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Tomahawk B450 is nice enough board (esp for the price) but I really do wish I'd gone w/a board that had more than one NVMe slot.
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Oct 25, 2019 03:25
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what is the recommended cheap-but-solid board for zen2 these days? If those 3900 non-Xs ever hit the consumer market I'd probably be down for one. (or a 3950 non-X)
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Oct 25, 2019 03:27
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betterinsodapop posted:Tomahawk B450 is nice enough board (esp for the price) but I really do wish I'd gone w/a board that had more than one NVMe slot. If you're not using your extra PCIe slots, you could always get a cheap adapter card. There's also multi-drive cards if you're using an x8 slot.
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Oct 25, 2019 03:36
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Stickman posted:There's also multi-drive cards if you're using an x8 slot. The one I saw when I looked at this was Highpoint Technologies. These do not require mobo bifurcation support, they have PLX switch chips onboard so will run on whatever. Probably this one if you need to boot - although I think JBOD should work on whatever? The Hyper M.2 and other cheapo <$200 cards with multi-M.2 support need motherboard support for bifurcation. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 03:38
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Paul MaudDib posted:what is the recommended cheap-but-solid board for zen2 these days? If those 3900 non-Xs ever hit the consumer market I'd probably be down for one. I'm aiming at a pair of MSI B450-As when I do a Christmas rebuild for the stepbrothers, but I'm not putting anything in there beefier than a 3600, maybe the X for the hell of it if it's on sale. I wouldn't put a 3900+ into one of those, though.
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Oct 25, 2019 07:43
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Paul MaudDib posted:what is the recommended cheap-but-solid board for zen2 these days? If those 3900 non-Xs ever hit the consumer market I'd probably be down for one. Ye olde Reddit list.
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Oct 25, 2019 07:47
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the problem with that list is it's completely ignoring the various BIOS update status on various motherboards B450 tomahawk and a 3900X? Sure! It was a great combo on 1000/2000 but notoriously problematic on 3000. there is no broad-base listing of what mobos boost to what clocks on what AGESA on the older chipsets either... HU kinda did it for X570 but not for any older boards. I'm not saying "nothing works" but I'd at least like to see a list that post-dates the 3000 release and some indication that they are reliably hitting clocks. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 08:16
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Paul MaudDib posted:the problem with that list is it's completely ignoring the various BIOS update status on various motherboards If getting optimal software matters right now, get the Asus X570-P. Otherwise, it's FineWine, baby.
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Oct 25, 2019 08:38
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finewine was not the answer I was looking for so, B350/X370 and B450/X470 sucks? seriously looking for an answer here, what's the $100 or even $150 legacy motherboard you can drop a 3900X (or non-X) onto? It shouldn't be any higher a TDP than Zen+. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 09:23
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B450/X470 are fine for any 3rd-gen for 99.9% of users?  Most of the potential annoyances are present on X570 boards too.
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Oct 25, 2019 09:52
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so what cheapo b350/x370 or b450/x470 board won't give me problems on a 3900x/3950x then give me a specific board here, how much do I need to spend it's only a 105w processor right? Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 09:54
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Paul MaudDib posted:so what cheapo b350/x370 or b450/x470 board won't give me problems on a 3900x/3950x then 
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Oct 25, 2019 09:58
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So a Prime B450M should be able to handle a 3900X? I don't intend to OC the 3900X.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:00
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Paul MaudDib posted:so what cheapo b350/x370 or b450/x470 board won't give me problems on a 3900x/3950x then A Tomahawk would be fine, or a Pro Carbon AC. Even a Pro4 would be fine with good airflow (once it’s bios is updated). You’re not going to be overclocking and might lose a little boost, but that’s what I meant by “99% of users”. If you want something cheap with better VRM, the ASRock X570 Phantom 4 is under $140 now. It really depends what you mean by “problems”.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:03
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Stickman posted:A Tomahawk would be fine, or a Pro Carbon AC. Even a Pro4 would be fine with good airflow (once it’s bios is updated). You’re not going to be overclocking and might lose a little boost, but that’s what I meant by “99% of users”. If you want something cheap with better VRM, the ASRock X570 Phantom 4 is under $140 now. I feel like this page has been super loving evasive, B350 is supposed to "just work" with zen2, yes or no? TDPs did not increase, yes or no? how expensive a motherboard do I need to buy before I'm getting the performance demo'ed by, say, hardwareunboxed on a 3900X? That should really just work, it's not any more power-hungry than a 2700X. You can't even overclock it. I hear all the time how you don't need a $150 motherboard for Zen2 because you can just buy B350/B450... yes or no? Just give me a cheapo board I can price track and ideally buy at microcenter and I'll probably buy one at some point... Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 10:09
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Remember if you don't have a Zen or Zen+ your Zen2 won't work out of the box on a B450 if it doesn't have BIOS flashback
uhhhhahhhhohahhh fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 10:15
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AMD not doing the boot kit program anymore either? Bummer. Everything should be factory compatible with 3000 these days, or at least so says the label, but.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:22
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Paul MaudDib posted:finewine was not the answer I was looking for If you're persnickety about firmware achieving peak clocks, there is none. We can tell you til the cows come home about VRM quality, but AGESA is a clusterfuck. Board partners aren't exactly eagerly working to undermine their own upsell here. Most boards accept a 3000 chip and are fine for people who say, "it's faster than my old PC, I'm happy." If you're the kind of person who subscribes to four or more hardware YouTubers and plans to run repeated benchmarks to  tune memory to peak infinity fabric and quantilize your chip harmonics etc, you're gonna pay a lot for a motherboard.
Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 10:24
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Craptacular! posted:If you're persnickety about firmware achieving peak clocks, there is none. We can tell you til the cows come home about VRM quality, but AGESA is a clusterfuck. Board partners aren't exactly eagerly working to undermine their own upsell here. fair, what's the best VRM I can get at the $100 and $150 price points, and how bad will that be for a 105/141W boost chip? excluding poo poo that obviously isn't getting updated, MSI comes to mind edit: Craptacular! posted:Most boards accept a 3000 chip and are fine for people who say, "it's faster than my old PC, I'm happy." If you're the kind of person who subscribes to four or more hardware YouTubers and plans to run repeated benchmarks to I don't plan to microtune my build but I think I should get a reasonable approximation of what the major tech channels are showing as their benchmarks. Especially when they're using that for their price estimates. If people are saying you can use a $75 motherboard in your build calculations, you should use that performance level in your benchmarks. If the B350/B450 legacy motherboard is way off the performance of the (much more expensive) current board, that needs to be measured and denoted in the benchmarks. vvv oh cool, not actually worried about that as long as they still do it. AFAIK their delivery times are excellent, like priority mail. The BIOS kit program is legit. vvv Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 10:29
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Paul MaudDib posted:AMD not doing the boot kit program anymore either? Bummer. They are but you have to provide proof of purchase before they send it to you. Don't know what their delivery times are like either You can alternatively ask wherever you buy it from to flash it for you, some places might charge though
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Oct 25, 2019 10:33
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All MSI boards that end in "Max" come updated for Ryzen 3000 out of the factory and have a larger memory chip to store the BIOS (32 MB). So buy the B450 Tomahawk Max, not the B450 Tomahawk.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:41
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Paul MaudDib posted:fair, what's the best VRM I can get at the $100 and $150 price points, and how bad will that be for a 105/141W boost chip? Keeping in mind that most the last gen boards were tested with last gen chips obviously, the MSI line was "approved" (as much as you can say) by Buildzoid and Level1 tried to break it but couldn't (again, with a 2700X). The Reddit list I linked considered it appropriate for a stock 3900/3950 but not OCed. The Tomahawk is in the "sometimes $100 but often $120" bracket, and the Carbon AC above it in the features list is $150. The Carbon AC has a second m2 slot (one that i think doesn't devour a bunch of SATA ports like the Tomahawk's, the other does), Intel ethernet instead of Reatek, and one of the better builtin soundchips (ALC1000-something) over the ALC890-something bog standard offering in the Tomahawk. Whether that's worth the upgrade is something I leave to you. Keep in mind that MSI fed all of these boards smaller firmware memory than other companies (including my ASRock A320 of all things), so while the MSI B450 boards do have good VRMs, to go to a Ryzen 3000 compatible firmware causes the flashy gamer BIOS to be replaced with something more pedestrian for the sake of CPU microcode space. They also had to abandon OCing profiles for the same reason, so if you do manual overclocking instead of XFR that's a shame (but you shouldn't be OCing a Ryzen 9 on this board anyway.) IIRC you don't like RGB bling poo poo so you should probably be fine with this. MSI solved the small firmware issues with the B450 Tomahawk MAX, but it seems they're not going to sell it in North America or something as there's never been any stock any time I've looked. (They often tend to do this with revisions or variants of main boards, such as the B450 Mortar Arctic that was just a white colored version of another motherboard that just disappeared from NA markets while still being sold on Amazon Japan.) As a result, you'll see a lot of people telling you to buy a board none of them actually own. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 10:48 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 10:44
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I’m not an AMD rep or professional reviewer, dude. All I have to go off of is the same as you - trip reports that people post on the internet, board analysis, and the occasional benchmark. And pretty much every time I’ve see the topic on reddit, someone posts “I have a tomahawk + 3900x and it works fine for stock speeds” which lines up with what it’s VRM should be able to do and sounds like it’s at least not noticeably slow. I’m not going to tell you you’re going to hit the advertised performance because AMD is having trouble getting the advertised boost on any. But even back in August when the boost issues were coming to light the Tomahawk performance was ~2.5% less than Gigabyte’s $600 X570, which is perfect acceptable performance for most applications. I haven’t seen any numbers since the latest AGESA, but I also haven’t seen anyone complaining about B450/X470 performance specifically. From what I’ve seen, at worst your looking at a very small performance hit, which might shrink with optimizations, or maybe it’s shrunk already. That’s the “it’s going to be fine for 99% of users” bit. E: MAX boards are going to be in stock on the 28th. Right now they’re about $5-10 more expensive than their non-MAX counterparts.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:46
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I'm not sure why you're completely dismissing msi, their bios support has been fine for b450 from what I've seen and the max boards come pre-flashed. And yeah, 3900x is only hitting the advertised single core boost in bursts, the sustained clocks are going to be 25-100mhz lower on every platform. Arzachel fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 10:47
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Even if he could find the MAX tomahawk, I don't think Paul particularly cares about DRAGON ARMY ARISE bios themes nor should he try overclocking a Ryzen 9 on it. So having the extra firmware memory is kind of pointless.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:50
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Yeah, that’s one of the two main reasons we’ve been recommending MSi B450 boards for 3rd-gen - if it’s not flashed for 3rd-gen support you can do it yourself with a usb stick.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:50
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Craptacular! posted:Keeping in mind that most the last gen boards were tested with last gen chips obviously, the MSI line was "approved" (as much as you can say) by Buildzoid and Level1 tried to break it but couldn't (again, with a 2700X). The Reddit list I linked considered it appropriate for a stock 3900/3950 but not OCed. The Tomahawk is in the "sometimes $100 but often $120" bracket, and the Carbon AC above it in the features list is $150. The Carbon AC has a second m2 slot (one that i think doesn't devour a bunch of SATA ports like the Tomahawk's, the other does), Intel ethernet instead of Reatek, and one of the better builtin soundchips (ALC1000-something) over the ALC890-something bog standard offering in the Tomahawk. Whether that's worth the upgrade is something I leave to you. that's exactly my understanding of the problem with MSI, it's great hardware but they didn't put big enough BIOS chips on it "solving" the problem by putting out a (newer, much more expensive) series of boards isn't really a solution that's kinda my problem, everyone recommends MSI... but not for 3000... and then [rotating list of complaints with other brands] if I could pay $130 for a B450 tomahawk and it runs zen2 flawlessly I'd probably do it
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Oct 25, 2019 10:51
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If you pay $120 for a Tomahawk and use BIOS flashback to upgrade it to the 3000 compatible BIOS, it'll run it as "flawlessly" as any other $100-150 board. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 10:53
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Craptacular! posted:Even if he could find the MAX tomahawk, I don't think Paul particularly cares about DRAGON ARMY ARISE bios themes nor should he try overclocking a Ryzen 9 on it. So having the extra firmware memory is kind of pointless. Huh? It's hard to find a regular tomahawk over here (eastern europe) but max versions seem plenty.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:55
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Craptacular! posted:If you pay $120 for a Tomahawk and use BIOS flashback to upgrade it to the 3000 compatible BIOS, it'll run it as "flawlessly" as any other $100-150 board. MSI finally fixed their poo poo? Cool. That's a reasonable touchpoint for build costs, thanks. Really all I'm looking for there.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:56
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Paul MaudDib posted:MSI finally fixed their poo poo? A bunch of buyers feel stung that MSI made some short-sighted decisions regarding future proofing. The people who are hit the hardest are non-X owners who plan to do manual overclocking. People who are letting XFR handle it and don't need to save their stock profile, their OC profile, their summer OC profile, etc are just fine. People who don't intend to OC at all are just fine. As I have a 1600 and am doing manual overclocking, I have not upgraded bios since May because OC profiles matter more than support for chips I don't own. If I replace this 1600 with a 3600X/3700X, I just use XFR2.
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Oct 25, 2019 10:57
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To be blunt, Zen2 no longer overclocks. Every chip is binned to an inch of its life. You yourself are no longer going to be able to manage the steep 1.5v+ voltages required for single-threaded performance as well as the all-core voltages. The chip is smarter than you. If SiliconLottery can't extract more than 50 MHz out of a chip in the best case, you're hosed. Which is, in a backhanded way, good. You're not paying for anything more/less than the silicon can deliver. GPU Boost/XFR style algorithms are ultimately good for the consumer as long as the performance in benchmarks can be realistically achieved. You don't have to pay for the FTW Ultimate Strix OC Mega Elite edition... unless the performance is justifiable. You really are just paying for whatever additional marginal performance the cooler can deliver. 3800X is a bad deal? Buy the 3700X. (exception being limited voltage/TDP... Vega OC was artificially gimped by the memory voltage, and desktop chips have (AFAIK) a hard power limit that prevents the 3700X from competing too hard with the 3800X, and 3600 vs 3600X, and so on...) edit: 1000 series of course being probably the one generational exception Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 11:00
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oh... one more dumb question... X470D4U routes the "NVMe" lanes to a physical slot. Do any other boards do that? I have a need for expansion and in a year or two when gaming perf catches up the extra 4 dedicated CPU lanes will probably be the factor that gets me to switch over (all things being equal, etc). PCH latency limits the IOPS of Optane or fast networking a fair bit. And that (real world) utilization eats into my x8 lanes I need for SLI (that I will never actually do...). Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 11:36
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Looks like you need a Threadripper. Lanezzzz in abundance.
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Oct 25, 2019 13:36
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It’s ok, almost everybody suffers from analysis paralysis from time to time.
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Oct 25, 2019 13:50
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Paul MaudDib posted:oh... one more dumb question... So what are you planning to use it for 
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Oct 25, 2019 14:26
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Stanley Pain posted:So what are you planning to use it for SLI (mandatory x8x8), or just full x16 to my primary GPU and I (ideally) boot and run my storage off a high-speed storage device (either direct-connected optane 900p or a high-speed network connection to a fast storage array, whether rdma or 10gbe or whatever). You need that x4 for fast storage/networking. have you ever queued in first... because optane and 9900K? sometimes that 1 sec matters. I'm in ur queue screen stealing ur tanks. Combat Pretzel posted:Looks like you need a Threadripper. eames posted:It’s ok, almost everybody suffers from analysis paralysis from time to time. really not wrong here The design paralysis of only x16 lanes is toxic. I miss the old days when you could just throw money at it and the problem goes away like x99. X299 has not even been performance competitive with consumer platform for gaming let alone X399. There has been a very obvious divergence between gaming and workstation platforms over the last 3 years and that didn't use to be a thing, X99 used to be the best at gaming and also best at productivity and you also got a fuckload of lanes. Threadripper being the actual best at everything and also a shitload of lanes, I may just buy zen3 threadripper, or even just the current incarnation. There is a price (and core count, and clock) I'd pull the trigger even on zen2. not $400 entry-level motherboards and $1000 chips like AMD will be doing of course. AMD needs to be ahead or real close in gaming before I'll do that. AMD didn't break compatibility with X399 because they wanted to reduce X399 pricing because it was way too expensive and stuff. X570 is a guideline for what to expect on TR40X and poo poo. It's gonna be even more eye-watering. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 16:00
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Paul MaudDib posted:AMD not doing the boot kit program anymore either? Bummer. They are. It doesn't take long to get the boot kit (an Athlon 200GE), and you only have to pay return shipping on the CPU alone (they don't want the HSF back). I got a despatch notice 3 days after creating a ticket. It wasn't troublesome at all, I don't know why people are so afraid of it. Edit: I guess for AMD's sake it's kind of good people are, though, because it's obviously a loss for them HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Oct 25, 2019 |
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Oct 25, 2019 16:04
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So apparently I got sent a DOA motherboard...was quite a process to eliminate down to that conclusion and now I'm legit curious about a better choice. Specifically, the Aorus Pro (non-Wifi) and it looks like a solid alternative, but I'm curious if anyone here knows whether or not Gigabyte's resolved their 'dual-BIOS deleting your changes' bug or if it's still an issue, since that might put a damper on it?
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Oct 26, 2019 18:51
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Gigabyte has not resolved that issue, but you can work around it by using the toggle switches on the board to soft disable it, then it only shows up if you flash a new version of BIOS or clear cmos and most of the time it is better to redo the settings manually anyway when you do that.
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Oct 26, 2019 19:20
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