I recently bought a 5700 XT. It's made a big difference to my frame rates, but I think my 3570k @ 4.3GHz is a major bottleneck in games. I'm thinking about buying a 3300X and overclocking. Could anybody recommend a good value full sized ATX MB that can overclock? I have an M.2 sata card and an nvme card which I'd want to fit to the MB. Will the stick cooler be enough? I have a 12cm Corsair AIO water cooler that I could use instead? Thanks
The go-to board for bargain Ryzen builds is the msi tomahawk B450. This will give you only a limited upgrade path though so if you can stretch to a B550 or x470 board then do.
Ryzen OC isn't really a thing. There's PBO which kind of does stuff, but otherwise you're stuck with how they are out of the box. Fast RAM is more important, I run 3600MHz stuff.
I think the 450 boards have limited pcie lanes and slots get disabled if you add nvme cards. With regards to overclocking, I thought you could apply 'all core overclocks via multiplier increases?
Not much. Ryzen have never been overclockers. AMD has their clocks really aggressive, so what you get out of the box is basically what the chip delivers. Just look at the whole line up, its only a few hundred MHz across all the SKU's. Looking at a few reviews you're looking at 5fps increase if you're lucky, Not really worth it in my mind. If you really want the extra performance just go for a 3600. Gone are the days of massive free performance boosts I'm afraid...
There are minor benchmark gains when overclocking Ryzen. I have gained a tiny bit by enabling PBO and AutoOC. but to be honest, it’s not worth the time. Similarly, even less benchmark gains can be had with quicker RAM. I had gone for super cheap 2x16GB 3000 CL16 RAM, (only £104 ) and got to it running at 3400 MHz same timing. There is an AMD slide saying 3200-3600 are the sweet spots for Ryzen 3000. 3600 vs 3300x? It depends on how long you plan to keep the CPU. 3600 won’t give you more FPS today, but will more likely to give you more performance in the future. Just like if you had gone for i7 in your previous build, you may not need to upgrade now. B550 might be worth considering. My Asus B550m TUF doesn’t disable anything. I can use all PCIe slots and NVMe slots.
The B550 doesn't appear to be much cheaper than the 570 chipset. The Asus 570 motherboards don't have USB-C, but the B550s do - which might come in handy in the future. The 570 boards seem to be more future proof, but I would like USB-C, so maybe an MSI board? I'm thinking about this system: 3300X 16GB or 32GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM 570 MB or B550 MB Total cost is either £342 or £416 depending on the amount of RAM I buy. Do you think my existing Corsair H75 will be capable of cooling the 3300X?
If the colour scheme is acceptable, go for this. Wasy better power delivery, so if you want a meatier CPU in the future it'll handle it far better
Type C is the future. Electrically, it's identical to A, you can buy a cheap adaptor and it'll work the same. As long as you have USB 3.2 Gen 2 port supporting 10 Gbps, you are set. I see Pete's recommendation have four gen2 ports, that's a lot! There isn't many games that would use more than 15GB of RAM. None of the flat screen games I've played since getting 32GB used more than 15GB. Asgard's Wrath used 18GB at most, but that's a huge VR game. Getting 2x8GB now you can always add 2x8GB in the future if needed. I only got 32GB because I had 16GB, I didn't feel like I had upgraded with same amount of RAM. That's because the CPU upgrade felt like placebo effect outside of time consuming CPU tasks like video encoding. Make sure your cooler can work with new socket. Noctua sent out free mounting kit, I've been using the same D14 for almost 10 years now.
Thanks for confirming the usb situation. I presume I need to buy a converter cable and possibly an external power supply for those devices that pull more power? My current PC has 32GB RAM, so going down to 16GB seems like a downgrade. For the difference in price I might get 32GB.
Thanks for the advice. I've gone with the ASUS motherboard and 32GB of RAM. Scan had some Corsair RGB RAM slightly cheaper than the 'standard' RAM, so I bought that instead.
I phoned Scan and upgraded to a 3700X. It seems to have better frame rates in the reviews I've read and should be good for a few years. It also feels like a proper upgrade going from 4 core/4 thread to 8 core/16 thread.
I've installed my new kit, but I'm concerned by something. The 5700 XT is completely covering the motherboard fan. I guess the heat sink fins will allow air through, but won't this be an issue under load? Surely Asus realised that big graphics would sit over the fan intake?
I can't see it it's fouling. It's sat tight on the plastic shrouding. I presume this has been taken into account when they designed the motherboard, but it seems suboptimal.
To check the fan works. In the BIOS, can you set the motherboard fan to spin manually by changing the Q-fan setting?
Thanks for the tip. I've not really delved into the BIOS yet. Any suggestions for RAM and CPU settings? I'm using the Wraith Prism cooler.