I'm planning on building a Ryzen system with the ASRock AB350 ITX board, but this whole BIOS update situation has me wondering whether I should keep it stock, update to 3.40 but no further, or if it's safe to go with the latest 4.40 update. I plan on keeping the CPU stock since I'm building in a Zaber Sentry and want to keep temperatures down and I'm using a Noctua NH-L9a to cool it. My current RAM is Corsair Vengeance LPX at 3000 MHz so I'd want to try and get around 2933 MHz.
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Motherboard ASRock X370 Gaming-ITX/ac and AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac
- Thread starter PlayfulPhoenix
- Start date
My suggestion would be to go to 4.40 for the higher RAM compatibility, given you're not planning to OC you CPU.
I'm on 3.10 as 3.40 broke my "speedstep" on idle, (so I assume they've fixed that in 4.40) and BC my RAM does 3200mhz XMP out of the box.
Just my 2¢
My suggestion would be to go to 4.40 for the higher RAM compatibility, given you're not planning to OC you CPU.
I'm on 3.10 as 3.40 broke my "speedstep" on idle, (so I assume they've fixed that in 4.40) and BC my RAM does 3200mhz XMP out of the box.
Just my 2¢
Much appreciated! I guess I'll see how my RAM does with the stock BIOS and if it's not up to my liking, I'll try flashing a newer one.
Now I need to decide between a R5 1600 at $169.99 USD, and a R7 1700 at $229.99 USD. Hmmm...
I'd go for the 1600 for gaming for its higher clocks, and the 1700 for anything that chews through cores/threads. That said I have a 1700 and it does great if your not doing high res high / refresh rate gaming. I'm at 2560x1600 @60hz and I'm never CPU bound.
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I'd have to disagree, my 1700x does anything a 7700k does, and with maybe 5% lower frames, but with 15% higher 1% and 0.1% lows. Since I got my ram running at 3466 c14... Also I'm gaming on 1920*1080 75hz for now, but I'm in the market for a 1440p 144hz panel.
Gtx 1080 @1950mhz core 5485mhz vram
Ryzen 1700x @3.9
G skill trident z 3600 c15 @ 3466 c14
1700X sounds more than adequate for the resolutions and fps you're at esp. given youre running a 1080. Tho tbf most people will fall into this category (myself included, I'm running a 980Ti Classified).
If however you where planning on doing 240hz 1440 or 120hz 4K, you'd find yourself needing higher clocks. Which is why most super high end rigs these days will be running an Intel chip BC they can hit over 5Ghz if you know what you're doing.
The more you bump your res up, the more gpu bottlenecked you become. You'd need two 1080 ti's in sli for 1440p 144hz and then you're still gpu bound I reckon.
And with amd and intel now pushing to more than 12 threads, there'll be more of an incentive for devs to develop for more threads. Which means the r7/r5 will only be getting better, and everything other than the i7 8700(k) will be slowly overtaken.
For 1440p 144hz competitive gaming the r7 1700x will be more than enough, since it will push it all the way to its cap at 300fps if you get good ram. If you look at overwatch, which is optimized for higher thread count, then even the r5 gets higher framerates than the 7700k...
Gaming is my primary use case, with some occasional image editing and video rendering on the side. I'm only on 1080p 60Hz with an IPS display right now and for the near future I don't see myself going past 1440p 60Hz IPS. Since I might need this build right away, I was thinking the R5 1600 for now, skip the Zen+ this year, and see what next year's Zen 2 holds and if it's worth a CPU upgrade on the same board. Even though I'm more CPU-bound at 1080p, most benchmarks I've seen put the 1600 performance near the 1700 for gaming, albeit at a little higher CPU utilization.
Thank you for the advice and discussion, sorry for taking this thread a little off-topic! I'm excited to try a Ryzen build and I'm hoping the B350 will last me for the entirety of the AM4 socket. I had mostly positive experiences with ASRock's Z170 ITX board, and their Ryzen AM4 boards look even better.
Thank you for the advice and discussion, sorry for taking this thread a little off-topic! I'm excited to try a Ryzen build and I'm hoping the B350 will last me for the entirety of the AM4 socket. I had mostly positive experiences with ASRock's Z170 ITX board, and their Ryzen AM4 boards look even better.
I couldn't resist and put together an R5 1600 with the ASRock B350 Fatal1ty ITX yesterday. It boot the first time, but wouldn't POST after I configured some things in the BIOS. I left it alone for an hour and while talking with my girlfriend, she said the word "RAM" and that made me remember the issues people were having with RAM overclocking. Thanks to that epiphany, I realized the issue was the XMP profile setting for 2933 MHz. I tried on the stock BIOS, 3.40, then 3.60 and still couldn't get it to run on 2933. I was about to flash to 4.40 when I saw the 3066 MHz option and decided "Ah, what the heck, let's try it before flashing again." Lo and behold, everything works!
I flashed the BIOS back to 3.40 and put the case back together. It's not the cleanest-looking build; the board layout made cable management messier than I expected. I'll consider sharing a picture if I can find one that's not too sloppy. The M.2 version of Crucial's MX500 can't come to retail soon enough...
Don't know when I'll be able to put it through its paces, but I'm definitely excited to see what Ryzen is capable of. I think it'll be fine with most modern games, so I'm more curious to see how it handles Dolphin, higan, virtual reality, and video rendering with DaVinci Resolve.
I flashed the BIOS back to 3.40 and put the case back together. It's not the cleanest-looking build; the board layout made cable management messier than I expected. I'll consider sharing a picture if I can find one that's not too sloppy. The M.2 version of Crucial's MX500 can't come to retail soon enough...
Don't know when I'll be able to put it through its paces, but I'm definitely excited to see what Ryzen is capable of. I think it'll be fine with most modern games, so I'm more curious to see how it handles Dolphin, higan, virtual reality, and video rendering with DaVinci Resolve.
I have really good ambient temps (20C or so) so take that into consideration. Here are a couple quick benches. Ill run whatever anyone wants if possible on this system to help out.
Idle seems to sit in the 36-44 range depending on what Win10 is doing with itself. Usually that pesky Windows Modules installer soaking one CPU thread whenever it wants.
After Time Spy/ Fire Strike runs back to back:
59.6C on CPU and 61C GPU per Hardware Info.
After about 20 mins of Warthunder at 1080p vsync disabled GPU hits 65 and CPU 50-54.
Lazy copypaste below!!
Time Spy 2 509 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti(1x) and AMD Ryzen 5 1600
Graphics Score
2 282
CPU Score
5 780
Fire Strike 6 845 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti(1x) and AMD Ryzen 5 1600
Graphics Score
7 540
Physics Score
16 654
Combined Score
2 659
HW info Shot.
Quick pics. All benches ran in fully assembled system. Just showing a couple of POST test shots before installing into the ModMini
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Those numbers look good to my (inexperienced) eyes. My Ryzen build with the NH-L9a seems to run a little louder at idle than the Intel build with an LP53 and the same Noctua fan ( ~1950 RPM vs. ~1750 RPM). The CPU side of the Sentry case feels a little warmer than the Intel as well, maybe 2-3 degrees Celsius more. I'm assuming this is due to Ryzen chips generally running warmer than comparable Intel chips?
As for the motherboard itself, I am very impressed with how well-built and designed everything is on the ASRock B350 ITX compared to the Z170 ITX board. Everything seems like a step-up, from the smaller and tighter packaging with no wasted space, to the I/O shield design and fit, to the improved M.2 WiFi module and housing, to the clean layout of the board itself. I especially preferred the portable antennas for the WiFi module, and to be honest it's the main reason I picked it over the X370 board. The UEFI software is nothing special, but it's the same as the Intel version so I felt very comfortable navigating around. I found it interesting that it boots right into the "advanced mode", without first using a "basic mode" like the Intel board did. Overall I'm impressed with ASRock taking an already good design and making it even better.
As for the motherboard itself, I am very impressed with how well-built and designed everything is on the ASRock B350 ITX compared to the Z170 ITX board. Everything seems like a step-up, from the smaller and tighter packaging with no wasted space, to the I/O shield design and fit, to the improved M.2 WiFi module and housing, to the clean layout of the board itself. I especially preferred the portable antennas for the WiFi module, and to be honest it's the main reason I picked it over the X370 board. The UEFI software is nothing special, but it's the same as the Intel version so I felt very comfortable navigating around. I found it interesting that it boots right into the "advanced mode", without first using a "basic mode" like the Intel board did. Overall I'm impressed with ASRock taking an already good design and making it even better.
For the both the X370 and B350 it says to update to bios 3.6 and from there update to 4.4 for the new CPU support. So if you want to go to the latest making a pit stop at version 3.6 (noted as a bridge bios ) is a must.
I can check what version my B350 is later tonight. I know I’m not at 4.4 yet though.
Tnx, nice one.
Did you OC on default voltage or did you put it higher (did you try to put it higher 3.7 or 3.8)?
How is the noise on idle?
Your temp are similar to mine on stock vent and on RVZ01 case but to me is not so silent as i think it would be.
Right now I’m (bios shot on page 3 of my previous post ) at 1.2375 v and 3600Mhz. Xmp profile selected on ram but manually backed he speed down to 2933 as it is not able to boot 3200 with the ram I’m using.
All set manually and everything else is in auto.
Last night was busy so I’ll mess with it some more tonight hopefully.
3.7 at 1.25 or so volts is achievable with most Ryzen cpus so I’ll try that with no voltage changes. I’m using the mini box pico 160xt psu and 192w brick so not looking to OC too much but definitely want to find a sweet spot.
Noise levels are good as I’m not filtered at all and there isn’t much restriction for airflow. It’s barely louder that an open bench. I do find the fan on the Noctua L9i to be tolerable even at higher rpm. I had a Node 202 and found it to be hotter and louder due to airflow restrictions and the fans on the cpu and gpu running harder.
All set manually and everything else is in auto.
Last night was busy so I’ll mess with it some more tonight hopefully.
3.7 at 1.25 or so volts is achievable with most Ryzen cpus so I’ll try that with no voltage changes. I’m using the mini box pico 160xt psu and 192w brick so not looking to OC too much but definitely want to find a sweet spot.
Noise levels are good as I’m not filtered at all and there isn’t much restriction for airflow. It’s barely louder that an open bench. I do find the fan on the Noctua L9i to be tolerable even at higher rpm. I had a Node 202 and found it to be hotter and louder due to airflow restrictions and the fans on the cpu and gpu running harder.
3.7 Ghz no voltage or changes. Just bumped the CPU freq. Bios is P3.4.
Edit: I'll start a thread for playing with this setup from here on out so as not to clog the discussion.
Edit: I'll start a thread for playing with this setup from here on out so as not to clog the discussion.
Not sure if this has been discussed on here or not. But I have the asrock ab350 gaming-itx/ac and having issues with their Raid controller. I have a Samsung 960 EVO NVME drive in the m.2 slot and 2 crucial mx500 sata drives. Trying to use the NVME as my boot and then Raid 0 the 2 crucial drives for storage. Apparently you cant do this with their on board Raid, when you try and load the Raid drivers it says you cant have an NVME drive as your boot drive and that the driver will not work unless the OS is on the raid drives? What? I have done the same thing with Intel boards with no issue in the past. I was excited to try this new Ryzen chip, but now I cant even use this thing using both the m.2 NVME and SATA raid together with this setup? Why isn't this being discussed anywhere about these chipests?
The most likely reason is that it does work but somehow it doesn't in your situation.
Are you trying to use the RAID drives from another motherboard while keeping the data ? You need to set these up as RAID 0 and you will lose all data on those drives. The way to set these up is explained in the ASRock's RAID installation guide. It's not through Windows, you first need to configure a RAID array the way the manual describes it.
Check that you have the latest drivers, there is the AMD chipset drivers and RAID drivers (latest). Are you trying to load the drivers for a new Windows install ? It's not clear from your post that you are using an existing install or trying to do a new install.
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