopping" for x570 mobos, and maybe that article explains why I saw a significant number of x570 purchasers that had problems getting their builds to boot, or had other inexplicable reliability issues.

I'm still "window shopping" . . . In the mean time, comsumer MB supplies seemed to have "dried up" a bit for some reason.

I was looking into a ≈$600-800 "minor league" build: x570 board, 3600/6-core or 3700x/8-core 65 watt CPU, 16 GB RAM, ¼-½ TB SSD. Non-gaming, so flashing neon lights on the MB not required. I had already gotten a video card, a Radeon R7 240 that will suit/exemplify my needs.

It's been about 13 years since my last build, and I retired in October, so this x570 build was going to be a little fun/keep-busy project.

I had a candidate for the MB, the Gigabyte X570 Gaming X (not in stock now). Checking into some alternatives, it seems that a lot of the available mobos have "bi-modal" ratings - a good number of 4-5 ratings (out of 5), but 10-20% 1 or 2 ratings; I know to take some with a grain of salt (e.g., possible user errors), but there are still some nasty reviews like "it worked for a while, then failed", the "XYZ ports never worked right", etc.

My requirements are fairly minimal; this would be my new main PC for web browsing, Emails, Youtube-ing and light video/audio editing, small word-processing and spreadsheet docs, etc.

I would like it to be fairly responsive, though, in the face of its main duty, which is to run the World Community Grid anti-cancer and COVID-19 apps full time (#CPUs×100%×24×7). My current Dell PowerEdge T20 with a Xeon 4-way E3-1225 v3 @ 3.20GHz does pretty well at all that.

I wanted an X570 board, because it seems that the older alternatives' (B450, ...) support for the current Zen gen is flaky - I don't want to have to get a older CPU just to upgrade the BIOS, and then have to rip that out and install the intended 3600/3700x processor. I'm getting too old for that $#!£.

I also wanted X570 because of the m.2 PCIE 4.0 slots, for maximum SSD performance.

But maybe there aren't any reasonably-priced m.2 SSDs that can go beyond PCIE 3 throughput speeds anyway?​

I'm also starting to wonder, though, if I would be better off waiting for the Zen 3 gen of CPUs; I'm starting to see reports that they may be launched in September, and have higher clock speeds and IPC. And maybe I should wait, too, for a new generation of motherboards that would support the Vermeer CPUs "out of the box."

Thanks for any comments or suggestions you might have.

 

[Newtun]

In reviewing my above post from a couple of days ago, I see that I neglected to mention that I intend to run Ubuntu Linux on my prospective "minor league" build. So that could be a countervailing factor to my 2nd-to last ¶, in that I might have to wait for Ubuntu to get the necessary "drivers", etc., for the next Zen gen CPUs and motherboards to work correctly (if not optimally).

I would welcome any opinions or recommendations from the more experienced members of this forum (which would be, like, all y'all ).

 

[Handruin]

Everything you put together sounds like a nice build. The 3600 or 3700X are excellent CPUs for the money. There was a rumor post only a few hours back about some AMD refresh release with an XT moniker being considered. This may drive some prices down while we wait for Zen 3 to come to market. This might help you if you want to get a better deal on a 3600/3700X or get the slight refresh once they become available. I've also seen an occasional deal on slickdeals for various 3600/3700/3900/ect that you may want to keep an eye out for.

I also chose an X570 board for the same reason as you to have the PCIe 4 slot. I never did end up getting a storage device for it that supports the PCIe 4.0 speeds. I stuck with my Samsung 970 evo which has been great so far. There is the Sabrant Rocket 1TB that you can get which supports PCIe 4.0. I doubt if you have that drive and a 970 evo you'd be able to tell them apart in terms of day to day use without benchmarks. My point being, you could likely get a less expensive PCIe 3. m.2 SSD for now and upgrade to a PCIe 4.0 later when they become more available and less expensive. Not that I'm specifically recommending the Samsung 970 EVO.

I haven't tried Ubuntu Linux as a direct install on my AMD config. I suspect it should work but to your point there might be the odd driver support issues that crop up for the various features that come on your motherboard. You will likely have to do more searches for that specific config in more Ubuntu-focused forums/threads.

Given that Zen 3 may be around the corner, I would personally wait under normal circumstances assuming your current system is stable enough. That said with everything going on with covid, it's a tough call on what availability will be like or even if Zen 3 might get delayed. Since you appear to keep your systems for a very long time, it might be worth waiting and getting the fastest version in your budget to give it the longest usable lifespan.

 

[Chewy509]

For those looking for a B550 based motherboard, the following (and pt2 and pt3) were interesting...

 

[sechs]

I kind of feel like B550 doesn't have a whole lot going for it when B450 boards are so cheap.

 

[Newtun]

They do have the PCIE 4.0 m.2 slots, for maximum SSD performance, FWIW.

 

[fb]

I am looking into finalizing the computer build for my son in time for christmas.

It should be able t8 play games in 1440, and to be reasonably future proof in general. Focus is on stability, not overclocking.

These parts exists:
Fractal design Meshify S2
Seasonic 850W Platinum
1 TB 970 Evo (Plus?)
32 GB Kingston HyperX Fury 3600 (RGB!)
Keyboard+mouse (HyperX).

I al leaning towards a 5600X if I can get hold of one, or 5800X if I stretch the budget a bit and if it is worth it in the real world.
Noctua U12S CPU fan?
Motherboard, not decided, not even on 550 vs 570 chipset, but I tend to buy Asus, ~TUF-range?

Graphics card, will have to start with a old one for a couple of months and save for a 3070/3080 or the AMD equivalent.

Any thoughts on the balance, or anything else for that matter?

 

[fb]

OK, so I just realised that a ROG Strix X570-E is about the same price as the TUF Gaming X570 Plus (wifi). The first store I looked at has a price difference of about ~$100... So, it looks like the ROG is a favorite for now.

 

[sedrosken]

I'm personally waiting for the 3700X to get really cheap second-hand now that everyone's rushing to upgrade. From my 1600AF to a 3600 is a substantial upgrade, yes, but nowhere near worth 200ish dollars to get one new. My 1600AF to a 3700X, though... That might be worth it, but I'm holding out until I can find one on eBay for about US$170 or less.

 

[fb]

sedrosken, that looks like a really good plan.

And, surprise surprise, there seems to be limited availability of the 5n00X. My backup plan is called Intel 10850K, which would also solve my GPU-issue. I will await the Black Friday with great patience and evaluate the situation on that day.
If no good deal comes up I will lay low and wait a little bit more to see if AMD is able to deliver som more CPUs to their retailers.

 

[Handruin]

I've had some alerts set for the 5000 series and haven't seen them even ping at all either. Makes sense, many have been waiting for this release and it looks really good.

 

[fb]

Good news, refill is on the way.

AMD and Retailers Talk Ryzen 5000 Shortage: 'A Lot More Stock Soon'

It sure felt like a paper launch.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[fb]

So... I ended up going down the Intel route.
Got a pretty good deal on an Intel 10850K+ Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero
Also got a Noctua U12S (black) cooler.

The reasoning: It ended up being a bit cheaper than a 5800X (with a slightly less premium motherboard) + and everything was in stock.
I know it is "outgoing" technology, but I think/hope it will give acceptable performance for a few years.

 

[sedrosken]

Remember how I said I'd grab a 3700X when I could get one for less than 170 bucks? Well -- I didn't manage that, but I did manage roughly a hundred off MSRP -- I made an offer on one that was heading to auction and nabbed it. I don't technically have it yet but nothing screamed "fake listing" so I guess if it is then ebay's customer protection program's gonna get a workout.

I'm hoping to hit 4.4 24/7 allcore -- I realize that's pretty lofty for Zen2, but my cooling is fantastic and my board *should* be able to deliver the current for it. That said, if I can't hit 4.2 allcore I'm going to just PBO it and hope for the best. That said, no matter what it's going to be better than what it's replacing -- not that my 1600AF is a slouch by any means -- but I can definitely use the better single-thread in particular. PCem is very demanding on a single thread, and having a not-halfassed AVX2 pipe will always help. Not to even mention the extra cores/threads, or the higher clocks in general! I'm probably going to sell my 1600AF to recoup some costs -- ironically it seems that the 1600AF is going for a bit more than it MSRP'd for, so I should really only be out a hundred and some change.

 

[Newtun]

Congrats, sedrosken!

I just got mine Thursday; I drove a couple of hours to the Micro Center store in Fairfax VA. Price was $279, "$50 off", with an additional $20 off for "bundling" it with a motherboard. (I'm wimping out, keeping it at default clocking for now, on the included cooler.)

 

[sedrosken]

I'd love to live close to a Micro Center but the closest one is a five-ish hour drive.

 

[Newtun]

What kind of cooling do you have for your 3700X?

 

[sedrosken]

Single-fan version of the Noctua NH-D15, the D15S. Under Prime95 small FFTs torture testing my 1600AF only hits about 65C after a solid ten minutes, and then it stays there. I'm betting the 3700X doesn't do much worse -- maybe 70-75ish, it will probably draw a bit more power -- this is a massively overkill cooler, and I bought it precisely so I wouldn't have to worry about it again within a reasonable time.

 

[Newtun]

Thanks, sedrosken. My temps are not that great, around 80°.

OTOH, I'm running the World Community Grid, "all out", 24×7×16 threads×100%, helping research cancer and COVID.

Despite not active overclocking, I think I'm getting a pretty good boost above the "base clock" of 3.6GHz, about 12-13%:

...@RyzenShine:~$ sudo lscpu | grep "^CPU MHz:"​

CPU MHz: 4035.011​

...@RyzenShine:~$ sudo lscpu | grep "^CPU MHz:"​

CPU MHz: 4078.878​

 

[sedrosken]

just over 4GHz on the stock cooler at 80C isn't that bad. My cousin's 3600 ran worse on his stock cooler -- he only managed 4GHz at 85-90, so I set him up with a Pure Rock Slim to get those temps down and cut out that buzzsaw noise his fan was making. But then as I understand it the cooler they include with the 3700X is actually competent, so... What's your ambient temp?

 

[Newtun]

My home thermostat is set to 71° F = 21⅔°C. The "composite" temp that I believe is reporting from my graphics card is 44°C. (This is as reported by the Linux "lm-sensors" package, FWIW.)

 

[sedrosken]

Well, that's not bad at all, then. Especially for a stock cooler. Then again, I hear those are supposed to boost a single core up to 4.4? Might be something to think about for the future. I definitely wouldn't outright overclock it on the stock cooler. That said, I also hear lm-sensors can be pretty inaccurate, especially on non-Intel sensors. Where Windows would say my FX-6300 a few years back was maxing around 80 under full load on a Hyper T4 at 4.5GHz, Linux was swearing up and down it was hitting 105, IIRC. I wonder if that composite sensor is for seeing what the "ambient" temp is inside your case? It being so much higher than your actual ambient might be a sign you need better airflow? I wouldn't know, I don't have an equivalent sensor in my own machine, unless maybe you count my drive or motherboard temperatures.

 

[Newtun]

I tried to figure out how to use lm-sensors to detect the fan speeds, to no avail. (I admit that I'm just a ordinary Ubuntu user, not a Linux super-user.)
I guess you get what you pay for; mobo manufacturers don't really support Linux, so it's up to the "community" to do so, and it's worth every ¢.

So I gave up and went into the BIOS and just reset the fans to max speed. It's not that much louder. (But it does seem to be noticeably warmer here in my office.)

The temps do seem to have dropped a few degrees, though.

 

[sedrosken]

Be careful setting fans to 100%. Smaller ones like the ones used on stock coolers tend to run themselves ragged over time.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, I ended up just PBOing it and calling it a day. It's still easily worth it. With realtime priority on both benchmarks, my Cinebench R15 score jumped massively from 1345 on the 1600AF@3.9ac to 2142. My Cinebench R20 score went from 3036 to 4921. That said, synthetic benchmarks don't tell the whole story at all, and we'll see how it does in actual use. The only thing I had really still been having trouble with on the 1600AF was running anything faster than a Pentium-200 in PCem, which is heavily, heavily, heavily single-threaded, so the boost to single-thread performance being as good as it is will be a huge boon.

I was initially very concerned at my temperatures, but it turned out to be a BIOS bug! In anything earlier than a couple versions before latest -- I'd been running what the board came with since they specifically recommended I not run anything newer with my generation of CPU, and true to word, the system behaved extremely strangely with a newer BIOS installed so I ended up flashing back -- the 3700X runs at a Vcore of 1.5v! No wonder the damn thing was idling at 52C! With the latest BIOS installed, however, it runs much safer and much cooler, at around 1.1v normally and idling at 35C, which is actually (only slightly) cooler than it was with the 1600AF. I suppose that's just the benefits of 7nm for you, when it's not busy it's not hot.

 

[Newtun]

Be careful setting fans to 100%. Smaller ones like the ones used on stock coolers tend to run themselves ragged over time.

OK, I backed off the fans' max setting to normal, but set my case fan speeds to modulate off the CPU temp. And I bought a big fan for the front of the case.

I'd been using the "psensor" app to monitor the temps, but it just shows the current, min and max values, with a little graph that shows that the temps are "spikey" and rarely reach the max. (It wouldn't have been too much more effort to show the average and standard deviation.)

So I wrote a little korn-shell script to check the temps every 15 seconds, and ran it for a couple of hours. Median temp was 76.8°C.

 

[sedrosken]

That's perfectly acceptable for a load temp, if indeed that is a load temp.

In terms of actual performance metrics on my own upgrade, I went from struggling to hit 100% in PCem emulating a mobile PMMX-300, to just about managing it on a K6-2 333 with a Voodoo2.

 

[LunarMist]

I received the 3950X in January 2020 and then replaced it with the 5950X a few months ago. Neither create very much heat with the Nocturnal heat-sink fans. The D15 was originally on the 3950X and then used with the 5950X. The 3950X is now in another box with an old D14 modified with a kit to work with AM4. (Noctural products are great.) Both systems are in the 60s °C max under benchmark loads. I set the base speeds to about 600 RPM and then ramping to full speed as temperature increases. They probably don't need doubled fans but it's better for reliability.

 

[Mercutio]

Here's a fun, kind of cheery thing: I found a status-unknown Ryzen 7 1700 in its retail box a couple weeks ago when I cleaned out my car. I popped it on a couple different motherboards and it didn't boot (it had also spent probably two entire years in my trunk), but AMD accepted and replaced it under warranty. They sent back a Ryzen 2700.

That's the first time I've ever completed warranty replacement on a CPU.

 

[Handruin]

That's a nice win and upgrade. Those 2700s are solid chips for sure.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm more impressed that I got an RMA on a CPU in the first place. I've always heard it's close to impossible to get one back.

 

[Mercutio]

Dropped a 5900X. 45 minutes with a razor blade later, it did actually work again. One thing Intel got right is using the ball grid instead of the pin grid.

 

[LunarMist]

Why does the interface affect dropping the 5900X and the razors are for what? Did the circuitboard break?

 

[Mercutio]

Why does the interface affect dropping the 5900X and the razors are for what? Did the circuitboard break?

Pins bent on the CPU side.
I've never bent the pins on the motherboard side of an Intel board.

I used a box cutter to bend everything back. A razor blade JUST fits between the rows of pins.

 

[sechs]

Dropped a 5900X. 45 minutes with a razor blade later, it did actually work again. One thing Intel got right is using the ball grid instead of the pin grid.

I'll point out that, if you had dropped an Intel chip on the motherboard socket, you may have had a useless motherboard....

 

[Mercutio]

AMD is releasing some budget Ryzen 5000s now, based on Zen 2 and Zen 3, and just added firmware updates to allow Ryzen 5000 CPUs to run on older but socket-compatible budget boards with A320 and B350 chipsets. MSRP is right in line with previous generations. This is good news for anyone who wants a low-cost build for some reason.

 

[LunarMist]

What happened to the AMD? They seemed to be hot stuff prior to the pandemic, but have nothing really new and better in a long time. Meanwhile Apples have the smoking fast ARm's and Intel has 12th gen bi-core CPUs.

 

[Mercutio]

AMD has next gen Ryzen in the pipe. There are leaks but nothing official yet.