Updating my PC: what are the important motherboard attributes to avoid hiccups

[tggzzz]

My current PC is rather old, and I'm considering replacing it. Back then UEFI was just coming in, and I managed to avoid the hassle associated with that, but times have changed. I'd like to get a handle on the motherboard attributes that might trip me up...

The system I have in mind would be something like:

• AMD processor, Zen 2, something like Ryzen 7 3700X
• principally Linux, probably a Ubuntu-based, LTS variant on principal, but partly since I've heard AMD only supports LTS variants
• possibly dual boot into windows, but I'll try to continue running WinXP in a VM
• a large format is OK, since I hope to reuse the case from my previous machine
• the usual complement of discs and memory etc
• a decent motherboard manufacturer, not low-end

So, what are the magic features that I should look for and avoid?
Are there any motherboards that are effectively Windows only? If so how can I avoid them?

Thanks for pointers!

[Halcyon]

If you're going to be running *nix, stick with an Intel-based platform. It is much more compatible across the board. If you are after a decent motherboard without the frills, look at Supermicro or any other workstation/server board manufacturer, you also generally get a full compliment of drivers for all kinds of operating systems and having personally used Supermicro in about 5 or 6 Linux and FreeBSD machines, I can attest that it's very well supported straight out of the box.

Ultimately, it comes down to your budget. If you're after a machine on the cheap, this might not be possible. But if you're willing to spend a little more, look beyond the consumer-grade gear.

[Ampera]

To begin with, we have a General Computing section of this forum which would be better suited to your inquiry.

Halcyon is an Intel fanboy, don't take his word for it, he just hates AMD. /me licks Halcyon

While there will always be the exception to the rule, I've found that the vast majority of motherboard hardware out now has fairly good Linux support. If you think, there's not really much to not be supported. You have sound, which has near universal Linux support, even for stranger stuff, NICs which honestly tend to have better Linux support than Windows, USB controllers which almost always have drivers, and chipsets/CPUs, which are common, known parts. Definitely do AMD, they're at the price to performance and energy to performance top right now, and they have features, like PCIe 4 that Intel is still dreaming of. Avoid Intel unless you get good deals on older hardware. They're still on their 14nm stuff and will be for a while.

Budget and application are always the determining factors when building any machine. We don't know what you intend to do with your machine, if you care about graphics, RAM size or speeds, NVMe. In general any common motherboard from the likes of MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, and ASRock will do fine. Brands like EVGA and BIOSTAR are also good choices, but I'm not even sure if they make new motherboards anymore.

Get the absolute newest chipset possible, the X570. While you may not need things like overclocking, you /will/ want better new CPU support, and PCIe 4, which will only come on boards with the X570.

Next suggestion is to get an NVMe SSD. Corsair makes good ones, Samsung is the gold standard, get a PCIe 4 one. Good, fast storage will make a lot of difference in a lot of places.

As for Linux version, if anything the LTS versions are less likely to have all the support you want, as they tend to be centered around older kernel versions. Use what you like, but if your chief concern is hardware support, rolling distributions which always have the newest kernel hot off the presses like Arch Linux are not bad ideas. That being said, you'll most likely be fine with the latest Ubuntu.

[hans]

My 3900X runs flawless under Linux now (Manjaro). I use an Asus Prime X570-PRO motherboard: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/PRIME-X570-PRO/

Yes, it's expensive (far more than B450), but:

- No BIOS updating for the new 3000 CPUs necesary. You may want to inform your shop you buy at whether you can plug'n'play a 3700X in a B450 board if you still decide to go that route. Maybe they can update the BIOS for you with less hassle. I think you need otherwise an older series CPU installed during the update process.

- X570=latest bells and whistles, of which PCI-e 4 stands out. However, this is more futureproofing for me (e.g in 2-3 years time), as most  current-gen GPUs and SSDs stick to PCI-e 3, or show little to none appreciable benefits when operating at PCI-e 4. I think this will come in future times, especially for SSDs. Getting a decent/high quality NVME SSD over SATA is a worthwhile benefit though, especially as an OS drive. For more info, source: https://youtu.be/47dGG8ZnN2g

- For ethernet NICs, I recommended getting a board with an Intel chipset, though.  The Realtek chipsets are really there to save money, because people still demand Gigabit RJ45, and although they may work, your Linux & BSD driver experience may vary..

- Note that the onboard graphic ports on all  AM4 motherboards don't work with the non-APU AMD chipsets, which is basically anything with >=6 cores.

Other than that.. most modern boards will support Linux these days. Dual booting shouldnt be a problem, thats more a software question/install issue. Sometimes you may need to enable legacy booting devices in these newer boards for Linux or older windows installs with MBR to be detected properly.

Also sometimes you need to use quite new packages to boot. When I built this system back in july last year, a few weeks after launch, I needed to use a release-candidate version of Manjaro as  the older kernel/systemd couldnt boot on Ryzen 3000 yet. I am not sure if Ubuntu 1804LTS was fixed for that, but you may want to check it out.
I'm sure though that 1810 and 1904 will work fine though.

[wraper]

- No BIOS updating for the new 3000 CPUs necesary. You may want to inform your shop you buy at whether you can plug'n'play a 3700X in a B450 board if you still decide to go that route. Maybe they can update the BIOS for you with less hassle. I think you need otherwise an older series CPU installed during the update process.

Any 400 series or A320 board which did dot sit on a shelve for a year will have bios compatible with 3000 series.

- X570=latest bells and whistles, of which PCI-e 4 stands out. However, this is more futureproofing for me (e.g in 2-3 years time), as most  current-gen GPUs and SSDs stick to PCI-e 3, or show little to none appreciable benefits when operating at PCI-e 4. I think this will come in future times, especially for SSDs. Getting a decent/high quality NVME SSD over SATA is a worthwhile benefit though, especially as an OS drive. For more info, source: https://youtu.be/47dGG8ZnN2g

Which has completely no use unless you want to buy a very expensive SSD. And even if you buy that it won't give you any performance increase unless you do some very specific tasks. Heck you can buy cheapo A320 board and it will work just fine with the same performance (no overclock). Just don't buy something with really bad VRM. Frankly it's much better to save money on motherboard and PCI-E 4.0 SSD and invest it into something that will really make a difference. Say GPU, RAM, more storage, better monitor.

So, what are the magic features that I should look for and avoid?

Chips on motherboard which don't have decent Linux drivers. The simpler the board, the less chances you will have problems with that.

[wraper]

Any 400 series or A320 board which did dot sit on a shelve for a year will have bios compatible with 3000 series.

I won't go down to A320. It's built for cheapest systems that will never be overclocked. Its VRM probably won't support 3700X for automated overclocking (turbo) for too long.

3700X has 65W TDP, It's much less than 105/95W of previous generations. Unless you do LN2, it won't boost by itself too much. And advanced overclock is simply not available. Not to say Ryzen does not overclock to any significant amount anyway so it's basically pointless to do it to begin with.

I would use A320 only on a 3400G

Which has the same TDP as 3700X because it has iGPU and is built on older 12nm node.

[wraper]

3700X has 65W TDP, It's less than 90W of previous generations. Unless you do LN2, it won't boost by itself too much. And advanced overclock is simply not available. Not to say Ryzen dos not overclock to any significant amount anyway so it's basically pointless to do it to begin with.

Both Intel and AMD are lying about their TDP. They both rate TDP as non-turbo power rating nowadays.

A 3700X is rated 3.6GHz, while with turbo it is easy to get 3.9GHz or 4.0GHz on all cores, and at that time we should see more than 90W consumption.

With 150W dissipation, you can expect almost 4.2GHz if you won the silicon lottery, or up to 4.4GHz with one or two active cores.

Both Intel and AMD's latest unlocked desktop chip can operate at 150W+ peak with air or cheap AIO water cooling.

Really? Note that it's total system consumption. Even overclocked 3700X consumes less.

[wraper]

Really? Note that it's total system consumption. Even overclocked 3700X consumes less.

Care to post a link to the full article?

https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/luke-hill/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-ryzen-7-3700x-zen-2-cpu-review/11/

[hans]

150W turbo's are not unusual. My 3900X boosts to 4GHz all core with a Scythe Mugen 5, which is a mid-range air cooler. Peak  temps of 85C or so. With PBO, the power & thermal limit is basically unlocked, and it jumps to almost 200W at 90C+ (only gains like 50MHz more). Source for these figures is the Ryzen Master software on Windows 10.

In addition, sorry for the Dutch source (stroomverbruik = power consumption), but just observe the Cinebench 15 Gem (average) and Cinebench 15 Max:

3900X (large list): https://nl.hardware.info/artikel/9397/21/amd-ryzten-7-3700x-a-ryzen-9-3900x-review-intel-voorbij-stroomverbruik
3950X: https://nl.hardware.info/artikel/9719/15/amd-ryzen-9-3950x-review-het-langverwachte-am4-topmodel-stroomverbruik

These figures are measured at the 12V CPU power connector *only*.

Both brands, Intel and AMD, far exceed the TDP rating. Typically Intel specs their TDP for the CPU at base clock. I'm not sure if AVX offsets are applied for this case, I think so, as a way to illustrate worst-case performance. I'm not sure how AMD exactly characterizes them.
Two advantages for AMD is XFR2, with very fine granular frequency steps as cooling allows. Second, unlike Intel, their turbos dont suffer from time limits, so performance stays up even for long single-core and multi-core workloads (e.g. 150W continuous "turbo").

For these reasons, I wouldn't go for a cheap A320 board on anything but an APU part. The meaning "bad VRM" is ambiguous in this regard: some OC'ers note that some X570 boards have bad VRMs (!) because they need some airflow over the VRM to not overheat under high loads. In theory, this could occur if someone installed watercooling on the CPU, and has no case fans thus no ventilation.

In other cases, a bad VRM from my perspective is one where the board limits the turbo capabilities of the CPU and it's thermals (i.e. the VRM overheats earlier than the CPU). There are plenty of choices in the B450 market that are fine, as those boards used to be entry-level OC/"gaming" boards in the 2000 series.

I agree that a X570 board is overkill if you're cash strapped. I was just trying to say, that in my experience, Ryzen 3000 has been most turn-key on these boards since 1) you know for sure there is no "old" stock of boards that contain older BIOS'es (which can be fixed) 2) the VRM & board design is spec'ed for the higher-end Ryzen parts.
PCI-e 4 is a niche right now. There are some (almost academic) workloads that can saturate the bandwidth to SSDs and GPUs. But in day-to-day use, the existing PCI-e 4 SSDs are not sufficiently quicker (e.g. random I/O) than a good PCI-e 3 SSD, and GPUs in regular applications are barely even bottlenecked by a PCI-e 3.0 8x lane configuration... However, these SSDs and GPUs will likely have an expiration date before a high-end Ryzen CPU, so I would expect things to change in the future. (E.g. I'm eagerly antipicating Samsung PCI-e 4 SSDs, or would expect GPUs in 2-3 generations time to be bottlenecked by PCI-e 3)

[NiHaoMike]

Second, unlike Intel, their turbos dont suffer from time limits, so performance stays up even for long single-core and multi-core workloads (e.g. 150W continuous "turbo").

With good cooling, it's pretty easy to hack Intel's Turbo Boost to work for an unlimited time. (At least from my experience on the now rather old SNB-E platform.)

[wraper]

I agree that a X570 board is overkill if you're cash strapped. I was just trying to say, that in my experience, Ryzen 3000 has been most turn-key on these boards since 1) you know for sure there is no "old" stock of boards that contain older BIOS'es (which can be fixed) 2) the VRM & board design is spec'ed for the higher-end Ryzen parts.

https://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/A320M-HDV%20R4.0/index.asp#CPU
This cheapo A320 board has Ryzen 9 3950X in it's support list (105W TDP). Surely it can handle R7 3700X. As of VRM it's the same as I've seen on their B450 boards except there is no heatsink. My point was that if board can handle 3400G it can also handle 3700X. There are B450 boards with 3 phase Vcore VRM, downgrade from this 4 phase design.

[Halcyon]

Halcyon is an Intel fanboy, don't take his word for it, he just hates AMD. /me licks Halcyon

Love you too Ampera ;-)

In all reality, in my 22+ years in the IT industry, questions like "What computer should I buy?" always ends in a flood of differing opinions and the OP walks away none the wiser. No one is any less correct than another but most people tend to be biased towards a particular brand, chipset, etc... for a multitude of reasons. I always say to people: It depends on the application and your specific use-case.

Yes, I stick with Intel, I have for many years. I have no use-case for AMD-based machines.

My general advice is:

If you're after the best chances of compatibility and stability, stick with Intel.
If you want a wider choice of motherboards from different vendors, stick with Intel.
If you're budget conscious and price is your main driver, either go with a consumer AMD board and processor or an older Intel-based system.
If you're planning to use *nix, don't get the absolute latest and greatest as support can be questionable (e.g.: AMD EPYC processors and FreeBSD-based OSs).
If your target is a specific TDP or performance benchmark, then select the processor and board that fits your specifications and build the system around that.
If you're waiting on someone on a forum to choose the best PC for you, you're wasting your time.

[daveyk]

"Halcyon is an Intel fanboy, "

I agree with him.  When ever I had a "falkey" PC, it was always an AMD (K6, K7, etc, all flakey).  I had an AMD system, now it was a long time ago, maybe 16-20 years, that had the processors that had the thermal runaway issue.  It may have been a Gateway, I really not sure, but when the heat compound dried between the processor and the heatsink, it flamed up an literally burned right through the mother board.

There was a a video at the time.  The guy would show a P3 running, the guy would lift off the heatsink, and the computer slowed down severely and locked up.   Then another one showing it with a P4, and it just got slow, but still ran.  Then he showed the AMD equivalent of the P4, the computer was working fine, and he lifted the heatsink off and it within a second or two was in flames (literally fire shooting up from the chip).

I have not used an AMD since then, other than maybe in a Chromebook (maybe).  I would NEVER build up a computer or laptop with an AMD processor.

[daveyk]

"I have no use-case for AMD-based machines."

See my post directly above.

[wraper]

If you're after the best chances of compatibility and stability, stick with Intel.

With all their security bugs and half-assed software/firmware fixes crippling performance. The latest one which is unfixable: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21167782/intel-processor-flaw-root-of-trust-csme-security-vulnerability

If you want a wider choice of motherboards from different vendors, stick with Intel.

As if something like 20+ motherboard models from basically every major motherboard manufacturer (each) for AM4 socket alone is not enough.

[wraper]

There was a a video at the time.  The guy would show a P3 running, the guy would lift off the heatsink, and the computer slowed down severely and locked up.   Then another one showing it with a P4, and it just got slow, but still ran.  Then he showed the

Only P3 and earlier time AMD equivalents would burn and only if thermal protection was not properly implemented in motherboard. Since AMD CPUs relied on motherboard for thermal throttling unlike Pentium 3 even though they had built in temperature sensor. IIRC Athlon XP probably already it did it internally. But Athlon 64 and later are 100% free of this issue for sure.

AMD equivalent of the P4, the computer was working fine, and he lifted the heatsink off and it within a second or two was in flames (literally fire shooting up from the chip).

And this most likely is your imagination or broken memory. The only video with any smoke present (not a lot) I've ever seen or found is below. In any case this point is moot, stupid and does not apply to anything made in last 15+ years.

I would NEVER build up a computer or laptop with an AMD processor.

Simply , especially considering your (non) reason.

[wraper]

BTW IME I had stability problems with both Intel and AMD based computers, mostly RAM related. But the only CPU to ever fail on me was Intel i7-3820k.

[Monkeh]

I agree with him.  When ever I had a "falkey" PC, it was always an AMD (K6, K7, etc, all flakey).

6-series chipsets. C2000s. Literal reams of errata. Meltdown, Spectre, SPOILER, Foreshadow, Lazy FP, Zombieload, Cacheout. Let's get oldschool and look at FDIV and F00F..

Intel can do no wrong, I'm sure you agree. Just all the above as a small selection of their immense fuckups and flakey designs. And yes, I do know some of this affects AMD too.

That said, I'm mostly an Intel shop, too. I just have my eyes open.

[rdl]

For my own personal use I've been on Intel since 2008, before that from 1999 I used AMD. Never really had any problems with either, just always went for what seemed the best value. Recently decided I need to build something to take over from my aging i5-3570K. Looking around, I can almost hear a Ryzen 5 3600 calling my name.

[David Hess]

Get the absolute newest chipset possible, the X570. While you may not need things like overclocking, you /will/ want better new CPU support, and PCIe 4, which will only come on boards with the X570.

I would avoid the X570 if it means that the motherboard includes active cooling (a fan) because of poor reliability of the fan.  And of course fans in modern GPU, CPU, and motherboard coolers tend to be stylishly custom so cannot be easily replaced with a standard tubeaxial fan.

[Monkeh]

https://lviattack.eu/

lol, Intel. So secure, so fast. Wait, neither. Oops.

[Halcyon]

https://lviattack.eu/

lol, Intel. So secure, so fast. Wait, neither. Oops.

Do you realise AMD processors aren't immune to many of these publicised vulnerabilities either?

I actually work in cyber security and I have not come across a single instance (outside a lab environment) where things like Spectre or Meltdown have been exploited, largely due to the complexity involved and level of access needed.

At least Intel have been responsive to provide patches and mitigations, AMD, not so much.

As for fast, Intel feature 7 processors in the top 20 fastest processors currently available, so not sure where you're going with that argument either?

Someone didn't do their homework... Oops!

With all their security bugs and half-assed software/firmware fixes crippling performance. The latest one which is unfixable: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21167782/intel-processor-flaw-root-of-trust-csme-security-vulnerability

The latest exploit also affects AMD processors. Intel have acknowledged the issue, AMD denied it's a new vulnerability and basically shrugged it off. As for "unfixable", the media reported that too about earlier exploits, that turned out to be bullshit too.

[wraper]

Do you realise AMD processors aren't immune to many of these publicised vulnerabilities either? At least Intel have been responsive to provide patches and mitigations,

Intel responsive like not releasing patches as minimum for months while they had their time to do so before issues were made public? And once their ass started burning once issues became publicly known releasing broken patch which were causing some older systems rebooting? https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/microsoft-out-of-band-fix-intels/
Or how about taking Minix and using it in every system without informing the author or anyone else. Then having tons of security issues since it was not meant to be used in this way.

AMD, not so much.

As of AMD, first of all they released some patches and collaborated with OS developers. The relatively little security issues they had were fixed mostly in bios updates. Secondly, you haven't seen so much activity probably because they did not need to? Because
they were affected to like 5% extent of Intel's?

[Monkeh]

https://lviattack.eu/

lol, Intel. So secure, so fast. Wait, neither. Oops.

Do you realise AMD processors aren't immune to many of these publicised vulnerabilities either?

Did you bother to actually read my previous post? Or read about this specific issue?

As for fast, Intel feature 7 processors in the top 20 fastest processors currently available, so not sure where you're going with that argument either?

Uhm, shockingly, I'm referencing the specific issue and the severe performance impact of the mitigations needed for SGX usage.

Someone didn't do their homework... Oops!

Someone didn't bother to do anything before knee-jerking to sound superior. And, well, pot and kettle considering our last discussion..

[wraper]

As for fast, Intel feature 7 processors in the top 20 fastest processors currently available, so not sure where you're going with that argument either?

And Intel top performer having about half of AMD performance. Not to say price/performance ratio.