Ryzen 3600 build mainboard question

[Irata]

So, my kid is pestering me to build a new PC (not that I need much convincing). Currently we have an HP Elitedesk 705 system (AMD A8-6500B, SSD, 16 GB RAM (2x8) sporting a 4 GB Radeon RX 550). System works fine and I got it very cheap, but my kid likes to game and would also like to record / edit / stream video and it's more of a "do one thing at a time" system right now and to be honest already a bit under powered.

Plus, my Ryzen 2500u Notebook already feels a lot snappier and smoother.
I think even the Ryzen 3000G would be a noticeable upgrade but I decided on the following after checking prices here in Germany:

CPU: Ryzen 3600 - decided for the entry level Ryzen 3000 series.
RAM: 32GB G.Skill RipJaws V schwarz DDR4-3200 (2x16)
GPU: I will most likely go for an RX 5700 (non-XT), either Sapphire or Powercolor. Plan is to upgrade it with something bigger in a year or so.

I am still very undecided on the mainboard. The plan is to keep the system for a long time, so I would probably upgrade to a 3900X or 3950X once they are EOL and then afterwards a Ryzen 4000 series CPU.
While PCIe 4 is not really a big factor for me now (do not plan on getting a PCIe 4 SSD from the start and it won't matter for an RX 5700), I want the system to be useable for at least the next four to five years and I feel it might make a difference in two years already.
For me, a big plus of AM4 is the upgradeability and the mainboard is really the last thing I want to change (as it's imho a hassle) . Anything else will probably be replaced over time though.

The mainboard that I would really want / love to get is the MSI X570 Creation (sounds nice and has tons of USB ports).
But, it's not exactly on the cheap side, even for X570 boards, so the alternatives I am looking at are:

- An MSI 450 Max board for around €100 - should be good enough for now but not sure how it will do in the future and it does not have too many USB ports. Also, I do not think that I will be happy with it with the next upgrade already, so it's almost out of the question.
- A Taichi X470 for €200. This seems like a solid board with a good build quality and VRM / power circuitry, but it has no PCIe 4
- Another X570 board in the €200-300 range, preferrably with a fan that sits idle when not needed and enough USB ports. I do not care about LED or Wifi but it should have a good build quality and power circuitry (including cooling).


Oh: Overclocking is not my thing. Do not really care. But I do value stability and reliability and maybe the option to play with memory timings.

Any suggestions would be greatly welcome.

 

[MaikuTech]

Settle for the MSI 450 Tomahawk mobo if you haven't already/
The specs should be enough for your kids at home.

Also crucial ballistix works "MUCH" more better than G skill with a lesser failure rate.

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Ballistix-Desktop-Gaming-BLS4G4D240FSB/dp/B00UFF84G2?th=1

 

[Irata]

Thanks for the input. Will probably wait for B550 and may even end up "just" getting my kid a new XBox for gaming as spending priorities changed a bit.

Am still very tempted to build a new PC, so I'll see.

But something like the Tomahawk in B550 form would be nice if B550 boards at least support the 20 CPU direct PCIe 4 lanes.

 

[MaikuTech]

Good luck with your new build, check the ram support list to make sure it'll handle what you want to put in there.

 

[wizardB]

So, my kid is pestering me to build a new PC (not that I need much convincing). Currently we have an HP Elitedesk 705 system (AMD A8-6500B, SSD, 16 GB RAM (2x8) sporting a 4 GB Radeon RX 550). System works fine and I got it very cheap, but my kid likes to game and would also like to record / edit / stream video and it's more of a "do one thing at a time" system right now and to be honest already a bit under powered.

Plus, my Ryzen 2500u Notebook already feels a lot snappier and smoother.
I think even the Ryzen 3000G would be a noticeable upgrade but I decided on the following after checking prices here in Germany:

CPU: Ryzen 3600 - decided for the entry level Ryzen 3000 series.
RAM: 32GB G.Skill RipJaws V schwarz DDR4-3200 (2x16)
GPU: I will most likely go for an RX 5700 (non-XT), either Sapphire or Powercolor. Plan is to upgrade it with something bigger in a year or so.

I am still very undecided on the mainboard. The plan is to keep the system for a long time, so I would probably upgrade to a 3900X or 3950X once they are EOL and then afterward a Ryzen 4000 series CPU.
While PCIe 4 is not really a big factor for me now (do not plan on getting a PCIe 4 SSD from the start and it won't matter for an RX 5700), I want the system to be useable for at least the next four to five years and I feel it might make a difference in two years already.
For me, a big plus of AM4 is the upgradeability and the mainboard is really the last thing I want to change (as it's IMHO a hassle) . Anything else will probably be replaced over time though.

The mainboard that I would really want / love to get is the MSI X570 Creation (sounds nice and has tons of USB ports).
But, it's not exactly on the cheap side, even for X570 boards, so the alternatives I am looking at are:

- An MSI 450 Max board for around €100 - should be good enough for now but not sure how it will do in the future and it does not have too many USB ports. Also, I do not think that I will be happy with it with the next upgrade already, so it's almost out of the question.
- A Taichi X470 for €200. This seems like a solid board with a good build quality and VRM / power circuitry, but it has no PCIe 4
- Another X570 board in the €200-300 range, preferably with a fan that sits idle when not needed and enough USB ports. I do not care about LED or Wifi but it should have a good build quality and power circuitry (including cooling).


Oh: Overclocking is not my thing. Do not really care. But I do value stability and reliability and maybe the option to play with memory timings.

Any suggestions would be greatly welcome.

Grab a gigabyte X570 board I've been rocking a Master Board for a couple of months now. Rock-solid and overclocks well.

 

[Irata]

Settle for the MSI 450 Tomahawk mobo if you haven't already/
The specs should be enough for your kids at home.

Also crucial ballistix works "MUCH" more better than G skill with a lesser failure rate.

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Ballistix-Desktop-Gaming-BLS4G4D240FSB/dp/B00UFF84G2?th=1

Well, seems like the issue solved itself for me.

Just saw that the Ryzen 7 2700x was on sale - cheapest I found it for was on Alternate.de for €149 including free shipping. Just had to order it as this is €40 less than the best offer I could find on a 3600 (non-X).

I think I'll go for the MSI 450 Tomahawk with this CPU and then get the rest bit by bit.
I will look into the Crucial Ballistix memory.

 

[Irata]

A little update - ordered all the components except for the GPU.

For the GPU, I decided to try and score a cheap used 8 GB RX 470 / 480 (Sapphire). The reason for this was because my monitor is a full hd 60 Hz model at the moment and we are coming from an A8-6500B with a 4 GB RX 550, so this is already a lot better than what I have at the moment.

A monitor and GPU upgrade will probably come next year - sticking to a budget.

Components are:

CPU: Ryzen 2700X (will use the boxed cooler) - € 150. This includes the Ryzen bundle, will get Borderlands 3 which is a € 50 value right there
Memory: 2x8 GB Crucial Ballistix Sport LT V2 DDR4-3200 CL 16
Mainboard: MSI B450 Tomahawk Max
SSD: 500 GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe
PSU: be quiet Straight Power 11 Modular 80+ Gold 750W
Case: be quiet Pure Base 600
Lite on DVD RW
My total right now is € 650 including shipping. Hopefully I get score a cheap used RX 470 in the €50-60 range, so the total should be €700 which is a good bit less than planned.

For the longer term, a GPU + monitor upgrade is planned for next year, an upgrade to a Ryzen 9 3900x is also an option once it is EOL and cheaper. PSU and memory wise I should be fine, can always double the memory down the road.

In any case, the new PC will be a huge upgrade over what I have for a reasonable price.
Note: The last PC I built myself was an Athlon 2500+ system, so it's been a while

 

[Irata]

Quick update: for the GPU I did get a 5500XT (Sapphire pulse) after all. Used Polaris cards were too expensive for my taste, plus I did not want to wait too much longer.

The 4 GB version was OK price wise, the 8GB one was out of the question as it is too expensive (+42 EUR) and for that price a somewhat more expensive 1650 super would have been a better deal.

Everything is now put together and I'm waiting on my Windows 10 DVD to arrive.

While putting the PC together, I remembered that the best part of building a PC (besides getting exactly the components you want) is when the d**n thing finally works. The building process, particularly attaching all the cables to the mainboard, getting the cooler on.... I could do without that

 

[Irata]

New update - set-up and installed the system yesterday. Everything went fine and smoothely:

Opened the Bios and enabled virtualization (no idea why that is disabled) and read the memory profile to have it run at the correct speed. Did not change anything else.

Installed Windows 10 Pro, updated everything, installed AMD's chipset drivers, other mainboard drivers and lastly the Adrenaline drivers.

So far no issues and the system feels nice and smooth. Kid's been busy playing games and recording gameplay. I do feel like getting a 5600XT instead of the 5500XT may have been better, but since an update to something proper is planned for next year, why waste money. It is good enough, just not "Ultra" settings good

Overall, the kid and I are really happy with the new system and looking around what pre-built costs vs. what I get, am even happier.

 

[daveteauk]

Too late I know for my input, but at least you didn't spend a fortune. I had a similar dilemma, and decided the MoBo was the thing that would last a few years so went for the MSI x570 ACE, a fantastic board, and great BIOS, unlike some other manus, and on offer at the time for £299. I slapped on a 3600x, for now, as it was just £188 at Currys - bargain. 4900x later this year along with a 'proper' gen4 M.2. I say 'proper' as the full bandwith capability isn't yet being realised by the current crop of gen4 M.2 NVMe SSD's with the Phison E16 controller as they're 'limited' to 5000mbps whereas the actual spec for gen4 is over 7000.

 

[Irata]

Too late I know for my input, but at least you didn't spend a fortune. I had a similar dilemma, and decided the MoBo was the thing that would last a few years so went for the MSI x570 ACE, a fantastic board, and great BIOS, unlike some other manus, and on offer at the time for £299. I slapped on a 3600x, for now, as it was just £188 at Currys - bargain. 4900x later this year along with a 'proper' gen4 M.2. I say 'proper' as the full bandwith capability isn't yet being realised by the current crop of gen4 M.2 NVMe SSD's with the Phison E16 controller as they're 'limited' to 5000mbps whereas the actual spec for gen4 is over 7000.

Not having PCIe 4 is the one thing I have a little bit of remorse about. B550 with PCIe 4 for the GPU and one nvme would have been ideal for future upgrades but I did not want to wait any longer and the price difference between the B450 board and a good X570 model already covered the CPU and nvme.

Should be OK even with a next gen upper mid range GPU though.

 

[daveteauk]

Not having PCIe 4 is the one thing I have a little bit of remorse about. B550 with PCIe 4 for the GPU and one nvme would have been ideal for future upgrades but I did not want to wait any longer and the price difference between the B450 board and a good X570 model already covered the CPU and nvme.

Should be OK even with a next gen upper mid range GPU though.

PCIe v4 is wasted on/for a GPU, as NO current GPU is even fast enough to saturate the PCIe v3 lanes, so don't bother getting it just for that, as there is absolutely no point, so don't knock yourself over that.

 

[neeyik]

PCIe v4 is wasted on/for a GPU, as NO current GPU is even fast enough to saturate the PCIe v3 lanes, so don't bother getting it just for that, as there is absolutely no point, so don't knock yourself over that.

Just about every GPU out there can saturate a PCI x16 3.0 interface, as it has less than 16 GB/s of bandwidth. A GeForce GT 1030 has more than double that for its local memory, as an example. This is why games are written to exclusively use local memory as much as possible and only dip into system as little as possible. Not that PCIe 4.0 will make that much of a difference as it’s only doubling the bandwidth; 5.0 doubles it again, so it will be useful for low end GPUs as money could be saved by not adding much or any local memory.

 

[daveteauk]

Just about every GPU out there can saturate a PCI x16 3.0 interface, as it has less than 16 GB/s of bandwidth. A GeForce GT 1030 has more than double that for its local memory, as an example. This is why games are written to exclusively use local memory as much as possible and only dip into system as little as possible. Not that PCIe 4.0 will make that much of a difference as it’s only doubling the bandwidth; 5.0 doubles it again, so it will be useful for low end GPUs as money could be saved by not adding much or any local memory.

That's completely the opposite of everything I've read about PCIe v3 against v4. Several sites, Toms included, forums and many YouTube PC guys all say no current GPU can fully saturate the v3 PCIe bus, and give that as one reason not to bother with v4 yet. Also, isn't the 16GB/s of bandwidth you mention, for EACH of the 16 lanes coming out of a GPU? And the 'local' memory you mention - isn't that the onboard GPUs memory?

 

[Irata]

Just about every GPU out there can saturate a PCI x16 3.0 interface, as it has less than 16 GB/s of bandwidth. A GeForce GT 1030 has more than double that for its local memory, as an example. This is why games are written to exclusively use local memory as much as possible and only dip into system as little as possible. Not that PCIe 4.0 will make that much of a difference as it’s only doubling the bandwidth; 5.0 doubles it again, so it will be useful for low end GPUs as money could be saved by not adding much or any local memory.

That‘s an interesting point - hadn‘t thought of it this way.

Could this enable AMD‘ s hUMA concept that went nowhere in their last attempt ?

 

[neeyik]

That's completely the opposite of everything I've read about PCIe v3 against v4. Several sites, Toms included, forums and many YouTube PC guys all say no current GPU can fully saturate the v3 PCIe bus, and give that as one reason not to bother with v4 yet. Also, isn't the 16GB/s of bandwidth you mention, for EACH of the 16 lanes coming out of a GPU? And the 'local' memory you mention - isn't that the onboard GPUs memory?

Each lane in a PCI Express 3.0 interface operates at 8 GHz and transfers up to 8 bits of data per clock, and each lane consists of two send and receive differential signal strobes that encodes the data to improve signal integrity. So a single lane has a send or receive bandwidth of up to 1 GB/s, whereas 16 lanes (aka x16) up to 16 GB/s, although roughly 2% of that is given over to the encoding.

GPUs can easily saturate a PCI Express interface - if it wasn't possible, then there would little need for high speed/bandwidth local memory (I.e. the GDDR chips on the graphics card) - what the likes of Tom's Hardware are really referring to is that there are no games out there that saturate the interface, and for good reason. One can use the PCIe Feature Test in 3DMark to explore this; quoting from the whitepaper:

For each frame, the test uploads a large amount of vertex and texture data to the GPU. The goal is to transfer enough data to saturate the PCIe 4.0 interface. The geometry streaming load increases from 2,400,000 to 9,600,000 vertices per frame as the test runs. The texture streaming load remains constant. The test uses a fixed time step between frames. This ensures that every system does the same amount of work when running the test.

The 3DMark PCI Express feature test is rendered at 2560 × 1440 resolution. The test is forward-rendered with simple Blinn-Phong shading. The background is rendered by blending three textures, two of which are uploaded for each frame. The test uses post-processing to add linear fog, tone mapping, and bloom effects.

A quick run on my system (i7-9700K, 32 GB DDR4-3000, Titan X Pascal) gave an average bandwidth usage of around 12.5 GB/s. However, the average frame rate was roughly 13 fps, so one would clearly never have a game like this. All rendering involves a constant flow of data across the PCIe interface, as the GPU needs to be told what to do, but it's far better to have large data sets and the various render targets all stored locally, as its bandwidth is far superior.

Could this enable AMD‘ s hUMA concept that went nowhere in their last attempt ?

Maybe with PCIe 5.0 or 6.0 - all current DDR4 memory interfaces are 64 bits width, so dual channel DDR4-3000 provides a total peak bandwidth of 48 GB/s; this is more than the 32 GB/s offered by PCIe 4.0, but less than what PCIe 5.0 offers (which is what you want). It's still less, though, than what one can achieve by using GDDR5: a $40 GeForce GT 710 provides 40 GB/s with its paltry amount of local memory.

 

[CharmsD]

Just about every GPU out there can saturate a PCI x16 3.0 interface, as it has less than 16 GB/s of bandwidth. A GeForce GT 1030 has more than double that for its local memory, as an example. This is why games are written to exclusively use local memory as much as possible and only dip into system as little as possible. Not that PCIe 4.0 will make that much of a difference as it’s only doubling the bandwidth; 5.0 doubles it again, so it will be useful for low end GPUs as money could be saved by not adding much or any local memory.

GPUs can easily saturate a PCI Express interface - if it wasn't possible, then there would little need for high speed/bandwidth local memory (I.e. the GDDR chips on the graphics card) - what the likes of Tom's Hardware are really referring to is that there are no games out there that saturate the interface, and for good reason. One can use the PCIe Feature Test in 3DMark to explore this; quoting from the whitepaper:

For each frame, the test uploads a large amount of vertex and texture data to the GPU. The goal is to transfer enough data to saturate the PCIe 4.0 interface. The geometry streaming load increases from 2,400,000 to 9,600,000 vertices per frame as the test runs. The texture streaming load remains constant. The test uses a fixed time step between frames. This ensures that every system does the same amount of work when running the test.

PCI-Express 4.0 Performance Scaling with Radeon RX 5700 XT

PCI-Express 4.0 has been one of the main new features prominently brandished on the product boxes of both the 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processors and Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards. We examine the performance impact of running these cards on older generations of PCIe.

www.techpowerup.com

"Looking at the results, we can see a whole lot of nothing. PCI-Express 4.0 achieves only tiny improvements over PCI-Express 3.0—in the sub-1-percent range When averaged over all our benchmarks, we barely notice a 1% difference to PCIe Gen 3. I also included data for PCI-Express Gen 2, data which can be used interchangeably to represent PCIe 3.0 x8 (or PCIe 4.0 x4). Here, the differences are a little bit more pronounced, but with 2%, not much to write home about, either. These results align with what we found in previous PCI-Express scaling articles.​

​

That's of course a good thing as it confirms that you do not need an expensive PCI-Express 4.0 motherboard to maximize the potential of AMD's new Radeon RX 5700 XT. It also produces strong evidence that PCIe 4.0 won't be needed for even more powerful next-gen graphics cards because our three tested resolutions reveal more details. ​

​

If you look closely, you'll notice that lower resolutions show bigger differences in performance when changing the PCI-Express bandwidth, which seems counter-intuitive at first. Doesn't the graphics card work harder at higher resolutions? While that may (mostly) be true, graphics card load does not increase PCI-Express bandwidth; it actually lowers it because frame rates are lower. The amount of data transferred over the PCIe bus is fairly constant—per frame. So if the graphics card can run at higher FPS rates because the resolution is lower, the PCIe bus does have more traffic moving across it." ​

When there's no difference in real-world applications the theoretical distinctions don't make a difference. Essentially nothing other than storage solutions exceed the capacity of PCI-2, that is the performance line. Pressing on points about local memory past an engineer is a task only the bold would take. The Frame pacing, frame generation times, frame buffers, frame everything under the sun, do not require more buss bandwidth than is currently available through several generations of PCI.

PCI level and speeds are also dynamically adjusted 'on-the-fly', see: https://graphicscardhub.com/gpu-pcie-running-x8/