What Ryzen 3 mobo and RAM

[MrJim]

Another vote for Crucial Ballistix. Optimum ram is 3600MHz, but you will be lucky to get a full 4 sticks to work at that frequency and even at 2 sticks that is officially an overclock and hence would invalidate your warranty. I tend to stick to non overclock 3200MHz stuff, or 2666 in ECC.

Crucial have their own store, though even they are out of stock on a lot of packs. They only seem to have the quick stuff in RGB today:

https://uk.crucial.com/memory/ddr4/bl2k32g36c16u4bl

Amazon seem to be putting some HyperX and Ballistix ram on their early Black Friday deals, so if you aren't in a hurry you could keep a look out. So far only in small sized sticks though.

I wouldn't buy direct from the Crucial store, if my recent experience is anything to go by. I ordered a Ballistix kit & it took a MONTH to get to me (their European shop is based in the Netherlands). Of course some of the delay might be attributable to the whole COVID-19 thing, but still.

Amazon would definitely be my first stop for Crucial products - Black Friday is coming up soon (27th Nov), so there may be some bargains to be had that weekend.

Edit!

The Trustpilot reviews for Crucial make for some interesting reading!

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.crucial.co.uk

[b0redom]

..... so if you aren't in a hurry you could keep a look out. So far only in small sized sticks though.

Well looks like 5900X chips and 3080RTXs are in somewhat short supply now, so I'm not can't pull the trigger immediately even if I wanted to!

Usage wise, currently I'm using my box as a general office machine, Photoshop CS, Gaming and I've just started dabbling with Unity so I probably need a bit of grunt for that. VM wise it'll be used to spin up local clusters which are too big for my Raspberry PI kubernetes cluster to handle.

[Disputes]

as you need at least 2 M.2 and would prefer 3, i assume all NVME. its a choice between B550 and X570 if you still want to keep 16x for GPU

B550 has enough lanes to do 3 NVMEs but it can be hard to find a board that does this, but seems quite a few asus boards are set up in this configuration, however for 1 drive you will need to use a pcie to m.2 adapter.

Asus TUF Gaming B550M-Plus
Asus ROG Strix B550-F Gaming
Asus ROG Strix B550-E Gaming

they are all set up with two m.2 slots and then the last PCIE slot is wired up for another 4x, so you just need to get an M.2 adapter to use it. but thats 3 m.2s

another option is x570 and that can get upto 4 PCIE4 4x drives. and that should be much easier to grab nearly any board.


i use this excel list to work out the boards with the features u want.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=2112472504

[Rob_B]

Indeed.


There is the whole thing of single vs dual rank dimms as well. Dual rank means more chips so harder to hit high memory frequencies, but on a flip side means the CPU can have twice the open pages to ram which can help memory latency in some applications. All depends how you intend to use the thing.

I've only just started to hear about duel rank stuff, as 4x8GB isn't in my budget am I actually best buying 4x4GB instead of 2x8GB for something along the lines of a B450+ a 3100 (or a 10100F if Intel?)

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I've only just started to hear about duel rank stuff, as 4x8GB isn't in my budget am I actually best buying 4x4GB instead of 2x8GB for something along the lines of a B450+ a 3100 (or a 10100F if Intel?)

Intel still seems to be a bit less finicky with RAM than AMD IMHO.

[DanceswithUnix]

I've only just started to hear about duel rank stuff, as 4x8GB isn't in my budget am I actually best buying 4x4GB instead of 2x8GB for something along the lines of a B450+ a 3100 (or a 10100F if Intel?)

You are best off buying 2 sticks so you have room to plug 2 more in some time in the future. I think that is way more important for 99% of people than the few percent performance change you *might* get depending on what you are running.

[MrJim]

B550 has enough lanes to do 3 NVMEs but it can be hard to find a board that does this, but seems quite a few asus boards are set up in this configuration, however for 1 drive you will need to use a pcie to m.2 adapter.[/url]

I believe I'm right in saying that B550 has a 3 x PCIE3 lanes to the chipset, whereas X570 has 3 x PCIE4 lane instead. So if you have lots of devices like an NVME M.2 drive or PCIE cards connected to the lower slot(s) on your motherboard, you'll be better off with an X570 board as there's greater bandwidth to be shared around.

[DanceswithUnix]

I believe I'm right in saying that B550 has a 3 x PCIE3 lanes to the chipset, whereas X570 has 3 x PCIE4 lane instead. So if you have lots of devices like an NVME M.2 drive or PCIE cards connected to the lower slot(s) on your motherboard, you'll be better off with an X570 board as there's greater bandwidth to be shared around.

I think even on B550 boards you should be able to use bifurcation on the main x16 slot allowing 4 M.2 cards on that. Assuming you have a secondary PCIe connector you can plug your gpu into.

[MrJim]

I think even on B550 boards you should be able to use bifurcation on the main x16 slot allowing 4 M.2 cards on that. Assuming you have a secondary PCIe connector you can plug your gpu into.

I don't think there are many B550 boards that offer two physical PCIE x16 slots to be split into two x8 PCIE lanes - and I expect those that do have that facility are the more expensive variety...

[DanceswithUnix]

I don't think there are many B550 boards that offer two physical PCIE x16 slots to be split into two x8 PCIE lanes - and I expect those that do have that facility are the more expensive variety...

My Asrock B550M Pro4 has one PCIe4 x16 and a secondary PCIe3 x16. I was just thinking if you were that stuck for NVMe then there is a potential extra 4 slots there, but AIUI it needs bifurcation support to use all 4 SSDs of a 4 connector card. But then re-checking I now see that one of the two NVMe slots on that board only has x2 PCIe lanes going to it.

If you can afford that many NVMe drives you can probably afford an X570 board.

[bowepa]

I would recommend msi edge wifi b550 for £150 with wifi 6 and bt

[CPGP]

In case anyone is still interested in RAM... This article talks about dual rank vs. Single rank:
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-page...-in-games.html

tl:dr: At the same frequency and timings, 4 dual rank > 2 dual rank > 4 single rank > 2 single rank. Getting the same timings with more sticks is harder, but even if you need to ran slower, the performance can still be an improvement.

[b0redom]

Bit of a bump on this one. I've managed to find a 5800X in stock at RRP - Currys would you believe!

I was planning on pairing it with:

MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk
64GB (2x32GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance LPX Black, PC4-28800 (3600), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 18-22-22-42, XMP 2.0, 1.35V

I still need to decide on:

SSD - currently thinking possibly - 2TB Corsair MP400, M.2 (2280) PCIe 3.0 (x4)

Cooler - open to ideas on this one. I'm not particularly wedded to either air or liquid cooler.

Do these look OK? Any recommendations?

[Jace007]

Cooler - Artic Freezer II 380 or if you have a smaller case Artic Freezer 280 - no frills, no RGB, Top performance water AIO at a decent price.
SSD - Sabrent Rocket 1TB and/or 2TB M.2 (Can get 1TB for £98 on amazon at times) thou personally don't think 2TB NVME are value for money yet.

What PSU have you gone for ? I've gone for a Seasonic GX850. Just waiting on Currys to Stock AMD 5900X

[b0redom]

For PSU I already have a Corsair RM750X.

[mulven]

Indeed.


There is the whole thing of single vs dual rank dimms as well. Dual rank means more chips so harder to hit high memory frequencies, but on a flip side means the CPU can have twice the open pages to ram which can help memory latency in some applications. All depends how you intend to use the thing.

Aye, I have an itx system myself so had to go with two dual rank sticks. I had to sleuth some QVL lists to figure out which kits would be 100% dual rank as some big brands are ambiguous and will send DR/SR randomly for the same product.