AMD Zen Discussion Thread

shootermacg

BloodBath wrote: »

They are already making use of them now. I would say in time the 2700 will outperform the 3600 but for now the 3600 makes more sense.

You can always upgrade to a 8 core or higher down the line.

That's exactly why I went down the AMD route. I'm sick of having to buy a new board, RAM and CPU together. I think you'll get plenty of mileage from the 3600 to make it worth your while.
Just because the consoles use will have 8-core CPUs, it doesn't mean they'll be utilized.

BloodBath

shootermacg wrote: »

That's exactly why I went down the AMD route. I'm sick of having to buy a new board, RAM and CPU together. I think you'll get plenty of mileage from the 3600 to make it worth your while.
Just because the consoles use will have 8-core CPUs, it doesn't mean they'll be utilized.

A lot of us have the old intel mindset. I'd only buy a cpu once every 5-7 years, upper mid to high end with around 2-3 different gpus on that 1 platform because you weren't getting much of a boost with the cpu and it was a pain to change your whole system.

With amd's Ryzen you can treat cpus more like gpu's. Something you upgrade every 2-3 years or so while still getting a reasonable price and a decent performance improvement over your old 1.

Sniipe

I picked up an "Aorus B450 I AORUS PRO WIFI" however its bios isn't updated. Should I send it back to Amazon or would anyone have an AMD chip I could rent? Are there any other options?

Sniipe

Oooh, I just saw this: https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/pa-100#faq-Short-Term-Processor-Loan-Boot-Kit

M00lers

Sniipe wrote: »

I picked up an "Aorus B450 I AORUS PRO WIFI" however its bios isn't updated. Should I send it back to Amazon or would anyone have an AMD chip I could rent? Are there any other options?

What CPU do you have for the B450 board?

Sniipe

moolers2000 wrote: »

What CPU do you have for the B450 board?

I have a Ryzen 5 3600 but the motherboard is only "2000 Ready"

M00lers

Sniipe wrote: »

I have a Ryzen 5 3600 but the motherboard is only "2000 Ready"

I see, you'll probably be quicker buying a 2000 series than going through AMD CPU loan program but you could abuse Amazons generous returns policy.

Subcomandante Marcos

moolers2000 wrote: »

I see, you'll probably be quicker buying a 2000 series than going through AMD CPU loan program but you could abuse Amazons generous returns policy.

grabbing a 200GE for £40 from amazon and returning it as soon as you have the bios flashed would be the best best tbh.

shootermacg

Is there no other way? Why would you buy that board (without a CPU) in the first place?
Sorry I didn't know you bought it thinking it would work out of the box. Is there a way to flash the bios from USB? That way you could just download the image and you'd be good.

wotzgoingon

No MSI were the only company to provide that feature last gen. Well widespread across nearly all their boards. There is one or two boards from other manufacturers who also offer it. While nearly all or all X570 boards from every manufacturer provide that feature this gen.

Homelander

Simi wrote: »

It's hard to say how quickly developers are going to utilise more cores in the future. The quad core i5 7600k has started to fall behind in the likes of battlefield 5 which runs noticeably better on 6 or 8 core CPUs https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1754/images/2018-11-25-image-2.png

I wouldn't be too worried about this happening the 3600 though. It is an SMT enabled part, and I seriously doubt any developer is going to require a minimum of 8 cores any time soon given that it would make every Intel processor from the 9th gen i7 and i9 down obsolete.

Personally I went with the 3600, noting that for the most part it is faster than the 2700x

I think in fairness the 7600K was old-hat even when it released.....good single core performance but even then it was showing weakness versus the 1600 in some games (while being better in others due to the core performance), these days the 2600 or i5-9400 are kinda bare minimum for a new build. Even if you're die hard Intel for some reason, the 9400 is a reasonably safe choice, by the time its obsolete or performing badly the 2600 will probably have had its day. (I know you can upgrade to a 3600 or 3700 or whatever, but equally can also upgrade to 8700/9700 or whatever). Intel and AMD are still much the same, AMD is just better general value. I recently had to buy a few machines for a setup and ended up going with the 9100 for £80 a piece (and really cheap h310 boards), much better performance than the 1200 at the same price and can swap them out for 9400 if/when needed.

shootermacg

Homelander wrote: »

I think in fairness the 7600K was old-hat even when it released.....good single core performance but even then it was showing weakness versus the 1600 in some games (while being better in others due to the core performance), these days the 2600 or i5-9400 are kinda bare minimum for a new build. Even if you're die hard Intel for some reason, the 9400 is a reasonably safe choice, by the time its obsolete or performing badly the 2600 will probably have had its day. (I know you can upgrade to a 3600 or 3700 or whatever, but equally can also upgrade to 8700/9700 or whatever). Intel and AMD are still much the same, AMD is just better general value. I recently had to buy a few machines for a setup and ended up going with the 9100 for £80 a piece (and really cheap h310 boards), much better performance than the 1200 at the same price and can swap them out for 9400 if/when needed.

Also remember the new i7 isn't multi-threading, so you're 3600 will have 12 logical cores vs it's 8 physical cores.

Homelander

shootermacg wrote: »

Also remember the new i7 isn't multi-threading, so you're 3600 will have 12 logical cores vs it's 8 physical cores.

Yeah that's true but for 99% of people, by the time that 6/12 trumps 8/8 with considerably better per-core (eg 9700) on 99% of setups, both will be redundant. Though the 8700 is 6/12.

shootermacg

Homelander wrote: »

Yeah that's true but for 99% of people, by the time that 6/12 trumps 8/8 with considerably better per-core (eg 9700) on 99% of setups, both will be redundant. Though the 8700 is 6/12.

The only reason the current I7 wins over the 3600 at gaming, at least in most games. is because most games still rely more on clock speed or MIPs. The current AMDS manage plenty of MIPs at a lower clock speed, so they are not too far off. Boost the resolution to 1440 and the difference is negligible.

Homelander

Again also true. The only real area Intel wins still is above 60hz at the high end (9700K/9900K/8700K/etc). For 99% of gaming PC's AMD is better value I don't think anyone would dispute it. Personally have a 3600 for that reason, and I actually have a 144hz monitor but I wanted to splurge on the GPU.

z0oT

From reading posts from the AMD rep on reddit, it seems the only thing one can use to accurately monitor voltages, temperatures with the Ryzen 3000 stuff is to use Ryzen Master.

Apparently some cores are put into a sleep state in idle, and the traditional monitoring software wakes them several times a second to monitor them. This causes the voltages and temperatures at idle to be higher than usual.

I tried using Ryzen Master last night, and my idle temperatures seem to be better behaved with just that running instead of HWInfo or something else. I'm seeing low 30's now as opposed to 40-60C.

The way the cores are put to sleep is interesting. I've seen all cores except 1 on my 3700X sleeping at one point, with the remaining one downclocked all the way to 400MHz.

AMD is continuing the tradition with weird quirks when it comes to monitoring. :pac:

BloodBath

Heads up for anyone ordering Ryzen 3000 on older boards.

CCL deliver to Ireland and will do the BIOS update for you if you order the board and cpu from them. About €10 delivery from them but their prices are among the cheapest.

Sniipe

BloodBath wrote: »

Heads up for anyone ordering Ryzen 3000 on older boards.

CCL deliver to Ireland and will do the BIOS update for you if you order the board and cpu from them. About €10 delivery from them but their prices are among the cheapest.

Cheers for the info - I sent my motherboard back to Amazon and ordered an MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX which has the bios update for 3000 series.

I got word back from AMD about the boot kit - asking for a picture of the CPU, but by that stage I had made the new purchase and canceled the kit.

pointywalnut

BloodBath wrote: »

Heads up for anyone ordering Ryzen 3000 on older boards.

CCL deliver to Ireland and will do the BIOS update for you if you order the board and cpu from them. About €10 delivery from them but their prices are among the cheapest.

I purchased the MSI Tomahawk B450 Max and 3700X from CCL in early Aug. Asked for the bios upgrade, which I admit is not needed for the B450 MAX, however it was not done.

BloodBath

A friend of mine ordered there recently and they did it for him. Maybe it's only for boards that need it.

wotzgoingon

z0oT wrote: »

Take away is that his survey results show the vast majority of Ryzen 3000 don't hit the advertised boost frequency, although the vast majority are within 25-50MHz of it though.

I see this doing the rounds on the net, and it's typical of the reviewing community making a big deal about nothing yet again. My 3700X is reporting 4392MHz on 1 or 2 cores after a few hours of gaming. The BCLK is reported as 99.8MHz, and 44 x 99.8MHz is 4392MHz. If the BCLK had an extra 200kHz added, the boost would be correctly reported as 4.4GHz even.

My 6700k used to do the same thing. I don't think it ever reported 4.2GHz or 4GHz, rather like 4180MHz and 3990MHz.

AMD to release new bios updates to board partners to address the issues in above video.

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-to-handle-boost-clock-frequency-differentials-with-firmware-update.html

AMD is pleased with the strong momentum of 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen processors in the PC enthusiast and gaming communities. We closely monitor community feedback on our products and understand that some 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen users are reporting boost clock speeds below the expected processor boost frequency.

While processor boost frequency is dependent on many variables including workload, system design, and cooling solution, we have closely reviewed the feedback from our customers and have identified an issue in our firmware that reduces boost frequency in some situations. We are in the process of preparing a BIOS update for our motherboard partners that addresses that issue and includes additional boost performance optimizations.

We will provide an update on September 10 to the community regarding the availability of the BIOS.

K.O.Kiki

TL;DW:

All test where conducted with a Ryzen 9 3900X on an open air test bench without direct airflow with a 1 hour long Blender stress test. The reported temperatures are peak temperatures and were measured using a digital thermometer with k-type thermocouples.

Please note that the MSI X570-A Pro experienced VRM throttling at 115°C PCB backside temperature with CPU frequency dropping to 547 MHz

• Asus Prime X570-P - 62°C MOSFET, 66°C PCB back
• ASRock X570 Pro4 - 75°C MOSFET, 80°C PCB back
• Gigabyte X570 Gaming X - 82°C MOSFET, 86°C PCB back
• MSI X570-A Pro - 101°C MOSFET, 115°C PCB back

Ryzen 9 3900X 4.3 GHz 1.4 V

• Asus Prime X570-P - 68°C MOSFET, 73°C PCB back
• ASRock X570 Pro4 - 92°C MOSFET, 96°C PCB back
• Gigabyte X570 Gaming X - 98°C MOSFET, 105°C PCB back
• MSI X570-A Pro - 103°C MOSFET, 116°C PCB back

BloodBath

I wouldn't touch any of MSI's products with a barge pole. This kind of crap seems regular for them.

How did that board get through any kind of internal testing.

will56

Current intel build is starting to show its age, couple of issues with MB connections and some odd behaviour after restarts.

I have an I7 4770. Run mainly photoshop, lightroom, and then some gaming with an rx480.
Usually running a number of Chrome tabs and some other programs alongside photoshop (joys of a 27" screen) :-)

Don't want to stump up too much cash, I've upgraded this one bit by bit over the last 5/6 years. but where should I be aiming for comparable perfomance ? R5 or 7

M00lers

will56 wrote: »

Current intel build is starting to show its age, couple of issues with MB connections and some odd behaviour after restarts.

I have an I7 4770. Run mainly photoshop, lightroom, and then some gaming with an rx480.
Usually running a number of Chrome tabs and some other programs alongside photoshop (joys of a 27" screen) :-)

Don't want to stump up too much cash, I've upgraded this one bit by bit over the last 5/6 years. but where should I be aiming for comparable perfomance ? R5 or 7

If you're trying to keep cost low I'd go for a 3600...but for your use case you'd get away with 2nd Gen Ryzen i.e 2600/2700.

Ultrflat

Hi guys if you had a choice between a 3600X and a 2700X which one would you go for?

Subcomandante Marcos

Ultrflat wrote: »

Hi guys if you had a choice between a 3600X and a 2700X which one would you go for?

Neither. Don't pay extra for the X.

K.O.Kiki

Ultrflat wrote: »

Hi guys if you had a choice between a 3600X and a 2700X which one would you go for?

3600X, or as above 3600 non-X with a better cooler.

Ultrflat

Subcomandante Marcos wrote: »

Neither. Don't pay extra for the X.

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

3600X, or as above 3600 non-X with a better cooler.

Sorry I should of said this is for rendering, graphic design and strictly productivity!

M00lers

Ultrflat wrote: »

Sorry I should of said this is for rendering, graphic design and strictly productivity!

The extra cores/threads of the 2700 would probably benefit you over the 6 core/12 threads of the 3600 if rendering but I'd check a few benchmarks to be sure.