Motherboard Raven Ridge HDMI 2.0 Compatibility — 1st Gen AM4 Motherboard Test Request Megathread

[jaxter]

You’re welcome. I have The Bridge on the River Kwai and Coco (the later of which my family currently has to use HDR-to-SDR conversion on in MadVR) to test with so I can most definitely test this out and see how everything fares. I was hoping for an early UPS Ground delivery for the Streacom case since it has been literally four hours away from my house, sitting in a hub since Monday afternoon. But as luck would have it, it probably will end up not coming until its scheduled Thursday delivery date, so I will just have to bottle up all my excitement until then. I am extremely excited for this build, especially given the fully passive cooling nature of it all which will make it dead silent (meaning no whizzing fans to speak of!).

I actually have a streacom case that I was using previously I think it's an FC 10 evo, if the 2400g works out it will be great as all I'd need is a Pico to be able to reuse it and at this point in time any savings are a boon.

 

[Hifihedgehog]

I actually have a streacom case that I was using previously I think it's an FC 10 evo, if the 2400g works out it will be great as all I'd need is a Pico to be able to reuse it and at this point in time any savings are a boon.

Yeah, it’s an FC8 Alpha along with the AM4 bracket for the copper heatpipes, which will be used to house and chill an ASRock ITX motherboard. According to Small Form Factor’s excellent review of the FC8 Alpha, the ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac has an optimal layout (meaning no tight clearances or blocked connections) for installation with the included stock heatpipes.

 

[jaxter]

Yeah, it’s an FC8 Alpha along with the AM4 bracket for the copper heatpipes, which will be used to house and chill an ASRock ITX motherboard. According to Small Form Factor’s excellent review of the FC8 Alpha, the ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac has an optimal layout (meaning no tight clearances or blocked connections) for installation with the included stock heatpipes.

My original build in the streacom case actually ended in disaster I had an A6 Apu and also tried to run a 3.5" hard drive in there, I ended up having overheating problems.
I was gutted and ended up running it with the lid off, this time I will get it right!!!

 

[jaxter]

Hi mate any progress on the capabilities of the 2400g i am eagerly awaiting news before deciding whiich direction to take with my build, cheers.

 

[Hifihedgehog]

Hi mate any progress on the capabilities of the 2400g i am eagerly awaiting news before deciding whiich direction to take with my build, cheers.

We just got the case closed up and will have it hooked up to the home theater AV receiver in a minute. So far, everything hardware-wise, including the Wi-Fi upgrade, M.2 PCIe, heatpipes, IR, RAM and PSU have been all flawless, thanks in a large part to @confusis’s build photos for the FC8 case from his review. We also installed the drivers from our test bench area with a no-frills full HD monitor, which worked well. Now, we just have to finish installing the other half of the drivers (already installed the chipset, graphics, and Wi-Fi; what is left is the Bluetooth, LAN, audio, and IR) out here. We should be able to connect in the next hour and see how 12-bit color over 4K at 60Hz works.

UPDATE: It works!

 

[jaxter]

We just got the case closed up and will have it hooked up to the home theater AV receiver in a minute. So far, everything hardware-wise, including the Wi-Fi upgrade, M.2 PCIe, heatpipes, IR, RAM and PSU have been all flawless, thanks in a large part to @confusis’s build photos for the FC8 case from his review. We also installed the drivers from our test bench area with a no-frills full HD monitor, which worked well. Now, we just have to finish installing the other half of the drivers (already installed the chipset, graphics, and Wi-Fi; what is left is the Bluetooth, LAN, audio, and IR) out here. We should be able to connect in the next hour and see how 12-bit color over 4K at 60Hz works.

UPDATE: It works!

Awsome i can hear the excitement in your text lol, now if i can just pick your brains over specifics firstly is the hdr toggle available and working in windows 10.
Secondy if so how is 4k 10 bit hdr playback through either the built in tv and movies app or the latest verson of vlc which has 4k hdr support, thanks .

 

[Hifihedgehog]

now if i can just pick your brains over specifics firstly is the hdr toggle available and working in windows 10.

The HDR toggle is available and HDR is working, at least as much as this TV can support it. It is an early HDR 4K Samsung TV that was released with pre-official HDR specification that has a dimmer color when HDR is enabled. It works just as well on this system as it did on my personal system's past GTX 1080. So on a newer TV, it would work without the dimness. Also as mentioned, the 12-bit color works flawlessly. I hope this helps!

 

[jaxter]

The HDR toggle is available and HDR is working, at least as much as this TV can support it. It is an early HDR 4K Samsung TV that was released with pre-official HDR specification that has a dimmer color when HDR is enabled. It works just as well on this system as it did on my personal system's past GTX 1080. So on a newer TV, it would work without the dimness. Also as mentioned, the 12-bit color works flawlessly. I hope this helps!

That is really encouraging news have you had a chance to play your 4k hdr Coco and bridge on the river kwai, when u get a chance please let us know if you get playback with no dropped frames and if possible the bitrate of said files. also if you have the capability could you test passthrough of HD audio.
I woldnt worry about the dimming when Hdr is toggled no deficiency in your tv my lg does the same with my htpc and my my gaming rig i have calibrated picture settings on the tv for gaming in hdr and movies so all still looks great.
Thanks again, much appreciated.

 

[Hifihedgehog]

have you had a chance to play your 4k hdr Coco and bridge on the river kwai, when u get a chance please let us know if you get playback with no dropped frames and if possible the bitrate of said files. also if you have the capability could you test passthrough of HD audio.

Will do! I will check all of those things shortly (EDIT: it probably won’t be until Monday; there still are a few more things to migrate over from the old NUC). As of note, I already configured the HDMI audio for 7.1 at 24-bit and 192KHz, and I observed that passthrough for DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD with Atmos are shown as supported in the Windows audio settings. But I will check to ensure passthrough is working properly, especially when testing the Coco and The Bridge on the River Kwai UHD rips. Super excited!

Also of note to anyone with old Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 keys or installations lying around and may not be in the know on this, despite what their site says, Microsoft’s activation servers still accept free upgrades to Windows 10. It has still worked for several machines I have upgraded, including this one, over the last few months.

 

[jaxter]

That is great im happy that it seems its going to serve your needs i have just checked the files that my current 1030gt struggles with and it really makes no sense to me i thought that there would be a point of lets say films encoded using a bitrate of just for example 18 mb/s would play and anything above would struggle, but its just inconsistent, i have files encoded at 29 mb/s that drop frames and playback with rapid microstutter and then another file at 38 mb/s that plays back better then the one encoded in a lower bitrate.
All movies are HEVC 10 bit hdr tested on latest vlc player and tv and movies app with fully up to date windows 10 pro and latest Nvidia drivers.

 

[Hifihedgehog]

That is great im happy that it seems its going to serve your needs i have just checked the files that my current 1030gt struggles with and it really makes no sense to me i thought that there would be a point of lets say films encoded using a bitrate of just for example 18 mb/s would play and anything above would struggle, but its just inconsistent, i have files encoded at 29 mb/s that drop frames and playback with rapid microstutter and then another file at 38 mb/s that plays back better then the one encoded in a lower bitrate.
All movies are HEVC 10 bit hdr tested on latest vlc player and tv and movies app with fully up to date windows 10 pro and latest Nvidia drivers.

Hmm... For that low of a bitrate, it sounds an awful lot like a software problem since the hardware is more than capable. Heck, even my family’s old 7th Gen i3 NUC which is a slug with anything else can still somehow handle all 100 Mbps-and-under UHD files without breaking a sweat. My suggestion: I would run the usual checks from top to bottom, like removing any bloatware (anything and everything that does not come by default with stock Windows is suspect) and running a full system virus scan. In addition, I would also ensure your software player is, in fact, properly configured for full hardware decoding with your NVIDIA GT 1030. All I know is a GT 1030 should have no issues whatsoever with decoding anything. I feel that buying a new computer with the 2400G would only postpone the problem and be treating the symptoms when it is some obscure software or configuration detail that is causing the problem.

PS: Audio passthrough has been flawless with lossless compressed audio like DTS-HD MA and lossy audio like Dolby Digital. This is in stark contrast with all our 6th Gen NUCs and later, which would always have intermittent dropouts every 15 minutes to couple hours of any Dolby Digital and PCM passthrough in Kodi. It has something to do with the NUC’s onboard Parade chip converting from DisplayPort to HDMI for the onboard HDMI 2.0 on NUCs that throws off the timing leading to these very brief, intermittent audio dropouts. Fortunately, the Ryzen 5 2400G has true native HDMI 2.0 making this completely inapplicable and fully immune. I still have to get Kodi set up for MadVR with VLC and/or MPC-HC for UHD playback but it will be tested sometime Monday.

 

[arshavin12]

That is great im happy that it seems its going to serve your needs i have just checked the files that my current 1030gt struggles with and it really makes no sense to me i thought that there would be a point of lets say films encoded using a bitrate of just for example 18 mb/s would play and anything above would struggle, but its just inconsistent, i have files encoded at 29 mb/s that drop frames and playback with rapid microstutter and then another file at 38 mb/s that plays back better then the one encoded in a lower bitrate.
All movies are HEVC 10 bit hdr tested on latest vlc player and tv and movies app with fully up to date windows 10 pro and latest Nvidia drivers.

Have you tried using Potplayer at all? It has all the necessary codecs built in which support GPU hardware acceleration.

 

[Hifihedgehog]

MPC-HC and Kodi DSPlayer also have full codec support plus they can be used with MadVR for HDR support.

 

[jaxter]

MPC-HC also has full codec support plus it can be used with MadVR for HDR support.

The 1030gt can definitely not handle rendering with madvr through MPC-HC, I tested this extensively when I received the card.
I will check playback with pot player but in all honesty I do think I have everything set up properly I just don't think the 1030 has the raw grunt, I'm quiet experienced in setting up the software side of a htpc but will recheck everything all the same.
I am going to pass my current build on to my other half as she's currently doing her work on an ancient shuttle pc that she's moaning about so need to put another system together.

Update- So i took your advice and started tinkering and lo and behold im getting pretty much perfect playback on all mkv uhd rips on my 1030gt it was as simple as switching from automatic video output in vlc preferences to dx 11 and back again, weird but colour me happy.
I am 99.9% happy all audio formats kick in no problems the only niggle is a little judder on panning shots (most people wouldnt notice)
Id still rather use an all in one ryzen on my new build though for that sweet sff format.

 

[jaxter]

Hifihedgehog any news on playback of your uhd mkv Rips?

 

[Hifihedgehog]

Hifihedgehog any news on playback of your uhd mkv Rips?

It plays perfectly, meaning no dropouts or judder. It is a substantial upgrade over what we previously had, a 7th Gen Intel NUC and a Skull Canyon NUC. Both had readily apparent judder, color mistranslation, and audio dropouts and audio bit depth issues with the AV receiver due to their onboard DisplayPort-to-HDMI 2.0 converter chips. Quite literally, our AV receiver showed it was receiving a 24-bit audio signal but the sound clearly sounded severely dynamically compressed compared to something like my old GTX 1080–and no, no dynamic compression or other filtering or effects were ever active, either. Described briefly, it sounded worse than even the default 16-bit audio setting on my GTX 1080. So somehow even though the AV receiver was identifying a 24-bit audio signal that was coming from the NUCs, the timing issues caused by the NUCs’ DisplayPort-to-HDMI converter chips was causing our AV receiver’s DAC and processing circuitry to not run in its normal, ideal mode of operation. Goodbye and good riddance to Intel’s half-baked NUCs with their jerryrigged non-native HDMI.


As explained earlier, I do have to settle for SDR conversion with MadVR on this system, but I already knew this since the 4K TV we have is just not up to snuff. Our TV is an early specification HDR Samsung unit which is well-documented (there are many posts online detailing this for NVIDIA graphics cards) as not working properly with any HDR signal, regardless of the device. But I can plainly tell that the HDR would be working if our TV was up to spec since the video has the same appearance in color and brightness as it did on my old GeForce GTX 1080, which I know for a fact works on other fully HDR compliant TVs.

 

[jaxter]

It plays perfectly, meaning no dropouts or judder. It is a substantial upgrade over what we previously had, a 7th Gen Intel NUC and a Skull Canyon NUC. Both had readily apparent judder, color mistranslation, and audio dropouts and audio bit depth issues with the AV receiver due to their onboard DisplayPort-to-HDMI 2.0 converter chips. Quite literally, our AV receiver showed it was receiving a 24-bit audio signal but the sound clearly sounded severely dynamically compressed compared to something like my old GTX 1080–and no, no dynamic compression or other filtering or effects were ever active, either. Described briefly, it sounded worse than even the default 16-bit audio setting on my GTX 1080. So somehow even though the AV receiver was identifying a 24-bit audio signal that was coming from the NUCs, the timing issues caused by the NUCs’ DisplayPort-to-HDMI converter chips was causing our AV receiver’s DAC and processing circuitry to not run in its normal, ideal mode of operation. Goodbye and good riddance to Intel’s half-baked NUCs with their jerryrigged non-native HDMI.


As explained earlier, I do have to settle for SDR conversion with MadVR on this system, but I already knew this since the 4K TV we have is just not up to snuff. Our TV is an early specification HDR Samsung unit which is well-documented (there are many posts online detailing this for NVIDIA graphics cards) as not working properly with any HDR signal, regardless of the device. But I can plainly tell that the HDR would be working if our TV was up to spec since it has the same appearance as it did on my old GeForce GTX 1080, which I know for a fact works on other fully HDR compliant TVs.

Thanks for answering all my questions its been very helpful im going to get my build together, i dont think i will reuse my old streacom case as i just dont think that closed top is conducive to a build and having had thermal problems last time i built in it i just dont want to risk it.

 

[Hifihedgehog]

i dont think i will reuse my old streacom case as i just dont think that closed top is conducive to a build and having had thermal problems last time i built in it i just dont want to risk it.

Understood. The completely passive FC8 case we have is cooling the 2400G perfectly. Temperatures never go over 70 even under the heaviest loads, and usual loads see it around 40 to 55 degrees. That said, we took special care in installation and mounted everything properly in the correct order, used Arctic Silver 5 instead of the stock paste, and applied paste in just the right quantities (the old adage “less is more” rings true here) in the correct locations. Improper installation of cooling equipment can easily tack on up to 10 degrees (or more) to operating temperatures.

 

[jaxter]

Understood. The completely passive FC8 case we have is cooling the 2400G perfectly. Temperatures never go over 70 even under the heaviest loads, and usual loads see it around 40 to 55 degrees. That said, we took special care in installation and mounted everything properly in the correct order, used Arctic Silver 5 instead of the stock paste, and applied paste in just the right quantities (the old adage “less is more” rings true here) in the correct locations. Improper installation of cooling equipment can easily tack on up to 10 degrees (or more) to operating temperatures.

I am tempted by the streacom case you have im just hunting around now to see what takes my fancy, by the way my case isn't the streacom its an Wesena i realised when i seen a build in one on here.

 

[jaxter]

All my bits ordered I had an dream build in mind which would probably have turned out ridiculously expensive, I've erred on the side of caution and may slowly build that bit by bit in the future hopefully when prices aren't so silly.
I've gone for the Asrock AB 350, Ryzen 2400g, 8 Gig Corsair lxp ddr4 3200, Chopin Case, 250gb Samsung Evo I was going to buy the Noctua Low profile fan but instead I'll use the shroud removal trick to get the stock and cooler in and see how it goes will be great if if it saves me spending more.
Excited to get the bits now and considering the high cost of components right now quiet pleased at the final build cost that totals £407.

Well that final cost build was so pleasing because I've only gone and not ordered the Ryzen 2400g, Doh!!!!!