My Journey from Team Blue to Red and back to Blue!

[Rancidpunk]

This is not a crticism of Ryzen, I'm not that brave! It's just my own experience. 

 

Last July I finally felt it was time to upgrade my trusty old i5 2500k. I have a 1660 ti and use my pc for a bit of gaming, World of Tanks and a few strategy games and also for the online degree I'm in the middle of doing so I'm not a power user which is why my 2500k has lasted me so long.

 

After much research based on my "late in life" student's tight budget as well as my useage requirements I had pretty much decided on an i5 9400f on a B360 but the reviews on the Zen2 from AMD when it came out made me feel it was better to stretch the budget. Although the Ryzen 5 3600 was way more than I need it seemed stupid to not spend the extra £100 to get myself a system that would still be quite capable in a few years time.  

 

So I bought myself a Ryzen 5 3600 paired with an asrock B450 Pro4 atx mobo. I got 16gb of Corsair Vengeance 3000mhz ram suitable for AM4 platform as that was the closest confirmation I could get for compatibility - asrock still today haven't got a memory QVL for Matisse which is great!

 

I got the build running no problem, got temps under control with an aftermarket cooler but had a lot of BSoD until asrock released their second bios for 3rd gen Ryzen which helped a lot with stability, only got a BSoD about once a week with a few random program crashes thrown in for fun. Not totally stable but I knew that was a downside of being an early adopter and asrock's next bios update (3.60) at the start of August improved things further. 

 

Everything seemed great until early November iirc then I began to get endless BSoD's with many different and seemingly random codes which made it great fun trying to figure out the problem. Never did manage to track anything specific down so I did a clean install of windows as I figured that might be the problem given most (not all) of the failure codes seemed like they were related to windows. Chipset drivers I kept up to date, regularly checking AMD's site. 

 

By the middle of December I was getting really frustrated with system stability and had tried a few things to check one of the components in my system wasn't causing the problem, luckily I had a spare GPU and a mate lent me the ram from a stable 2700x/B450 system but nothing made a difference, I even tried reinstalling windows on a sata ssd and mechanical HDD in case the M.2 ssd was faulty.

 

I kept going, trying a lot of different bios settings suggested by other people with similar problems and using the RAM calculator but nothing worked and I still had endless BSoD's every half hour or so for seemingly random reasons each time. 

When asrock finally released the B450 bios with AGESA 1.0.0.4 I thought the solution had arrived and I flashed the bios successfully, rebooted and found I now couldn't get as far as the windows login screen without the system crashing, BSoD, reboot and repeat even with a clean windows install. I'd had enough of this crap by now and after speaking to the retailer they let me RMA the mobo which was returned after testing with no problems found, followed by the cpu which was also tested and found to be fully functional. The mobo was tested with a 2600x and the cpu on an X570 mobo.  

 

At this point I was left with a cpu and mobo that it seemed were now somehow incompatible with each other at least as far as windows is concerned. I've been a windows user since ms-dos, I've always really enjoyed troubleshooting in spite of how frustrating it could be but with final Latin exams pressing I really needed a stable system right away so I felt that I was left with only a few options, especially considering my budget.

 

I could sell the asrock B450 and get one of the cheaper X570 boards ending up another £100 down or I could sell the CPU and get a 2700x, breaking even financially. Both these options still left me with a system way more powerful than the old i5 but the downside to me was that I wasn't having the best experience returning to Team Red since my Athlon 64 X2 and there was no guarantee that either of these solutions would work.

 

After a month back on the old Sandybridge I was still deciding what to do when I got an email offering an i5 9400f with an Asus Z390-P for £220 and that swung it for me. I've got a stable system that stays frosty never reaching above 55c and I've  sold the 3600 for a slight loss, the mobo is now in a friends 2700x system working fine so overall I just about broke even on the deal. 

 

I've got no idea what caused this nightmare experience with Ryzen but I won't be buying Asrock ever again - a smaller company I know but truly awful bios support for anything but their top end boards.

[Uptivuptiz]

22 minutes ago, Rancidpunk said:

This is not a crticism of Ryzen, I'm not that brave! It's just my own experience. 

Good thing you put this in the top, otherwise you'd be slaughtered a long time ago  

 

Ahem... It is truly unfortunate that you had to have such an experience.

22 minutes ago, Rancidpunk said:

I won't be buying Asrock ever again - a smaller company I know but truly awful bios support for anything but their top end boards.

I definetly feel there some truth to that statement (I'm a ASRock user myself). Hopefully your new system will work just fine for all of it's lifespan.

[porina]

It is certainly annoying when things don't work as they should for whatever reason. Troubleshooting can be difficult unless you have ready access to alternate parts to swap out. For this reason I like to have at least two systems running on a given generation.

 

Even though OP has changed system so no further troubleshooting is required, we can still speculate on the cause. Maybe it was bad ram? Or unstable ram at the speed it was running at. Especially with Ryzen Memory Calculator, in my limited experience of it, it is rather aggressive and I often have to back off its suggestions for stability. I see that ram was swapped, but with what? I'd probably go further running ram at a lower speed just to see if that might rule it out. Just because ram is stable on one system doesn't mean it will be on another. The only trick I can think of is reducing the speed so much e.g. to 2133, so it doesn't really matter any more.

 

Apart from that, maybe the PSU might be a contributing factor? Is the same one carried over to the new system? Having said that, both the 9400f and 3600 are both rated at 65W TDP, and while both will go above that, they're probably close enough not to matter. 

[Rancidpunk]

17 minutes ago, porina said:

It is certainly annoying when things don't work as they should for whatever reason. Troubleshooting can be difficult unless you have ready access to alternate parts to swap out. For this reason I like to have at least two systems running on a given generation.

 

Even though OP has changed system so no further troubleshooting is required, we can still speculate on the cause. Maybe it was bad ram? Or unstable ram at the speed it was running at. Especially with Ryzen Memory Calculator, in my limited experience of it, it is rather aggressive and I often have to back off its suggestions for stability. I see that ram was swapped, but with what? I'd probably go further running ram at a lower speed just to see if that might rule it out. Just because ram is stable on one system doesn't mean it will be on another. The only trick I can think of is reducing the speed so much e.g. to 2133, so it doesn't really matter any more.

 

Apart from that, maybe the PSU might be a contributing factor? Is the same one carried over to the new system? Having said that, both the 9400f and 3600 are both rated at 65W TDP, and while both will go above that, they're probably close enough not to matter. 

The RAM I tried running at 2333 and it was Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000. I swapped it for LPX 3200 rated for the AM4 platform. I did back it off from the aggressive settings and tried it at stock too. The PSU was a new Corsair RM 650x so unlikely to be a problem either.

 

Tbh before I got locked out of running windows I had tried many different suggestions for bios settings but nothing made any difference. It was relatively stable up until November, maybe a blue screen once or twice a week then it just took a nose dive, I did think it might be a windows update that caused it but locating the problem was impossible. 

[porina]

2 hours ago, Rancidpunk said:

It was relatively stable up until November, maybe a blue screen once or twice a week then it just took a nose dive, I did think it might be a windows update that caused it but locating the problem was impossible. 

I've seen all sorts of weird Win10 corruption over time, and should reinstall several of my systems for that. They kinda still work but just not quite right, not bad enough to crash though. That you tried a reinstall and the problem remained would seem to make that unlikely in your case unless it was some interaction between software.

[NineEyeRon]

There is something else other than Intel CPU and AMD GPU? Huh who knew...

 

I think it’s OK to go with what you know, I look at Nvidia and see nothing that makes me want to buy their cards. I look at AMD and see nothing to make me buy their CPUs. 
 

Others will be the exact opposite, some will be a mix and some will just go with whatever suits at the time they need it.

[jones177]

I don't think it is about what team you are on. It can happen on either platform.

 

I have it a bit easy working out PC problems since I use more than one PC to switch around parts.

When I have an issue, most of the time it ends up being the motherboard and because it is what everything is attached to it is the last thing to be swapped out.

 

1 in 3 motherboards that I buy have flaws that do not stop it from running but stops it from running well. These problems are either encountered over time or crop up when new hardware is installed. 

 

Even now I have two computers that use the same motherboard/CPU and one runs perfectly and the other has strange issues. These issues would drive me nuts if it was my only computer but since I have 3 it is just annoying.  

 

 

 

[spartaman64]

did you do a clean install of windows? if not i bet its some old leftover intel drivers or something thats causing issues

[Rancidpunk]

1 hour ago, spartaman64 said:

did you do a clean install of windows? if not i bet its some old leftover intel drivers or something thats causing issues

I did many clean installs even trying a bootable USB, nothing would get me into windows!

[Yoinkerman]

Sounds like a bad board

[SkilledRebuilds]

19 hours ago, Rancidpunk said:

they let me RMA the mobo which was returned after testing with no problems found, followed by the cpu which was also tested and found to be fully functional. The mobo was tested with a 2600x and the cpu on an X570 mobo.  

 

At this point I was left with a cpu and mobo that it seemed were now somehow incompatible with each other at least as far as windows is concerned. I've been a windows user since ms-dos, I've always really enjoyed troubleshooting in spite of how frustrating it could be

 

9 minutes ago, Yoinkerman said:

Sounds like a bad board

Possibly still but, what a frustrating experience...still no working stable situation for the OP even with a RMA class Working board...