Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

The Tomahawk Max is $115 on Amazon. That's a $90 difference. If the board advertises as being updated for Ryzen 3000 series or has BIOS flashback without a CPU installed, it's a pretty guaranteed thing. Not sure why you'd want to spend $90 on a motherboard if you won't use it's features if that can go towards a CPU with more cores or faster ram to help with performance.

Thanks everyone, things to think about!

This is almost exclusively a gaming/screen recording machine. I doubt I'll do streaming, but who knows.

Updated Parts List

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Playing around with the suggestions here, it looks like the 3600 would be a smarter move than the 2700x. Faster for the same price, essentially! Thanks! I'm pretty settled on that now instead of the 2700x. It doesn't seem like the 3600x offers signiticant speed increases for the extra $50 it costs.

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I was thinking the X570 motherboard for the ability to switch to a 3x00 and well, because it got lots of stars. But it sounds like there might be cheaper options for roughly the same quality?

I swapped out the motherboard to a MSI B450 Tomahawk as well. It does throw this warning, which I take it related to the BIOS/Ryzen 3000 situation?

"Some AMD B450 chipset motherboards may need a BIOS update prior to using Matisse CPUs. Upgrading the BIOS may require a different CPU that is supported by older BIOS revisions."

I'll dig a bit more on this. I'd like to doublecheck features on the X570 to see if there is anything in there I'd need.

EDIT: Built-in Wifi would be a plus to the X570. Not sure if it justifies the expense, I could see some scenarios in the next couple of years where that would be helpful.

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I'm wondering about the cooler too. I have this one, and it does says it's compatible with this CPU. Not sure if it makes sense to mess with that or just use the air cooler that comes with the Ryzen 5.

That's basically what we were discussing... B450 came out before the 3000 series chips, so although practically all of them will work with a BIOS update, if you get a board that shipped before that BIOS was available, and the board doesn't have BIOS flashback (in order to update the BIOS without a CPU installed). Otherwise you need to have a first or second gen CPU available in order to get the BIOS updated.

Edit: I would invest in a new cooler... that H60 isn't very good at all, and all in one watercoolers don't last forever.

Citizen86 wrote:

That's basically what we were discussing... B450 came out before the 3000 series chips, so although practically all of them will work with a BIOS update, if you get a board that shipped before that BIOS was available, and the board doesn't have BIOS flashback (in order to update the BIOS without a CPU installed). Otherwise you need to have a first or second gen CPU available in order to get the BIOS updated.

Got it, that makes sense, thank you. It's treading some new ground for me, but just to make sure I've got this right...

As long as the board has BIOS Flashback (the B450 Tomohawk Max does), I can just use a USB key to Flash the BIOS and I should be good to go. This seems pretty easy, no?

I do wonder about the Wifi capability of the X570, but I'd think I could just add an adapter for less. Honestly, I can't see any other real differences between the two boards in terms of features, unless I'm missing something. I wonder if there are quality elements involved?

Citizen86 wrote:

Edit: I would invest in a new cooler... that H60 isn't very good at all, and all in one watercoolers don't last forever.

Thanks. I'll poke around for a cooler. I take it that using something other than the cooler that comes with the CPU is a good idea?

To answer my own question: Yes.

Latest thinking...

CPU Upgrade 2019 v.3.0

The Ryzen coolers are decent, although I think the 3600 comes with the smallest one... it will still work ok, especially if you don't plan on overclocking (which you don't really need to with 3000 series Ryzen anyways, they boost really well).

I'd suggest trying the stock cooler and see how it goes, see if the sound levels are ok, how temps are...

Also yes, for BIOS flashback, you basically follow the instructions, which is essentially download the BIOS, put it on a USB stick, put it in the correct USB slot, boot the motherboard and wait.

I would just use the stock Ryzen cooler, unless you try it out and think it is too loud for your setup and personal taste. I am not saying it is loud, just some people are more sensitive to noise than others.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I'm wondering if I might get some feedback on a CPU upgrade I'm thinking of putting together for 4-year-old build?

That's a pretty banging system for a 4-year-old. Max settings on ClueFinders Math Adventures easy.

Ordered! Thanks everyone for the input. This is better/cheaper thanks to you all. Much appreciated.

I decided to get the extra cooler. It's only $40 and I'm under budget by quite a bit. Removing heat/noise from the start is worth it to me.

Motherboard should be the last thing to arrive (next Wed-Fri), so I'll probably build this next weekend.

*Legion* wrote:
Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I'm wondering if I might get some feedback on a CPU upgrade I'm thinking of putting together for 4-year-old build?

That's a pretty banging system for a 4-year-old. Max settings on ClueFinders Math Adventures easy.

Yep! Precocious brat demands only the finest. Throws temper tantrums when his Elmo videos load too slowly.

You should get a dial-up emulator and show him what it used to be like, so he learns to be grateful.

When upgrading a PC like Godzilla, i.e. changing the motherboard, one would need to re-install Windows from scratch right? You can't just connect the old system drive, particularly if the old system is Intel based?

I am not concerned about the license, I remember there was some MS phone number to call (or should I be?). I am concerned about motherboard (chipset/sound/network/etc.) drivers and stuff.

I am trying to evaluate how much work would be involved in an upgrade like that. What Godzilla is doing sounds exactly like what I need to do.

You should always do a fresh install of Windows when you change the motherboard. It's possible to simply connect the old drive with Windows already installed but frequently leads to problems.

Yes, I just put the Windows 10 installer onto a flash drive last night, so I can wipe my Windows 8.1 system SSD and install clean over it. I'm currently using an Intel CPU, too, this will pretty much be the same thing you'd be doing.

I set aside an hour to swap files on my existing system SSD drive to a non-system SSD drive, and I was done in about 20 minutes. (Caveat: 80% of the files I want to keep are in Google Drive or Dropbox already, so that helps quite a bit.) It's surprisingly easy to move Documents, Downloads, Desktop files to a different drive too. A lot of the programs I figure I'll just download and reinstall fresh. Steam makes it easy to swap games to different drives, and I figured out how to move my daughter's Sims 4 game to a different drive as well. All in all it was a lot more straightforward to set up the computer data-wise for this transition than I imagined it would be.

All my parts have arrived now. The motherboard came yesterday, with a confirming "AMD Ryzen 3000 Desktop Ready" info blurb right on the box. I'll be upgrading tomorrow evening. I'll let you know how it goes.

My basic plan of attack will be to detach everything from the existing motherboard, take it out, put the new motherboard, CPU, cooler, and RAM in, reattach everything except the non-system drives. Install Windows 10 on my system SSD, get everything up and running, then reattach the two non-system drives. Mess around reinstalling software and getting storage the way I want it.

Rebuild went great!

It took about 2 hours including getting Windows 10 set up on the new machine.

Installing drivers and downloading games now, but everything is working great.

Thanks again for all the tips and advice, everyone!

Congrats, Godzilla!

You are my inspiration. Now that I am sufficiently inspired, all I need to do is find the money for this upgrade.

BTW, do you see any improvements in games?

Hedinn wrote:

Congrats, Godzilla!

You are my inspiration. Now that I am sufficiently inspired, all I need to do is find the money for this upgrade.

BTW, do you see any improvements in games?

Thanks!

The cost might be less than what you imagine if you flip the old parts on Ebay. I'm looking at putting my old stuff up, and it looks like my old Intel CPU is going for $180-$200 used. All in all, it looks like I might be able to clear $250 to $300 by selling the old CPU, motherboard, and RAM.

I didn't have time to play yesterday, but I launched a couple of games just to check some things. Load times are significantly faster, processing times seem noticeably quicker too.

Nice, glad to hear the upgrade worked out. What were your old parts?

I keep thinking about rebuilding my Win 7 Windows Media Center box and reusing the license. I've switched long ago to a non MS supplied guide data supplier, so won't be hurt by MS shutting down its service. Still running it as a 6 tuner CableCard + OTA DVR feeding a bunch of Xbox 360's. I'm modern

This box was originally built in 2009 and has passive cooling on the CPU. Can't believe it's lasted this long with only some hard drive upgrades along the way.

Is it not doing something you want? With older setups like that, as long as they work correctly, I tend to just leave them alone, because it's quite frequent that newer versions of commercial software will come with changed terms that are sharply inferior to the old ones.

Citizen86 wrote:

Nice, glad to hear the upgrade worked out. What were your old parts?

Intel i7-4790k
Asus Z97-PRO
Kingston HyperX FURY 16GB (2x8GB) 1866MHz DDR3 CL10 DIMM - Red

I sold the old cooler to a friend already.

Malor wrote:

Is it not doing something you want? With older setups like that, as long as they work correctly, I tend to just leave them alone, because it's quite frequent that newer versions of commercial software will come with changed terms that are sharply inferior to the old ones.

I don't want to update the software at all. I just want newer hardware. This hardware has some issues I work around just due to it's age. I bought a 4TB HD to use as a recording drive, and I think it's so big that WMC doesn't always recognize it when it's set as the recording drive. Works fine as a secondary, but this ancient MB just reads it too slow to be 100% with it as the recording drive. It thinks it isn't there, which causes it to fall back to thinking the smallish SSD that the OS lives on as the recording drive. So I have to use a 2TB recording drive, then as it fills up, move shows over to the big one.

Also, it has issues with some surround sound types, so I've just disabled some of them. 100% driver related. It's an Nforce* chipset, and there's only some of the older drivers that work properly. Not even the last ones.

I could probably spend $150 on MB, lowish power CPU, and memory and get rid of some of these issues.

It's more of laziness and fear or stuff not working on an old OS than anything that's kept me from upgrading. I've customized quite a few things in the WMC over the years that I'd probably never remember doing that I'd have to figure out again, too.

*How long has it been since you even though about Nvidia chipsets?

I moved from WMC to Tivo and Tivo Mini's.. does largely the same thing using Xbox One's as the front end (you can connect the Tivo Mini's to the HDMI pass through on the Xbox One and it appears like a cable box) so I still live the one remote one box for everything (TV, Plex, Streaming Apps) life and cable card fee from Verizon Fios. Sucks to pay Tivo $149 a year but its still a huge savings from paying Verizon for extra cable boxes all around the house. I have Live TV in 6 rooms so it adds up.

It just works and you can even turn off the TiVo service and just use the Xbox Guide if you don't need the DVR (I still record some stuff that doesnt show up in Torrents or Hulu) for essentially a $0 fee a year setup.

I just installed my first m.2 drive, and thought I'd pass along some info, because my motherboard manual had zero documentation on how they worked; they were too new when the board shipped, I guess.

First, the form factor measurement is about length. Normally they're 22mm wide, and then have a varying length, from 30mm up through 110mm. The most common size is 22x80, which most motherboards will support. Mine, for instance, supports up to 80mm, but does not have enough room for a 110. You should be able to install any size equal to or smaller than the motherboard's assigned area.

Second, they come in two flavors, SATA and PCIe. SATA mode can drive 600 megs a second, which is crazy fast. In theory, PCIe mode can drive up to 4000 megs a second, if you're on version 3 and running in 4-lane mode. There are definitely drives that will go faster than SATA3's 600 megabytes, but in practice, I'm not sure that this actually matters, as very few programs can accept data at that speed anyway. CPU power becomes the bottleneck. As drives get bigger and they stop compressing games as much, you may start to see raw SSD speed making a real difference, but that's probably not going to happen for awhile yet.

You need to be sure the drive and the motherboard support at least one mode in common. If it's an SATA-mode drive, your motherboard needs to be able to drive the m.2 socket in SATA mode, or it won't work. Same with PCIe mode.

You shouldn't really have to worry about drivers anymore; either mode is exposed via the AHCI protocol, which all current OSes drive just fine. PCIe mode uses NVMe, but if I understand correctly, this is a superset of AHCI, so I believes OSes that only know AHCI can still use a PCIe-mode drive. I'm a little blurry on this part, however, and could easily be wrong. Be sure that an NVMe drive will work with your OS of choice before buying one.

The physical install on my ASUS board was a little interesting, and it's what actually prompted this post. The m.2 socket is pretty tiny, right near the DIMM slots. On this board, there are two silver circles on the board, and a silver nut with a screw in it. They look like this:

nut circle circle socket DIMM slot 0 DIMM 1 DIMM 2 DIMM 3

If your drive length matches where the nut is, you take the screw out, slot the drive into the socket, press down gently until it's resting on top of the nut, and then put the screw in to hold it down. If your drive is shorter or longer, you have to pull the nut out and move it to the landing pad (silver circle) that matches. Screw the nut in, mount the drive, press it down, put the screw in. It's very much like the standoff nuts under the motherboard, if your case still uses those.

I can't easily do a diagram, but it ends up with the m.2 SSD being flat, supported about 5mm off the motherboard by a nut at one side and the socket at the other. The clearance allows for components to be on both sides of the drive. There are apparently different clearance ratings, and drives can be single-or double-sided, but I don't know how important they are in practice. The SSD I mounted had tons of clearance. The hardest bit was probably pulling the teeny screw out without dropping it.

It's another one of those technology advances that leaves me impressed; I just installed a screamingly fast 1TB PCIe-mode hard drive that cost a hundred bucks and is about the size of a large stick of gum. The old 2.5" size looks enormous by comparison... and probably also a lot tougher. With everything exposed, I suspect m.2 drives will be quite vulnerable to environmental damage.

So: easy to install, once you look them over, and very easy to use with any modern OS. But, most likely, quite fragile. Be careful about physical abuse and static zaps.

I've been getting BSODs semi-regularly, perhaps once or twice a week. I'm also trying to update to the latest version of Windows so I can use the Game Pass subscription I just bought, but every time I try, I get a BSOD during the updating process.

Coupled with a few other little things, I'm starting to suspect some corrupted drivers and think the best option would be to reinstall windows. Is there an easy way to do this so I don't lose all of my data? I don't have a large enough HDD to backup everything, and my internet is pretty slow...

Would an in-place upgrade potentially fix these corruptions and allow me to update?

I had my first experience installing a M.2 drive in my last upgrade. It reminded me of nothing as much as installing RAM.

My first experience with m.2 drives was when Dell first started offering them as the SSD option in their configs 4 years ago or so. Brought up some really interesting support issues like "if a motherboard fails how do I do data recovery off of this thing?" These days you can get adapters to make them into USB devices, but there was none of that back then and those Dell computers only had 1 m.2 slot. Luckily it never came up. Two of my computers are currently booting off of NVMe variants and I love it.

As I understand them, AHCI is a SATA-based comms standard designed for high latency disks. NVMe rides on top of PCIe, and is designed for low-latency SSDs. So the two sets of standards are cleanly separated; depending on whether your slot is on a SATA or PCIe bus, the device will use AHCI *or* NVME. NVME is not to my knowledge capable of running in a sort of AHCI mode; they are competing standards but meant for different device types. NVME is not supported by SATA, but some NVME SSDs also support SATA mode, which will reduce their performance. A kind of backwards compatibility, I suspect.

Both SATA and PCIe support M.2 slots, which I think is where the confusion comes in. But the AHCI will bottleneck an NVME capable device, so it’s a bad idea to put an NVME device in an M.2 slot on a SATA bus.

Just thought that might be of interest.

Malor wrote:

I just installed my first m.2 drive, and thought I'd pass along some info... (snip)

Thanks. I noticed that spot on my new motherboard and was thinking to add a drive there if I could find one cheap on Black Friday.

A_Unicycle wrote:

I've been getting BSODs semi-regularly, perhaps once or twice a week. I'm also trying to update to the latest version of Windows so I can use the Game Pass subscription I just bought, but every time I try, I get a BSOD during the updating process.

Coupled with a few other little things, I'm starting to suspect some corrupted drivers and think the best option would be to reinstall windows. Is there an easy way to do this so I don't lose all of my data? I don't have a large enough HDD to backup everything, and my internet is pretty slow...

Would an in-place upgrade potentially fix these corruptions and allow me to update?

Have you already tried an in-place repair? Have you tried to remove all of the hardware you can see if it goes away? Like USB devices, extra drives, CD drives, extra RAM, etc.

After getting rid of everything not essential, I would check the power supply.