Ryzen 2600 questions

The only odd thing about this whole assembly, was that after i tested all devices (flash drivers, ereader, smart phones, you name it) on USB (because i wanted to be sure i wouldn't have the buggy mess that Gigabyte 970UD3P had with front USB3), one smart phone, wasn't being recognized only by the front ports (i was banging my head on the wall, thinking "the Gigabyte curse follows me to AM4). But, after about 1 hour of trying anything i could think of, the solution was to swap USB cable. Unbelievable but true. The cable keeps working on FX. And on Ryzen's rear USB ports. But not on front USB. Fortunately, i like to keep spares for everything, so i had some spare retail USB cables that i had bought from Amazon (quality cables). And it got recognized... Just like that... Mysteries of the Ryzen...

Other than that, Ryzen 2600 + Windows 7 = easier than i imagined.

I 've manually put 52 trc in memory timings in BIOS. All went well. I am impressed by MSI. The BIOS just works and looks so much better compared to Gigabyte's 970 UD3p. The only thing i can't figure out, is why the USB ports cease to give power (for charging for example), if you shut down the PC. My AM3+ boards keep powering the ports.

At any case, a word of praise for the much slandered FX. Comparing [email protected] vs 2600 stock, the desktop feeling is really, really close. I notice a slight superiority in snapiness of the Ryzen rig when opening the secondary (mechanical) HDD and browsing quickly through directories. This is probably merit of the better SATA performance. Otherwise, they are really close. I have a gazillion of utilities, only a few seem to launch slightly faster on Ryzen.
I also tried heavily modded Skyrim for very brief time inside Whiterun. There is no fps difference really. The fps that drop abruptly on the stairs of Dragonsreach and in front of the gates, are persisting with Ryzen and are just as bad. It's clearly the game engine that is flawed. The only minuscule difference that i noticed, is that running around the city, i don't get a half second semi-lag at one spot. Maybe it's a matter of more RAM bandwidth. But, in general, FPS wise, the game seems the same. Since most of my games are old, i expect the same, except probably for Shogun II Total War, which is very CPU bound. But i haven't tried it. Anyway, for someone who isn't a gamer or is a Sunday gamer, the "upgrade" to Ryzen won't bring many benefits, unless he plays recent games or severely single core bottlenecked games.

As far as power consumption goes, well, using killawatt, idle power consumption of the Ryzen rig, is the same as the FX (65W). Doing ordinary things like browsing, there is like 10W difference in favour of Ryzen. The real gains come at full load or games. Prime95 and IBT AVX go at 150W, which FX went to 200-220W. Skyrim shoots up to 110-130W, while in FX it was 200-220W.

For the potential power you get, the Ryzen 2600 is a bargain. I spent 400 euro for 3 components. That's not really expensive for the potential the rig has. The only problem is, that despite the much slandered FX, the countless posts that i read that "Ryzen's benefits are HUUUUUUUuuuuuUUUUUge", "i felt the difference everywhere", "It blew my mind", if you don't play the latest and greatest games that hammer the CPU and if you don't do some task to occupy all cores, like i used to do too (video encoding), the potential is there, but the perceived difference is very small. There is nothing i have done so far that "wowed" me with Ryzen vs FX.
The problem is, that i don't run Cinebench just for the sake of wowing myself looking at graphs. The biggest advantage i see, is 1) the lower heat/power consumption, 2) native USB ports work much better.

In poor words, for an average user, who doesn't play all the new games, the FX isn't "garbage" at all. I had in plan to grab an 8 core RYzen 4000 when it goes EOL. Now, unless i have some big need for 2 more cores, i can already see it will be overkill. I will probably grab one, as well as a spare motherboard, but i think i will stay with this platform generation for many, many years, together with my beloved Windows 7. We are past the point where you really need so much CPU power, if you aren't chasing every new game that comes out.

A bow, to the much slandered FX. I will keep a secondary FX rig for sure.

EDIT: And speaking of benchmarks (thank God they exist!), i gained 3434 points in 3DMark2003, arriving at 71386 points! I vaguely remember the time, when i would score lower than 2000 points... So this is really a big increase. Now if only i had the game that would benefit from it.

Nice SSD you are set to go! Im happy that everything is going smooth w/ the hardware and Win7. I did install Win 7 in my FX and was ok, updates also, system runs great!

Hope you by now sorted your BIOS profile for the Fans, i have zero problems w/ my MSI. Your motherboard have any BIOS update ? If yes you know what to do.

This CPU is very cool comprad to the FX, most under load. Iddle the FX is Ok, my have Hyper 212 push/pull.

Enjoy your build !!

The SSD is my trusty Crucial BX100 256GB. I actually executed the benchmark from userbenchmark.com and i got surprisingly good score.

Yes, i understood the BIOS, fans set just fine. I flashed the since day one (the board came with a BIOS from last summer. There was a December update).

To be honest, for a "65W" part, i was expecting a bit less heat. But, 65W TDP nowdays, just means that the CPU is more efficient, while drawing more power. For example, my 45W Athlon X4, was drawing 110W at full load. The FX6300 stock, undervolted, 160W. Ryzen 65W , draws 150W. The 1090T about 190W going from memory, which is about the same as the 1800X from what i read in reviews. It just shows that modern CPUs, tend to draw more, but dissipate less in heat.

Anyway, i am happy with Ryzen, the migration was much smoother than i had anticipated. The only small event viewer error was concerning an "ICEsomething service" failing to start. I traced it to the Realtek audio driver and it doesn't do anything really (maybe it interfaces with Nahimic? I don't know, since i didn't install Nahimic). So i disabled it and now i have 0 errors in event viewer.

Smooth sailing. I am impressed with MSI. I don't know how it behaves with overcloking, but for stock settings, everything works just fine, after i tuned the RAM timings and the fans. BIOS that just works and looks nice too! Definitely an upgrade from the headaches with Gigabyte 970 BIOS! I am an MSI fan now! Oh, the motherboard's mosfets run incredibly cool! (thanks to the massive and extremely firmly put heatsinks).

The only "negative" thing, is that when attaching the Scythe Katana3 cooler, the clipping mechanism literally grazes the mosfet heatsink while you clip it. But i resolved the issue, by clipping first that side and the free side for last. It was a very tight fit, but it worked. First time that this has happened to me in AMD board since AM2+ days, because this motherboard has very tall heatsinks.

I think i can now safely say, that Ryzen 2xxx has absolutely no problem with Windows 7. Not that it seemed to, but this is a statistical confirmation. The HDD's low performance is simply because it's a slow drive, that is horribly defragmented for years, as i put all kind of junk there, so it's normal. The rest of the machine performs as it should at stock speeds (with a RAM tweaking for main timings, while remaining at 2933Mhz for a 3000Mhz kit). I am also glad to see, that my choice of NVidia drivers, based on the magnificent 3DMark2003 performance, was correct.

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On the Gigabyte boards, you may have to play around with your IOMMU groups. I had a 970A-UD3 at one point with a simple "enable/disable" feature in the BIOS, something to keep in mind if you end up running Linux and have weird USB problems.

If you do end up running Linux and replacing Windows 7, you'd be surprised at how good gaming has become in the last year or so. Destination Linux https://destinationlinux.org/ and Phoronix https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home are great resources for gaming info. And the destination linux telegram group is full of gamers

Thanks, i had tried that already, along with pretty much anything found in endless googling. I will look at those links, i am not updated on the Linux situation thanks!

great thread undervolter.
I'm really happy to see that I'm not the only old scooler in the world wanting to stay on win7 :-).
every time I mention that I get destroyed by comments LOL.

I'm currently still on [email protected] (16gb, gtx 1060 6gb, SSDs) and changing my mind from day to day to go with R5 2600 and asus prime x370-pro or not. I'm afraid that very soon, I'll be forced to change to win10 because I do play newer games and we know that unfortunately in this segment win7 is loosing the battle. for example I bought a new freesync 24" monitor to be able to use freesync after nvidia finally unlocked the option and then hit a brick wall after I realized that the tech doesn't work under win7 :-(.
I will either leave my beloved SB for work and use ryzen specifically for games or create dual boot on ryzen using win7 and win10 which will also be a pain.

what are your thoughts on this, should I upgrade or wait a little longer? maybe for 3xxx series? I'm nut sure If I would see any real benefit in gaming. Newest I intent to play are FC5, Rage 2, metro exodus, BF1, BFV, last 2 tom raiders...?

P.S. what are the chances I'll be able to replace R5 2600 with new 3xxx series when it comes out if I build around this motherboard. Any info on this?

regards.


edit: forgot to mention. I play on 1080p and don't intend to improve that with new machine cos then I would need to go for more expensive GPUs and that's not something I want.

The i5 at 4.5GHz can even handle a 1070. Just please wait. The Ryzen 3000 series and the X570 boards will be here soon.