OcUK Ryzen 3000/Zen 2 review thread

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Unless there is a big rush,I would give it a week or two until we get more clarification on these BIOS issues.

 

[TNA]

So had a catch up on the reviews and in conclusion I feel it comes to what I just said in another thread.

Love what AMD have done with the 3000 series, but still not sure if I need the upgrade. My 4770K still runs like a champ at 4.7GHz. Might upgrade to a 3900X at some point in the near future, but if I do, it will not be because I felt like I needed to, but because I fancied something new.

 

[Armageus]

@Jokester can you please add a blank post after the OP for me? I am running out of space to add stuff in the OP!

Fairly sure we can't do that unfortunately (or at least I can't figure out how to )

 

[Stanners]

@Jokester can you please add a blank post after the OP for me? I am running out of space to add stuff in the OP!

Amateur mistake there. You don’t see @Kaapstad making those sort of errors

 

[Jokester]

Fairly sure we can't do that unfortunately (or at least I can't figure out how to )

Was thinking it might be above my pay grade, I'll see if I can see anything.

 

[Jokester]

@CAT-THE-FIFTH Done

 

[Yaayuh!]

@CAT-THE-FIFTH Done

All hail the mighty mods.

 

[~>Dg<~]

Yeah thats a thought, i was considering just going x570, with the Taichi, but may be better off going x470 etc... instead, hmm.

yeah x470 good board looks the better option at the moment but when buying new tech you want new tech not old gen. cause the x570 boards have the stupid little fans on its gunna stop a lot buying them. fan goes kaput thats basically mobo in bin. plus the extra noise. which many reviews say the are audible. plus the price of the new x570 boards. budget ones nearly £200 lol. they gunna drop down in price pretty quickly once you factor in all the things people wont buy them for. also because older mobos dont really have much performance loss.

hopefully someone on here or gibbo puts boards together from all gens that run well together along with ram. its one thing that holds people back from going amd. which mobo which ram to choose. then people wonder why people just say screw that buy intel its simpler.

 

[jigger]

yeah x470 good board looks the better option at the moment but when buying new tech you want new tech not old gen. cause the x570 boards have the stupid little fans on its gunna stop a lot buying them. fan goes kaput thats basically mobo in bin. plus the extra noise. which many reviews say the are audible. plus the price of the new x570 boards. budget ones nearly £200 lol. they gunna drop down in price pretty quickly once you factor in all the things people wont buy them for. also because older mobos dont really have much performance loss.

hopefully someone on here or gibbo puts boards together from all gens that run well together along with ram. its one thing that holds people back from going amd. which mobo which ram to choose. then people wonder why people just say screw that buy intel its simpler.

The prices of X570 start around £150. I’ve had three Asus Intel boards from Z77 onwards with stupid little fans on. It’s nothing new to the manufactures... Workstation and server systems use these same fans and they take a beating 24 hours a day for years.

 

[modd1uk]

Still no 3600 vs 3600x reviews , need to work out if the extra £50 is justified.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Amateur mistake there. You don’t see @Kaapstad making those sort of errors

I only have one PC,not his rigs capable of launching the Space Shuttle!

@CAT-THE-FIFTH Done

Many thanks!!

 

[Alan1969]

I’ll try once I’m home, just away to step on to a chopper.

coming back from an oil rig?

Yeah thats a thought, i was considering just going x570, with the Taichi, but may be better off going x470 etc... instead, hmm.

fan on the x570 only kicks in when it needs apparently - so as it is not going to be working 100% of the time it may last

 

[motiv]

looks like Anand used the wrong bios, rather than a broken one.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

fan on the x570 only kicks in when it needs apparently - so as it is not going to be working 100% of the time it may last

Oh thats good then.

 

[pete910]

Speaking of @Kaapstad , where is he, He's normally bought 4 of everything by now

 

[Drollic]

Still no 3600 vs 3600x reviews , need to work out if the extra £50 is justified.

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/review-on-ryzen-3600-and-3600x.18858943/

Think I'll be going 3600x then 8 core on refresh if possible. I'd say it's probably only worth half of the upgrade in cost over the 3600 but they're so cheap I'm not fussed.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

07/08/2019 6:33 PM (GMT) - Update on the bios issue on Crosshair VIII Hero motherboard ("the thing").

Earlier today I received a response to my inquiries from ASUS. The response was rather technical and I cannot go into the specifics of what exactly it involved.
However, it confirmed my suspicions of what actually has caused the seen anomalies. A long story short; a mistake has been made and it has affected the results of multiple reviewers, including my own. In my own case, I ended
up discarding my own affected multithreaded results alltogether, before even releasing them. I'm still angry because of a lot of my own and other peoples work went to waste because of it. But like I said, mistakes do happen.
In this case all of the evidence and known facts suggest that this was indeed a mistake, caused by an extremely tight schedule and miscommunication between several different parties. Infact, all of the facts I can personally verify
indicate that despite the rather suspicious way this mistake happened, there never was any malicous intent involved.

ASUS also provided me a new bios versions for both Crosshair VIII Hero and Formula boards, which correct the mistake made in newer than the AMD approved 0066 bios builds.
Based on my own testing done on the 3900X SKU, the CPU now meets its specification in terms of the allowed power consumption (same way, as the approved 0066 build did). The new build has currently not been validated, so
it will take some time until its changes get reflected to builds available to the larger audience.

What kind of effects will the fixed bioses have then?

Based on my own testing (do note that silicon variation exists and that the sample size is one for 3900X):

- ~ 27W lower average power package power consumption (VDDCR_CPU & VDDCR_SoC, i.e. the main power rails)
- 7°C lower temperature (tDie, while using DeepCool Assassin II cooler)
- < 90MHz average frequency loss across all twelve cores in MT workloads

The above figures were recorded during Blender 2.80b runs, but they should translate almost directly to Cinebench R20 NT as well (based on my experience).

The peak power difference between the faulty and the fixed bioses is around 35W (Prime95).

Despite there is no question that a mistake was made, I'd still like to thank ASUS for two specific reasons: they didn't try to deny the existence of the issue (which btw. is the usual reponse within the industry), but also fixed it immediately.
I also do feel bad for the bios engineer, who had to stay over(over)-time to get the bios build done. Thanks for that. I also have to feel bad for ASUS, because this mistake might have smirched the reputation of their brand new Crosshair VIII -series motherboards.
And make no mistake, these are one of the best, if not the best X570 boards available at the market (a personal opinion).

At this point you should ask yourself if ASUS paid me off?
Everyone can be bought, its just the matter of the offered sum or bargain. Everyone claiming otherwise either lives in self-deception or frankly, is a moron.
I myself could definitely be bought. And rather cheaply too, I think. The thing is, just that at least until writing this, nobody has even tried to do so.

Besides of this statement, I also corrected an error AMD pointed out to me.
Despite the 3900X CPU has fused (factory programmed) Fmax ceiling of 4.65GHz, AMD only advertises 4.60GHz maximum boost.
I must admit that I was initially surprised to see the 3900X having 4.65GHz fused maximum boost limit, since AMD indeed only mentions 4.60GHz in their marketing materials.
Nevertheless, I'm yet to reach the advertised 4.6GHz either, so in that regard the only thing which changes is the CPU falling 25MHz short instead of 75MHz short of its advertised frequency.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

https://www.techpowerup.com/257201/...ail-amds-zen2-backwards-compatibility-promise

AMD succeeded in delivering on its backwards-compatibility promise for the 3rd generation Ryzen processors on motherboards based on AMD 300-series and 400-series chipsets. This promise was very close to being derailed suggests a community thread on MSI forums. According to MSI representatives active on the forum, the capacity of the SPI flash EEPROM chip that stores the motherboard UEFI firmware is woefully limited to cram in the AGESA ComboAM4 1.0.0.3a microcode on many of its motherboards.

The company had to make several changes to its UEFI BIOS package that's currently being circulated as a "beta," to accommodate support for 3rd generation Ryzen processors along with AGESA ComboAM4 1.0.0.3a. First, it had to kick out support for A-series and Athlon processors based on the 28 nm "Bristol Ridge" silicon. Second, it had to [and this is a big one], kick the RAID module, breaking SATA RAID on many of its motherboards. Third, it had to replace its feature-rich Click BIOS 5 setup program with a barebones "GSE Lite" Click BIOS program, which lacks many of the features of the original program, and comes with a dull, low-resolution UI. This program still includes some essential MSI-exclusive features such as A-XMP (which translates Intel XMP profiles to AMD-compatible settings), Smart Fan, and M-Flash.The scary part? Many other motherboard brands appear to be using 16-megabyte EEPROMs on their older socket AM4 motherboards. These companies are bound to run into similar ROM capacity issues unless they keep their UEFI setup programs lightweight. Motherboards based on the latest X570 chipset feature 32-megabyte EEPROMs. The AMD X570 chipset lacks support for not just "Bristol Ridge," but also first-generation Ryzen "Summit Ridge" and "Raven Ridge" processors.

We recommend that unless you literally possess a 3rd generation Ryzen processor, do not update the BIOS of your older socket AM4 motherboard. You may risk losing features and break your RAID volumes. Find out the latest version of BIOS that has the classic AGESA PinnaclePI 1.0.0.6 microcode, and use that instead.

 

[hyperseven]

 

[beany_bot]

Mobo vendors have got some cheek charging the price they are asking for X570 boards while not being able to put together proper freaking software for them!