Hey OzB,
With Victoria's neverending lockdown I'm looking to upgrade my older PC to play some games on a budget.
I have ordered:
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core/12 Threads AM4 Processor
Galax GeForce GTX 1660 Click 6Gb
1x8gb DDR4 3200MHz Ram Stick (to join my older 2x4gb DDR4 ram)
I'm looking for a good value motherboard that will support these.
Any recommendations are appreciated.
Cheers
Thank you very much for the reply :)
Yes, I went the 'Super 1', they were the same price on umart.
Is there a problem using 2x4gb and 1x8gb RAM sticks?
Also can you clarify what you mean by "dual channel all the things Ryzen" ?
I'll check out the boards you recommended tonight.
Ryzen is very memory bandwidth and latency sensitive, especially for gaming.
You can run your existing 2x4GB kit and a single 8GB stick to fill 3 of the 4 slots and it will work, but if you plug it in such that it is the first kit in dual channel and the new stick in single channel (how most people would intuitively do it, keeping the matched 2x4 kit together) the game you're running and all the background processes push you over that first 8 gig of dual channel into the second 8GB of single channel, the CPU will suddenly hit a wall where the memory bandwidth is halved and choke.
Intel chips aren't anywhere near as sensitive to this, but AMD's Ryzen family are, hence me saying "dual channel all teh things".
In synthetic benchmarks it would look awful with the bandwidth falling off a cliff at higher memory usages, but in reality having more ram not in dual channel would be better than having less ram dual channel only and using virtual memory on your SSD, but the mix of dual and single channel is likely to get weird stuttering problems randomly happening in games that use more RAM, especially if you have other stuff running in the background (Chrome etc). How bad it'd be is a how long is a piece of string question.
What are your existing 2x4GB sticks exactly?
If they're DDR2133, 2400, or 2666 then be aware your new RAM will have to clock down to match it, and mixing RAM will probably mean having to set timings manually cause it might stop A-XMP from working and run the RAM at 2133 by default.
You should be able to put the settings of your slower RAM into the BIOS manually and it should run fine. Run memory diagnostics to be sure of your settings are stable - doing weird things like mixing RAM types/capacities across channels is basically like memory over-clocking as you're off the reservation as far as "standard, set and forget" stuff goes.
You should (maybe?) be able to fudge dual channel by putting the 8GB stick in the first slot of one channel by itself and putting the two 4GB sticks into the other channel to give you technically dual channel for the full 16GB, but that will also put one channel in dual rank and one channel in single rank*, which is another possible problem for system stablity.
*(ranks are another thing different to channels, they're kind of like SMT/Hyperthreading for RAM, where the channels are like cores - not really but that's the easiest way to explain it)
Bear in mind your memory speed and timings will likely have to be really low due to both the older RAM's specs and the overheads of having two different types of RAM in there and the mix of single and dual rank, but that's still better than not enough RAM or the mixed dual & single channel scenario.
So if you can't get a nice new 2x8GB kit and palm the 2x4 kit off with your old system or whatever, just be careful about what slots you plug the memory into, and then if you get stability problems, you might have to under-clock the RAM or loosen the timings.
I mean, decent 2x8GB 3200 kits are like $120, and saving that little bit of money here might cost you a crazy amount of time to get stable, or it might never get stable, or it might just work no problems. You're in the same realm as over-clocking when you do weird stuff like this & RAM over-clocking is way more complex than CPU over-clocking so just be aware and think how much if your time worth to you? If you like tinkering then no problems. If you want to just plug it in and go, perhaps think again.
Cheers for the explanation. I'm just going to get 2x 8gb sticks, I think its worth the money.
The other 2 are about 5 years old and cheap from memory so the mhz would be low.
What's your opinion on the MSI 450m pro-vdh MAX?
It seems like a category killer to me in terms of features and price, wondering if there's a catch.
MSI 450m Pro VDH appears to have a tiny heatsink on what looks to be a 4 phase VRM (with two extra phases for SOC/graphics with no heatsink at all) I haven't tested it personally mind you, but there's some red flags there. If it has all these features for so little money, what's the catch? Why spend more for the Mortar or Tomahawk? Just from the photos the VRM is obviously one big catch, the only question is how big of a catch is it and can you simply point a fan at it & get away with it or not?
It'll work out the box for any 3000 series "in theory" without needing a bios update (as all the MSI MAX series do), but with that VRM you're likely in the same territory as the ASRock B450(m) Pro4 where Ryzen 9s will be sketchy, except the Pro VDH a worse VRM heatsink while having better features in every other way.
You'd need to find a review of someone stress testing it* to know for sure what they can handle before the VRM temp throttles and nerfs the higher core count and therefore current CPUs (like drops clocks down to or below base frequency)
* (or the non-Max version, the only real difference is the bios chip & CPU support)
TL;DR if you're only planning on something like a 3300X or 3600 it is probably a good budget choice, especially if you aren't overclocking. But for 3700X or more you might want to do some more research first just in case, and definitely don't go buying a Ryzen 9 to go on it without proper research first.
Lots of the VRM snob stuff is only relevant if you want to throw in a huge core heavy monster down the track. If you're only going Ryzen 3 or 5 and not planning to upgrade till you need to do the board anyway, it'll probably serve you well.
Hello smashman42. I would need your help with a build. What motherboard and RAM would you recommend for Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 2070S? I want to replace my 8 year old PC. I would probably use it for gaming (PUBG and COD:WarZone) and streaming iPhone or PC games. Many thanks. :0
RAM is pretty easy, for current deals this is hard to go past - Crucial Ballistix Elite 16GB (2x 8GB) DDR4 3600MHz C16 Memory $129 + Post @ Mwave
It is almost certainly Micron Rev E, which over-clocks pretty well if you want to fiddle with it down the road, but basically that price is ballpark "deal" pricing for slower 3200c16 kits, so you can't go wrong for plug and play load A-XMP and be done with it.
On the motherboard side, the short answer is if you stick with that Ryzen 5 3600 and don't go to 8, 12, or 16 core CPUs, pretty much anything should be fine, so it largely depends on the features you want.
B450 and X470 boards don't support Ryzen 3000 out of the box without a BIOS flash, except for the MSI MAX series as mentioned in the posts above.
The TL;DR is if you go B550 chipset with a Ryzen 5 and don't plan ever going Ryzen 9, you'll probably be fine with anything.
For B450/X470 unless you have access to a 2000 series CPU to upgrade your BIOS you are limited to MSI's MAX series, and again R5 with no upgrades to R9 you'll almost certainly be fine with anything in MSI's B450 MAX range.
The SATA ports, the PCIe slots, USB ports, M2 slots etc that you want will pretty much dictate how much you spend.
The long answer is below….
That MSI 450m Pro VDH would be close to the cheapest plug and play option, but if you can stretch to the B450m Bazooka Max, or even better the Mortar Max/Tomahawk Max you'd have an upgrade path with the later two to the bigger core count chips (Mortar is basically a Tomahawk in mATX, not exactly but pretty close)
If you want more future proofing, the B550 stuff is a lot better in general as the board makers aren't cheaping out as much, and seem to have mostly taken their X570 boards and slapped B550 chips on them and downgraded the non-CPU PCIe to v3.0.
MSI's B550M Pro VDH reportedly has the B450 Tomahawk's VRM (Hardware Unboxed did VRM stress testing on it compared to some other boards, the vid is worth a look), so you get better newer chipset but might lose some port connectivity and definitely some slots compared to the older full ATX Tomahawk. You can go up the stack in MSI's range and get more connectivity and better VRMs as you go.
For other brands the only one I've looked at is ASRock cause they have some of the cheapest options - the ASRock B550M-HDV had been on sale absurdly cheap for B550 (not sure if it still is), like B450 board priced, but it looks to be basically their older B450 board with a B550 chipset on it. I actually used the older B450M-HDV in a mate's super budget media centre, but that was with only a Athlon 200GE on it which is an absurdly low powered CPU, but it has been bullet-proof for him since the upgrade (his old Sandy Bridge i3 board got flakey, bad RAM slot). In theory that board should be totally fine with the Ryzen 5 3600, but personally I wouldn't go cheaper with ASRock than the B550/B550M Pro4 (available in both ATX and mATX) and then only for an 8 core max. You can go up the stack if you need more connectivity or features of course.
Other brands the general rule of thumb I'd look at is going to the same price point as the safer boards listed, like skip the cheapest option with no or very tiny VRM heat-sinks. Generally this means going for a board with four RAM slots cause the cheapest usually only have two, but sometimes the cheapest board has four RAM slots and crap or no VRM heat-sink, so be careful.
ASUS have their own "Apple Tax" where they're almost always the dearest option in a given tier of product, so the crappiest ASUS board is often similar priced to the second from bottom tier for MSI/Gigabyte, and on the flip side ASRock is usually the cheapest full stop where their second tier board is often close the the other brands' first tier pricing.
I'm another one building a comp during the lockdown.. got the B450m Pro-VDH from Shopping Express:
https://www.shoppingexpress.com.au/buy/msi-b450m-pro-vdh-max…
https://www.centrecom.com.au/asus-prime-b550m-k-am4-matx-mot…
Free doom via redemption ($100 on steam)
Either buy two 8gb sticks or get another pair of 4gb sticks, dual channel all the things Ryzen, having only half of it dual channel will give you weird stutters when stuff crosses that limit between dual channel & single - and is that 1660 a super or not, cause the price difference is tiny but the performance difference is not.
Cheapest board not total shit, ASRock B450 Pro4 (there's an F variant with less USB ports and fan headers too, but otherwise the same), either ATX or mATX. (I have mATX non-F version myself)
The VRM would be sketchy for 12/16 cores but is fine for 8 cores & below.
ASRock's cheaper boards have even worse VRM heatsinks or none at all, so don't go cheaper than this, and for other brands look for the same sort of VRM cooling.
The best "cheap-ish" option would be the MSI B450 Tomahawk Max (ATX) or B450 Mortar Max (mATX) - MSI's MAX series comes with Ryzen 3000 series compatible bios and a larger actual chip, so the non-MAX variants are munted in comparison but often the same price or only a little cheaper, steer clear of them. The lower MSI MAX stuff can have similar probs with the VRM either itself or with the heatsink being inadequate, the only potentially cheaper options that are ok are the B450 Bazooka MAX or the B450 Gaming Plus MAX
If you want premium, both the Tomahawk or Mortar in B550 instead.
Basically, with you looking to use all four RAM slots - look at the B450 range in whatever brand you like that has 4 RAM slots (the cheapest only have two) and often the cheapest 4 slot board is still junk like the two slotter, so go one step up from that & hopefully it won't be junk, though only going a Ryzen 5 means you don't pull enough current to really run into VRM probs, but be aware you'll kill the whole upgrade path reason for AM4 if you go too cheap on the board.
Hope this helps