Why shouldn't I buy this mainboard?

[kano]

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Prime-B350-Plus-Ryzen-Motherboard/dp/B06X416NJ1/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1487878179&sr=8-9&keywords=ryzen+motherboard

 

I want a setup with two graphics cards. But, I will not use them for SLI/Crossfire. SLI/Crossfire is way too expensive for the performance gain that they offer. The only reason that I am interested is to use one for rendering and the other for displaying the output. This means that the graphics card tasked with displaying the desktop does not suffer extreme lag, which is what happens if you render using Cycles and attempt to display the desktop simultaneously only on one video card.

 

With this in mind, the fact the board here only supports running one video card at full speed should not hamper things, right? Rendering is bottlenecked by the performance of the GPU, and not the PCIE slot. Therefor, I would be a fool to pay twice as much for a board with two slots that run at x16 speed and Crossfire/SLI support, when I'm never going to use that, correct?

[Bikerdude]

Well straight off the bat -

• there are no Ryzen reviews yet, all the ones I could find were copied and pasted.
• that motherboard only has 4 sata ports.
• the motherboard chipset is brand new, so we dont know what the bugs with it may be
• on the subject of chipsets, anything that starts with a B in the name is probably low/mid range and/or cut down in some way (only 4 sata, what else have they cut?)
• which ryzen CPU were you going to buy?

And on the subject of AMD cpu's -

• I have a 3.4Ghz FX4300 paired with a GTX 760, and TDM perf is way down, this was a friend told me down to the crap floating point perf of the AMD cpu. So we dont know at this point if AMD have fixed the serious shortcoming.

I am running a 4790k on a Z97 motherboard and it holds it own against the 7700k in most tasks. That and I have FULL Win7 support from this CPU. Whats the specs of your current system..?

[kano]

The specs of the current machine are a Phenom II x6 1075t (3GHz) and 16GB of memory with a GTX970. I realize that Bulldozer would be a "sidegrade", lol, and besides, the current board is not AM3+, only AM3.

 

4 SATA ports would probably be enough. One SSD, one eSATA, and three HDDs, or two HDDs and an optical drive. If I need more SATA ports, I already have a PCI-to SATA card, which would work fine for optical drives, though it would bottleneck HDDs/SSDs.

[Bikerdude]

The GTX970 is being seriously under powered by that Phenom, its about the same as a Core i5 2500k but lacks the Fp perf of said i5 - so that openGL/IDtech games will run poorly on it (the 1075k)

 

I would hold fire untill some non-biased reviews start coming in, showing motherboards and CPU perf of the Ryzen platform. I am internested to see what Win7/8.1 support will be provided.

[kano]

Well, here we go again. The benchmarks have landed, and Ryzen performs very well in multi-threaded loads, but not so well in single threaded loads. Seems like we've been down this road before. And the chip that AMD are offering in the reasonable price range is clocked at a mere 3 GHz. So if you're not willing to shell out for the highest end Ryzen model, you get significantly trailing single core performance.

 

But the bright side is that AMD has scared/knocked some sense into Intel, and they are now offering the I7 7700 for $320. So now I'm tempted to get that instead of the more expensive and slower clocked, though 8 core Ryzen.

[Bikerdude]

and they are now offering the I7 7700 for $320. So now I'm tempted to get that instead of the more expensive and slower clocked, though 8 core Ryzen.

Only issue I have with Kabylake platform is the deliberate hobbling of features on-cpu and more importantly on-motherboard on any OS lower than windows 10.

 

I would quite happily go to a 7700k/Z270-370 if the cold to desktop boot times were the same or lower than my current Z97 and old Z77 mobo's under windows 7/8.

[kano]

I ended up ordering an I7-6700 non K for about $310. However, I haven't chosen an MB yet. The K models are more expensive, they don't come with coolers AND the feature that allows you to pass through a video card to a VM is disabled on the K line for some reason... So after going for Skylake, I won't be strong-armed into Windows 10 and this thing will still way outperform this Phenom.

Edited March 4, 2017 by kano

[Bikerdude]

I had and tried a 6700k several months back and only tested under Windows 7 at the time. I tested 3x Z170 based motherboards (Msi, Gigabyte and Asus) and all had the 3x longer cold-to-desktop boot issue -

 

- http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18681-why-shouldnt-i-buy-this-mainboard/?p=402421

 

WIndows 7 ran just fine, it was just I could not stomach paying £440 for a new system that booted slower than my Z77/Z97 systems did. How ever I am not running Win8.1 (it has better SSD support and slightly better SSD perf across the board). So I maybe tempted to go Kabylake if a suitable motherboard can be found and by that I mean one that 1. has quick boot times but crucially 2. allowing booting from USB on Win8.1 or below (Intel/M$ have deliberately hobbled the CPU, so the mobo vender would have to provide USB support)