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Ooof. That's one nasty gouge. I don't blame you for sending it back. If it works.....can always lap it though. But yeah, I understand wanting something that just works when it arrives.

Honestly was a fantastic find. Had I known about a 35w i7 with HT, I'd have bought that same CPU myself lol. Didn't even know that SKU existed.

I do have an Opteron, yes. It's also part of my surprise on the 939 rig. Just waiting for a clear enough day to paint it. EDIT: I have now officially started the painting process. Took a few pictures, but I'll share all of them in an update post when its completed. Smoke started blowing back our way this evening, so it might have to wait for another clear enough day.

Minor progress update: So updates are going to be a tad slow right now for financial reasons. Saving up to take that front panel down to the local plastics company in town, but they charge $150 / hour just to look at it. So, definitely gotta save up to get that fixed. Not buying another Chieftec Dragon as that'd be pointless since I have one. In the meantime, I DO have the remaining bits on order for the Thuban / Phenom II x6 rig with the HD7970 in it. I broke the retention bracket on the board, so have another of those on the way. It was working kind of, but then I broke that. Needed a HDD so bought a 4TB spinner. Also have a wifi card (Intel 7260) and sound card on the way for it as onboard sound was broken, so was a good excuse to buy a Xonar DG. I also have EVERYTHING here to do my Socket 939 build. The only thing I'm waiting for on that is a clear day to paint the case. It's still "raining ash" around here, so not going to paint it in those conditions. Otherwise, I'm done buying stuff for a little while, as I need to get that case repaired before I continue. Once the case is repaired, I'll be ordering what's left on the two Socket A rigs HOPEFULLY before Christmas, but we'll see. Then a K6 rig maybe, depending on availability, early next year. And these will all be done!

Been wondering what RX 580 crossfire would be like on my Ryzen. This would save me the hassle of trying to fabricate with zip ties a location for a second card in my tiny little case. Either way, custom cards are always neat to see in the wild. Nice to see dual GPU's making a comeback lately.

It's pretty typical IMO. I recall high clocked / low latency DDR3 beating the snot out of early DDR4. Same thing was true with DDR2 and DDR3, and back with DDR and DDR2. Once their processes mature some, DDR5 will take off as much faster. It's just still way too early to tell yet, that's all.

Android. Problem is, I pay monthly for OneDrive for the 1TB access. I'll work it out, I'd rather have my cloud storage locally on my own NAS anyway. Once I get my OPNsense router sorted out, I planned on doing like an FTP or something I could upload to instead. Too many projects and only so much concentration I can give lol.

Get one! Let's have some fun! No I did not know that AMD was sued over that. I knew these weren't a proper full 8 cores though, knew that since before they were released lol. These CPU's got so much bad press it was ridiculous and I honestly don't see why. It's not THAT bad of a CPU. It's certainly better than my Phenom II x6, and its not as good as my Ryzen 2600. I mean it sits right where it should for performance. Oops. I did not know that, never used the CPUz benchmark before. My bad. Take a 2600k's results from online and do some math? I've already put Linux Mint on it now. I can run it again next time I go Windows on it. I was honestly curious if I can get by daily on Linux. So far, Mint's not bad. Only complaint (so far) is lack of MS OneDrive to sync pictures and stuff with my phone. I can RDP into one of my many VM's though for that till I figure out an alternative (if I even need one). I have NOT gotten to try out any games yet on it though, Steam is still downloading. Nor have I attempted to install .exe games or .iso image games. Either of those might break my experience here. So far, I'm liking it though.

@UltraMega This one's for you. Ran the CPUz benchmark since I'm going to Mint on the FX rig now that I have an RX580 in it (don't feel like screwing with eyefinity just to get my monitor working). Here's the results of the CPUz bench. I chose a 2600k as the reference point CPU, figured it was the most fitting. Results really aren't surprising. About the same IPC as a stock 2600k core for core with the FX at 4.8GHz and the 2600k at stock. When jumping to multithreaded though, the 4 modules / 8 "cores" approach does in fact seem to work better than the 2600k's HT though.

Again, I'm no networking expert..... I am using an Asus B85M-G CSM/SI motherboard with an i5 4590T 35w quad core, which I was led to believe is Devil's Canyon. I figured if it is on 24/7, lower wattage is better. I also figured since people quite literally run routers on Atom based systems, an i5 of any generation is probably more than enough. I have your "standard home network" for the most part. Couple of streaming boxes, a couple computers, couple phones. The basics. Using a VPN now too though. My system under heavy network traffic load sees like 10% load. I'm barely using 1GB of RAM out of my 8 I think. And I'm using like 2-3GB of storage if that. 99% of the time, the system just sits there. My NAS sees a lot worse loads than the router does, that's for sure. My advice of a non expert? Go for something with decent performance in the last decade, but something as low power as you're willing to go (without sacrificing performance). It is an always on device afterall. 4490T's are still cheap, about the price of a 4770 non K. No HT......but do you really need HT for a router replacement when consumer routers run on what, ARM processors? If there's any special instruction sets needed, I couldn't tell you that one. You said you have an i3 right? Try it out! Your i3 you already have is free and at least its lower power than the i7 4790. Not being one of those energy conservative types by any means, but a router isn't exactly a place that needs a huge overclocked i7 / i9 / Ryzen. Look forward to your build regardless! EDIT: Forgot to mention too, my networking needs aren't necessarily the same as the next person's (obviously). I'm perfectly fine on 10/100/1000 for my router since the router doesn't necessarily need to affect the rest of the local network.

Update: Side panel of the replacement rosewill case just returned from the metal shop. Still no word on plastic working for the cheiftec. I might have to find another cheiftec dragon or something. Anyway, here's the new updated side panel. Paint is coming next! Waiting for a day when it's not snowing ash. -_- EDIT: On the note of updates. I decided to do another thing. I was able to use my FX rig to an advantage this evening. Had this old MSI RX 580 8GB Armor OC card laying around that I bricked over a year ago with a bad BIOS flash. Never had a system on hand with enough space, PCIe slots, and a big enough PSU to try to flash it again. I did think about using onboard GPU, but unfortunately my Ryzen 3600 lacks one. So finally, this evening, I put in my old GT310 "just because it works" card in the top PCIe slot. Put this RX 580 in the second slot with power hooked up. Booted to DOS, bam....after 4 failed flashes finally found the right BIOS for the card! Now that I found the right BIOS to the card, I flashed my slightly better overclock to it (1400 / 2050) with better fan profile (70*C instead of 75*C target temp). So now, the card runs 1400 / 2050, its alive, and benchmarks exactly the same as every other 580 in the house now! Here's a picture of the card in my FX system now.

On the FX rig? I can, yeah. I'm kind of in between at the moment, got the Phenom II x6 going last night so was working on getting it stable.

So far, here's what I've done.....ALMOST successfully. 1) Flashed the 7970 to the older F41 BIOS available directly from Gigabyte. The newer F3 BIOS (and leaked F8 BIOS) didn't want to POST in the 890FX. 2) The above F41 BIOS made the card unstable with 3D, BUT....it works in the 890FX. 3) Flashed the 890FX from BIOS 2.00 to 2.01 beta. Seems to work? Hasn't been very stable since the flash, but could be the GPU BIOS. 4) Switched 7970 BIOS switch to #2 once 890FX was flashed. It POST'ed. Never did get it to boot again. Note: After the 890FX BIOS flash, the BIOS was then UEFI instead of old school. Might be the bootup issue? 5) I'm now installing Win10 (again) using UEFI. F2 (stock) BIOS on the 7970 and latest beta 2.01 BIOS on the board. Seems to be working now. The card is 3D stable in the 990FX Sabertooth again using stock F2 BIOS on the card, whereas it wasn't on the F41 there either. It POST'd and installed Windows on the 890FX now. Maybe, just maybe it'll work??? EDIT: It's working. The 890FX now has the 7970 installed, 3D is working. So yeah, needed to update the motherboard's BIOS to a beta. Kind of a PITA since the 7970 is the card I bought for the rig. Stress testing the OC's now.

I remember this being an issue for people with LGA 1155 back in the day originally, but I don't recall hearing about people having this problem with AMD boards. Anybody know where I can start looking to fix this problem of my ASRock 890FX Deluxe5 (BIOS 2.00) not POST'ing with a Gigabyte Windforce HD7970 Rev 2.1? The board works fine, attempts to boot up just fine with a GeForce GT310 installed. The card works fine, I just pulled it a few days ago from my 990FX / FX 8350 rig. If the card is installed alone in the 890FX board, I just get an "error code 97" on the little display on the bottom of the board, and no picture at all, and no POST beep. It's got to be a BIOS issue, but there's no later BIOS's for the board that address anything like this. And I can't seem to find any GOOD results for the Windforce v2.1 being flashed to a different BIOS either.

Yeah, eyefinity will be about my only hope with the 290x and Linux. Same with windows. Native res isn't required but it'd be nice to have 3840x1080. I'll play around with it more later, I'm sure eyefinity is possible on Linux. Still working out the bugs in windows now that I know it's a card limitation. EDIT: Got the Thuban rig built this evening, and having issues with THAT one too, more serious issues. *Grumbles. The 7970 absolutely will not POST in this board. Tried every PCIe slot, and even tried a GT310 installed as primary GPU and using the 7970 as secondary. It just will not POST at all with the 7970 even present. Tried swapping the BIOS switch around too. I'll make a thread in the GPU section about it. Maybe somebody else has had this problem. I'll update with pictures once its functional. Not any good taking beauty shots when the insides are a mess right now.

I did figure out its not a Linux specific issue, its a 290x issue apparently. It won't run at native res in Windows either with my Ultrawide. I ended up having to run 7680x2160 in eyefinity with the latest drivers in Windows. I figured the 290x would be new enough to work out of the box with this screen. Latest Windows drivers do not allow you to customize the eyefinity resolution, so whatever it picks up, is what you get apparently. I'll be trying older drivers today, this res isn't going to work for gaming at all with an FX / 290x lol. And my screen is 5120x1440 anyway, was hoping for just simple 3840x1080 actually on it lol. So apparently, I'll need to figure out how to force the right resolution, in eyefinity, for Linux to work.

Agreed completely. A good SSD setup will get just about ANY rig made in the last 15 ish years (or longer) "usable" daily. Gaming just needs whatever GPU you need for your resolution and games, and I'd say at least a "good" quad core to be happy with "most" games. Obviously there's exceptions to those rules, but good general "minimum" requirements anyway. On that note too, my own FX rig apparently is NOT going Linux and neither am I. Apparently I cannot get 5120x1440 to work in Linux, something about the EDID not reporting correctly or something, I dunno. Linux terminal confuses me coming from a DOS / Windows background. So that kinda sucks. Was looking forward to swapping my main rig to Linux Mint or Kubuntu. Tried using the xandr (spelling?) tweaks to add in the resolution and refresh rate, but didn't seem to matter what I did, screen was garbled at any 32:9 resolution.

Bump, really fixed OP's wording.

I mean I way overpaid for most of this junk..... But yeah, I'd pair it with any modern mid-range card or past gen high end card like an RX 580, R9 290x, GTX 1660Ti or whatever is equal, 1070Ti, or even an old 980Ti. The more VRAM the better these days of course. Find a deal on a used 1080 / 1080Ti even, and I'll bet it'll do just fine. Maybe a tad bottlenecked, but I'll bet you'd see an increase. 8 threads is 8 threads, these (later) FX CPU's compared almost identically to Ivy Bridge back in the day. Still absolutely usable and enjoyable today on a budget. Other than BeamNG.drive (which is HIGHLY CPU heavy with AI spawned), I legitimately cannot tell a lick of difference between this FX rig and my sig rig in games. General usability....meh, my NVME is obviously snappier than RAID0 BX500's, but its a close race. EDIT: I missed the "he's not going to be doing heavy gaming". Yeah, it'll do great.

So per the request of UltraMega, I went ahead and ran some benchmarks on this old FX 8 core / R9 290x. Unsurprisingly, it does better than my sig rig in games since the test bench is 1080p. I mean seriously, I'm amazed at how good RDR2 and Crysis Remastered look, just WOW. Definitely means I need to save up $2000 ish for a 6900XT now. Anyway, enough chit chat, onto the results! Apologies for double posting. Trying to keep actual information separated from conversations. Screenshots and CPU benchmarks (Cinebench / 3dMark): But then of course, I couldn't stop at just basic benchmarking. I had to show you guys how well it plays games too!!! I only ran 2, but they're the highest possible graphics / most extreme on a system games I had installed on here. Don't believe me? Check out the results for yourself!!! Games benchmarks: Sorry for not doing other games. I mean, these 2 alone absolutely blew me away with their performance as it was. Overall, this FX rig is definitely a keeper though.

I'll run Cinebench on her tonight. I can do a couple 3dmark runs too, not sure which ones I have but I can do that before I linux swap it. Games, I'd run, but really there's not much to say. I was playing RDR2 on it last night at 1080p / dead center preset settings. Cyberpunk was playing smoothly on low I think it was? (My Ryzen rig's settings at 1080p). I already knew BeamNG.drive played fine on it on High / 1080p seeing as how it was doing medium with the 7970 installed. And yes, it has been pretty bad up here. WA State is also on fire, yet again. 2 days ago on my drive home it looked like it was snowing. -_- Of course, per the usual lately in our state, we're being told one reason why but its actually another reason all together as to why these fires are happening. Yay. At least this year, the bigger fires were started by lightning. Too much dry fuel in our forests the last couple years. That's what happens after 10 years of no logging. If the forests aren't managed, they burn easy.

I've been using the Intel i350T4 in most of my rigs, I'm nowhere near setup for anything past gig speeds anyway. The i350T2 I'd imagine would be nearly identical as well if you needed something cheap and solid with just 2 ports. I chose a 4 port just in case. I used these in my NAS and VM box too, although I really probably did need 10g NIC's there, but whatever. It works. For the OPNsense box, you're going to want to plug that into a switch or something else anyway for the added ports for your LAN. More than likely anyway. I mean, you CAN use it as a full on router, even wireless. However that's going to need a bigger enclosure, and more PCIe NIC's, and its even more setup and troubleshooting on it later. By all means, try it out if you want to. Just my experience as an end user switching from commercial grade routers. I'm happy with mine just as a very intelligent gateway, firewall, dhcp, and vpn. And in that instance, all that's really needed is equal or faster than your ISP for the NIC's. 1 in / 1 out is all that's "required", but you can assign them to so many things its ridiculous. If you plan to be any advanced at all in your network, you might want to start off with a 4 port NIC. I'm using 3 ports, and the headaches are real (but wow its powerful). I only recommend mine because they were cheap, they're gig speed capable, they were cheap, and they work great in everything. Also, fair note, I'm by no means intelligent with networking gear. I make junk work, that's my specialty.

Anything in particular I should run on it before I put Mint on there for testing? I've got quite a few games on there with Win10 right now already. Debating on going Linux on my main rig for a while now, and this FX rig performs closely enough....might as well give it a try there first. EDIT: Also, I've submitted a request to return the Radeon 9800XT since I bought it less than 30 days ago. Really bummed out about that one, especially since I left the seller a good rating already because I was so excited for it. Le sigh. Let's see if he accepts the return or not. It gives a display, but its artifacting even on BIOS, and on desktop its completely unusable due to it. I guess I could try to bake it, but for $175 of paypal credit's money......I think he can take the return. It was, actually, advertised as a fully functional card. If I was actually taking a gamble on it, 1, I wouldn't have paid $175 for it, and 2, I wouldn't have found a listing that said in working condition.

Double or triple post. My apologies. This update is kind of entirely different than the previous ones. I unboxed my first Socket A rig this evening. EVERYTHING WORKS!!!! Got a test bench going on with the box it came in. Board, CPU, and RAM boot up to BIOS. It recognizes the IDE HDD I had laying around. Even both the Radeon 9800XT and X1950 Pro seem to be working (thus far). The 9800XT does seem to be having some artifacting at certain resolutions though. Not sure what's going on with that yet. I'll be getting these going soon enough. I do really need to get busy on that busted front panel before I can build this one though. This Socket A setup (with the Radeon 9800XT) is intended to be going into that Chieftec Dragon case. Not sure what all add on cards I want to use with it yet. Definitely a sound card and wifi card. Not sure either about OS drive either, as IDE drives are incredibly slow, even for this rig. Either way, enjoy some unboxing and test bench pics of my first Socket A re-build of the 2020's.