Ryzen upgrade with X1700 CPU, DDR4 RAM and M.2 SSD

[redwudz]

Note: There ARE photos and step by step info to follow all this text.


I've been considering a PC upgrade for the past few months. My present system was fast enough, and built about 3 1/2 years ago.
But I have been getting a few random BSODs (Blue Screen Of Death, a unrecoverable OS failure.) in the same past few months.
I couldn't easily trace them down as it could be RAM, boot drive, corrupted OS files, problematic SATA drives, or even a motherboard problem.


So... I decided to move up to the AMD AM4 Ryzen CPU, along with 16GB DDR4 RAM
and a 250GB M.2 NVMe SSD boot drive. I prefer AMD CPUs over Intel offerings.

This is my existing system from my Computer Details:


W7 Home Premium 64Bit OS
AMD FX-8350 8 Core CPU 4.2Ghz
1600MB G. Skill DDR3 1866 RAM
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 MB
Nvidia GeForce GT730 Graphics
Corsair H50 Hydro CPU cooler
1 X 250GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO boot Drive
4 X 1500GB Western Digital SATA 6 data Drives
Pioneer BDR-209D BDRW
Pioneer BDR-209D BDRW
Pioneer BDR-209M BDRW
Corsair HX750 750W modular power supply


LIAN LI Lancool PC-K7B Case
• Aluminum/ SECC ATX Mid Tower
• 3 External 5.25" Drive Bays
• 5 Internal 3.5" Drive Bays


And the upgrade parts in US$:


GIGABYTE GA-AX370-Gaming K5 motherboard ................ $130
AMD RYZEN 7 1700X 8-Core 3.4 GHz 95W CPU ................ $330
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 3200 RAM kit............. $136
SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 250GB NVMe PCI-Express 3.0 x4 . $130
Corsair Hydro series H60 CPU cooler ............................... $60
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.................................................. ........................About $786US total


Several of the parts were presently well discounted or on sale, so that helped with my decision. The Ryzen CPU is fairly new and available earlier this year. The 1700X CPU running at 3.4 Ghz seemed to be at a good price point VS performance. The 1800X series is about a $100US more at 3.6 Ghz.
It has other features, but not really worth it for me.


There will be newer Ryzen CPUs coming out in the future, but this seems to me like a good time for an upgrade.
I like Gigabyte MBs and have had generally no problems with them. I had initially looked at the GB K3 motherboard,
but it seems to be missing from GBs site. Not a good sign. The K5 is a gaming MB, though I don’t play games on this PC.
But it does have all the features I wanted.


It also has LED light displays on the MB, a bit useless as I don't have a windowed case and don't plan to get one. But it was the same price as the K3 because of discounts and does have a few other upgrades over the K3. I wanted the AX370 chipset as it has more options than the AB350 chipsets. I don’t really plan to overclock the system at present, but I will likely need to change some BIOS settings to work correctly with the 3200 RAM.


I have a Samsung 950 EVO M.2 SSD boot drive in my laptop and it seems much faster than my current SATA SSDs. Seems a good upgrade.
250GB is more than enough for a boot drive, IMO. My existing 250GB SSD SATA drive has about 60% free space.
The boot has only the OS and programs on it. Page files and large temp files are on the SATA drives.


16GB RAM works well for me, so no need for more. During my encodes, only 2GB or 3GB is normally used. And I can always add more if desired.
The DDR4 Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM seems well rated. Most all RAM, especially DDR4 is expensive at present. But that should improve.


I’m changing to the Corsair H60 hydro cooler for CPU cooling. The existing H50 has worked very well with the FX-8350 125W CPU, but is also 3 ½ years old. The H60 also has some improvements for installation and efficiency. And it fits my case with 120mm exhaust fans. The Ryzen 1700X is a 95W unlocked CPU, so cooling shouldn’t be an issue, even if I decide to do an overclock. I'm very happy with hydro cooling and wouldn't go back to air cooling for the CPU.
My temps at 100% CPU on all eight cores usually runs about 47C with the FX-8350.


The existing Corsair HX750 750W is a decent power supply. But I was considering an upgrade to a newer fully modular PS. The existing PS runs the MB, three Pioneer BDR-209 BDRWs and four 1500GB Western Digital black SATA 6 drives and is cool and quiet, even under full load.

The existing Lian Li Lancool case is also sufficient for my needs with two 120mm filtered intake fans and two 120mm exhaust fans. All but one of my internal fans are PWM (Pulse Width Modulated) and very efficient, responsive and quiet. I also run a very quiet 80mm fan to help cool the GPU.


This case has been used with four different MBs in the past and is very well built. It’s almost 9 years old. It’s the economy Lian Li line and was about $100US when I bought it. The premium Lian Li all aluminum line is mostly over $200US, but extremely well built. My HTPC uses a all aluminum Lian Li desktop case.


I will reuse my four WD 1500 SATA HDDs. I may upgrade them later to a larger capacity.


I also had planned to reuse the Nvidia GeForce GT730 Graphics card.
It’s a fanless card and fits my needs for quiet operation. I may upgrade this later.


Link to the Gigabyte K5 MB:

http://www.gigabyte.us/Motherboard/GA-AX370-Gaming-K5-rev-10#kf


Link to the Ryzen 1700X CPU:

https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-1700x




But that’s enough background, now the upgrade.


New parts and the PC





Existing PC internals





PC Cables unplugged and this radiator definitely needs cleaning





Removing old motherboard with case on it's side. I will leave the cooler and pump connected for later installation in a different case.





Case without MB.





Cleaning the PC, fans and filters, The front fans also needed cleaning.
I had to remove the HDDs and the HDD tower to access the fans.





Front filters before cleaning. Lots of dust.
The filters I just wash in the sink with dish soap and dry





Fans, filters and case cleaned. I use 91% isopropyl alcohol and cosmetic
removal pads to carefully clean the fans. Much better than regular lint type paper towels.
I also use Q-tips for tight spots. Dirty fans don't perform well.





Front fans and HDD tower re-installed.





The new GA-AX370 Gaming K5 MB sitting on a anti-static pad.
CPU, RAM and SAMSUNG 960 EVO card installed.





The SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 250GB NVMe PCI-Express 3.0 x4 Internal SSD.
Not all M.2 cards will work with this MB.





Checking fit for the MB. I have removed the existing rear IO shield and placed the new one.





IO shield and MB in place. Screws for all MB mounts installed. Lots of USB connections.





The Corsair H60 Hydro cooler.





Heatsink and pump with thermal paste. Though it may be decent quality,
I'll wash it off with alcohol and use Gelid thermal compound.





GELID Solutions GC-Extreme Thermal Compound which I prefer.





CPU with thermal compound evenly applied. Equivalent to about 2 magazine pages thick. I will clean up the excess on the MB.





The Corsair H60 Hydro heatsink/pump, radiator and fans installed.
Both fans are used for exhaust. The first fan blows air into the radiator
and the second blows air out, causing a higher velocity airflow and
more efficient cooling. The front air filters keep out most of the dust.
The case is fairly well sealed.





The MB up and running in BIOS mode. The EVO SSD is installed, but not formatted. No OS installed.
All other drives are disconnected. I test it in BIOS before plugging everything in.





Fan adjustments and BIOS temperatures. I always check the PC health in BIOS the first
time I power up a PC. Everything is OK. All the fan headers have plenty of adjustment options.

I also make sure the water pump is full speed. The PWM fans use the stock PWM settings.
They run at about 600RPM normally. If the CPU temp increases, they ramp up to about 1600RPM.
The small 80mm quiet fan for the GPU runs full speed.





CPU and RAM settings. You can use a mouse in BIOS. This makes setup easier.





Peripherals and drives. Sorry, my camera doesn't do well with screen shots.





Drives and BIOS save.





Wiring mostly set up, ready for the OS. The red cables near the bottom are a rear eSATA PCI slot adapter along with a X1 PCI SATA adapter card.
I've used all eight SATA slots.

The gray cable is a SP/DIF PCI slot adapter for coaxial audio. My surround amplifier and my audio switcher doesn't have optical connections.

I have also added an additional SATA 2TB HDD to my other four HDDs. Below the video card is a quiet 80mm fan for help cooling the GPU card




Windows 10 Pro, 64bit. I got it for $109US. I can always go back to W7, but W10 works well enough in my laptop. And W7 is a bit old...
I do run 'Start 10' so I have a regular menu as neither PC has a touch screen. I also disable most of the W10 reporting to MS.





The old MB and PS mounted in a inexpensive Rosewill case.

I changed the power supply for the Ryzen PC to a CORSAIR RM750X 750W
Full Modular ATX Power Supply as it is a bit more modern than the one I had.
I recycled the other Corsair PS along with the FX-8350 PC to the Rosewill case.

The red cables near the bottom are a PCI slot eSATA adapter.
The black and red cable is a SP/DIF adapter I made.
The PC uses it's original SSD drive and runs Windows 7 Home 64bit.

The PC just has the SSD boot drive at present and a WD 1TB storage drive.





Settings for Vidcoder. AC3 audio conversion also. CQ setting of 18.5 gives me decent quality and MKV file sizes around 8GB. Easy to store and quality I like.





HWiNFO 64, Windows Taskmanager and Vidcoder running on the Ryzen PC. The CPU temps under 100% CPU are about 51C. CPU idle temp is 23C.
All other temps and voltages are OK. I would like to see the 100% CPU temp a bit lower, but it's good enough and
it recovers very quickly to the mid 20C range within 15 seconds once the load is removed.





The AMD FX-8350 8 Core 125W CPU ran at ~47C at 100%, but the Ryzen, though a 95W CPU, runs at ~51C. I think you need a good cooler.
Though lower wattage than the FX-8350, the Ryzen CPU does a lot more and it needs a fair amount of cooling. If OC'd, a lot more cooling, IMO.


CPU and OPT CPU are the two rear exhaust fan speeds.
System 3 at 1474 RPM is the H60 pump motor.
System 2 RPM is the front fans, wye'd together. Both intake and exhaust fans run about the same speed.
System 1 is the 80mm quiet fan for cooling the GPU. The MB has five fan headers, each independently controlled.



A simple performance test of the new PC and old PC was done by using VidCoder and a BluRay that I own of 'AVATAR' which is 2hrs, 41min in length.
Decrypted to the HDDs with AnyDVD HD.


I ran it first on the PC that's in my Computer Details,
a AMD FX-8350 8 Core CPU 4.2Ghz PC. It's fast.
It took 3hrs:55min:22seconds to encode to my MKV settings.
I had put it in a new case as detailed earlier.


With the same Vidcoder settings the Ryzen PC accomplished the same task in 1hr:49min:46seconds.
I could likely improve the encoding time a little if I OC'd the Ryzen PC RAM and CPU, but it's OK as is for the moment.



Some useless information:

The Ryzen CPU was originally know as 'Zen', but that name can't be copyrighted, so they
ended up with 'Ryzen', which sounds a bit like 'risen'. The PR people said that the "New Horizons" mission to Pluto was happening at the time and 'Horizon' was converted to 'Ryzen'.


The MB company AORUS is a Gigabit subsidiary located in Tiawan.
The brand name "AORUS" is coined from an Egyptian god, Horus, known to be the god of sky and kingship, which is depicted as a falcon. The falcon head is therefore used as AORUS's brand logo. According to employees, the first letter of HORUS was changed to "A" to represent the brand as "A team".


NOTE: JUST IGNORE ALL THE ATTACHMENTS BELOW. THEY ARE JUST DUPLICATES.
I CAN"T SEEM TO GET RID OF THEM AND IT SEEMS THE ONLY WAY I CAN GET THE PHOTOS ABOVE TO DISPLAY CORRECTLY.

[redwudz]

Hopefully the photos will stay in place, but I'm having a lot of trouble uploading them.


EDIT: I've reloaded them with the unwanted attachments. But the main photos are all there.

[manono]

I see only the first four pics.

Good going. I hope you do well with that rig. I'm sure you will as your encoding times have been cut in half. Let us know when you get to 4 GHz and how much more the encoding times improve after doing that.

[redwudz]

What's strange is that all the photos seem to show up on my laptop using Google Chrome. If I add them normally, I end up with a whole bunch of attachment duplicates at the end of the post. But I'll try that anyway.


But others have got the 1700X reliably to 4Ghz. I still haven't got the RAM to 3200 without locking up the PC.

[KarMa]

What about a GPU? I guess you are currently on the mobo built in GPU but any plans for something else?

[redwudz]

I must of omitted that. I have a Radeon HD6450 video card at present. The MB just has a HDMI socket,
but I'm not sure that works as I haven't tried it.
It may be for other AP CPUs in the future. I don't really need much of a GPU as it's just for display.

EDIT: Reading this over, I should mention I'm using a Nvidia GeForce GT740 GPU card now. It has a quiet fan, so I don't mind.
The previous card was having problems.

[sophisticles]

That's a really nice write up, better than many of the supposed "pro" write ups I've seen on some tech sites. BUT I wouldn't build any new system at the moment, especially a Ryzen based one:

http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Test-Stress-Run

Aside from the well known seg fault issue with Ryzen processors, Intel's Coffee Lake will be launching soon and all reports indicate that it will take back the performance crown easily, plus it's going to have an updated iGPU.

Regardless, good luck and enjoy the new build.

[redwudz]

I haven't had any problems with encodes at 100% CPU and that should stress the CPU. I've done about 10 BD>MKV conversions so far.
I checked my W10 Event Viewer for Errors and Warnings and they seem to be mostly from W10 problems and from some of my older software.


The PC has been running stably for about a week now. OCing the RAM or CPU may cause problems, so I'll put that off for now.
The M.2 SSD is using about 42GB of the 231GB available. The SATA HDDs are from the old PC and may have some problems that W10 can address.


I'm running the F3 BIOS and there may be a newer BIOS in the works to address some problems. And worse case, I still have my FX-8350 PC to fall back on.

[usually_quiet]

@redwudz As always, you have done a fine job putting your system together and documenting your build.

I decided to postpone my planned build until after Coffee Lake arrives, and I now have a bad case of new PC envy. (Before anyone tells me to look at AMD hardware now, I already have. Sadly, it is unworkable for my planned use.)

[jagabo]

(Before anyone tells me to look at AMD hardware now, I already have. Sadly, it is unworkable for my planned use.)

I not looking to start a flame war... but what are the reasons an AMD system won't work for you?

[usually_quiet]

(Before anyone tells me to look at AMD hardware now, I already have. Sadly, it is unworkable for my planned use.)

I not looking to start a flame war... but what are the reasons an AMD system won't work for you?

Only Intel Kaby Lake currently works for playing UHD Blu-ray on a PC, which I want to be able do using my new machine. Also, current AMD GPUs don't do a good job with hardware de-interlacing according to SiliconDust's software development guys, which is a problem if I want to watch recorded TV shows originating from my TV tuner cards.

[KarMa]

Only Intel Kaby Lake currently works for playing UHD Blu-ray on a PC, which I want to be able do using my new machine.

Fair point, and figured this was your reasoning.

Also, current AMD GPUs don't do a good job with hardware de-interlacing according to SiliconDust's software development guys, which is a problem if I want to watch recorded TV shows originating from my TV tuner cards.

I watch live H.264 1080i and MPEG2 1080i broadcasts with DVBViewer which supports LAV Video Decoder and ffdshow Video decoder. With LAV, it does not seem to support AMD deinterlacing for my RX 460 (not sure AMD offers deinterlacing anyway) but LAV can automatically deinterlace sources it detects with combing. For sources I know are being deinterlced, I get around 3% CPU usage on dvbviewer.exe with my old FX-6300 CPU. The GPU is decoding the H.264/MPEG2. How good the bob deinterlacing is, it looks pretty good for on the fly deinterlacing. Certainly won't outdo QTGMC but I've seen worse.

For the ffdshow and the optional YADIF, I get around 20% CPU usage. Maybe a bit lower on the other decoding options. Both LAV and ffdshow are certainly doable for me.

[jagabo]

Only Intel Kaby Lake currently works for playing UHD Blu-ray on a PC, which I want to be able do using my new machine. Also, current AMD GPUs don't do a good job with hardware de-interlacing according to SiliconDust's software development guys, which is a problem if I want to watch recorded TV shows originating from my TV tuner cards.

Thanks for that.

[usually_quiet]

Also, current AMD GPUs don't do a good job with hardware de-interlacing according to SiliconDust's software development guys, which is a problem if I want to watch recorded TV shows originating from my TV tuner cards.

I watch live H.264 1080i and MPEG2 1080i broadcasts with DVBViewer which supports LAV Video Decoder and ffdshow Video decoder. With LAV, it does not seem to support AMD deinterlacing for my RX 460 (not sure AMD offers deinterlacing anyway) but LAV can automatically deinterlace sources it detects with combing. For sources I know are being deinterlced, I get around 3% CPU usage on dvbviewer.exe with my old FX-6300 CPU. The GPU is decoding the H.264/MPEG2. How good the bob deinterlacing is, it looks pretty good for on the fly deinterlacing. Certainly won't outdo QTGMC but I've seen worse.

For the ffdshow and the optional YADIF, I get around 20% CPU usage. Maybe a bit lower on the other decoding options. Both LAV and ffdshow are certainly doable for me.

I already know about LAV filters. I have used LAV filters with NextPVR running Windows 10, but the problem is that SiliconDust's software uses the GPU's hardware de-interlacing, and I want to be able to use the HDHomerun View app and some day the HDHomerun DVR with my SiliconDust CableCard tuner.

Intel iGPUs and NVIDIA GPUs work fine with Silicondust's software, but not AMD GPUs/APUs. Apparently this problem with de-interlacing has existed for a while, but AMD either can't or won't correct it. One of their software guys mentioned that he has an AMD A10 APU in his own HTPC, so it isn't as if they deliberately excluded AMD from their project due to developer bias.

[Edit]I did not intend to hijack this thread, so this discussion really needs to end here.

[budz]

Whoas! redwudz you're still at it huh. Last pc I built was 7 years ago. I thought about building a new pc but these days I do little to nothing with video conversion. I'm still doing stuff from tv though to convert and that's about it. Using my last XP pro pc for that! Hahaha! Good to see you're still building computers. I may build a low budget Ryzen system. Hard to justify building a new desktop since laptops are cheapo and I have my tablets. Take care bro!

[redwudz]

Good to see you still check in once in a while.

I gave up temporarily with OC'ing the RAM on the Ryzen PC.
May require a bit more research. But it's fast enough anyway.

The 'downside' to the Ryzen is that it requires different memory and MBs. The onboard SSD works very well for the OS.

Windows 10 Pro also works well enough and I can live with most of the W1O changes compared to W7.