Intel Z790 Motherboard Suggestions

[Avacado]

3 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Thought the refresh was still getting called 14th gen. I could be wrong. The refresh is what I mean.

It's been awhile since I have read news on it. My understanding is that they would make it a 13950k etc... 

 

@Sir BeregondLooks like you are right, still it's annoying. They are branding it Raptor Lake-S and calling it 14th gen. I still don't know if the actual CPU will start with a 14XXX though. 

Edited June 20, 2023 by Avacado

[kaliz]

I was getting a Z790i EDGE but then i saw a this OC mobo and couldnt resist, I ended up getting a Z690 Tachyon! just set it up, and it can get the immersive 6GHz / 8 GHz combo without much hassle! Excited!

 

[ENTERPRISE]

Looks like the 14th Gen refresh may very well be compatible with existing motherboards 

 

Error 404 (Not Found)!

WWW-FORBES-COM.CDN.AMPPROJECT.ORG

 

 

 

[Sir Beregond]

6 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Looks like the 14th Gen refresh may very well be compatible with existing motherboards 

 

Error 404 (Not Found)!

WWW-FORBES-COM.CDN.AMPPROJECT.ORG

 

 

 

Should be, its just a refresh of Raptor Lake, but I am hoping that means it has enough of a boost to be worth calling 14th gen.

[ENTERPRISE]

Just as a small update, due to Intels lack of longevity when it comes to sockets, I have decided to go the AM5 as IMHO it offers a better upgrade route so far as not having to keep swapping out the motherboard. Granted LGA1700 lasted a fair good while, I still don't trust Intel to not switch things out. Just being pessimistic. 

[Sir Beregond]

3 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Just as a small update, due to Intels lack of longevity when it comes to sockets, I have decided to go the AM5 as IMHO it offers a better upgrade route so far as not having to keep swapping out the motherboard. Granted LGA1700 lasted a fair good while, I still don't trust Intel to not switch things out. Just being pessimistic. 

Yeah I mean if upgradability of CPUs with the same platform is a big deal to you, then it makes sense. LGA1700 is at its end with the Raptor Lake Refresh. AM5 will probably get Zen 5. They said 2025, so don't necessarily see it lasting past Zen 5 unless they extend it like AM4 was. To me it feels like AM4 was sort of an anomaly. But it does mean you have a longer period to upgrade on AM5 if getting in now. So I totally get it.

Edited July 13, 2023 by Sir Beregond

[ENTERPRISE]

9 hours ago, Sir Beregond said:

Yeah I mean if upgradability of CPUs with the same platform is a big deal to you, then it makes sense. LGA1700 is at its end with the Raptor Lake Refresh. AM5 will probably get Zen 5. They said 2025, so don't necessarily see it lasting past Zen 5 unless they extend it like AM4 was. To me it feels like AM4 was sort of an anomaly. But it does mean you have a longer period to upgrade on AM5 if getting in now. So I totally get it.

 

Yeah no doubt that every socket and motherboard has its limitation regarding future generation support. Drawing from previous experiences of the AM* platform, it tends to offer better longevity over Intel offerings, typically. However as you say, perhaps the long life of AM4 is an outlier and AM5 will be shorter live, I guess only time will tell.

[neurotix]

3 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

 

Yeah no doubt that every socket and motherboard has its limitation regarding future generation support. Drawing from previous experiences of the AM* platform, it tends to offer better longevity over Intel offerings, typically. However as you say, perhaps the long life of AM4 is an outlier and AM5 will be shorter live, I guess only time will tell.

 

Are you going to get a 7950X? With my experience, I would highly suggest avoiding the 7900X3D or the 7950X3D...

 

What my issue is is that my first chiplet maxes out at 5150MHz with PBO no problem, and that's the chiplet that has the extra L3 cache and runs games. That's all fine and good.

 

However, for benching for hwbot, my 2nd chiplet worked fine at first and was boosting to its max speed of 5650MHz and I was getting great scores. I could switch between having the 1st chiplet run at 5150mhz for games (under the Windows Balanced power plan), which parks cores in the 2nd chiplet. For benching, I could change to High Performance power plan and that would make my 2nd chiplet hit 5650MHz. So I was getting the best of both worlds.

 

Unfortunately, this lasted for maybe a month (I got the setup in March) and now my 2nd chiplet will not boost above 5100MHz no matter what I do. So I can't bench. One time, a BIOS update fixed it but then one day a few weeks to a month later it stopped working, and no bios updates since have fixed it.

 

I would not recommend the ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming as that is my board and I think it may be the culprit. It's also been nearly two months since I've gotten a bios update. I want to buy a normal 7900X and say screw the V-Cache but my wife has suggested I wait it out and see if a bios update fixes it.

 

Sorry this is so long winded but I just wanted to let you know or keep you from getting ripped off. And yes I've gone through Asus as well as AMD tech support and tried a bunch of things and none have fixed the problem.

 

Hope this helps.

 

EDIT: Also if you need help with Zen 4 memory overclocking, pm me. Try to get a kit that does 6000MHz as that's about the fastest Zen 4 will run.

Edited July 13, 2023 by neurotix

[Sir Beregond]

^ Yeah I don't know what AMD was thinking with that split CCD design choice for x3D. The 7900X3D especially makes no sense as its essentially worse than a 7800X3D for gaming. And I am not sure the 3D cache is helping much in workloads you want 12 or 16 cores for. I don't know, was a very strange design choice imo. The market that could potentially benefit from this split design seems pretty niche to me.

[neurotix]

1 minute ago, Sir Beregond said:

^ Yeah I don't know what AMD was thinking with that split CCD design choice for x3D. The 7900X3D especially makes no sense as its essentially worse than a 7800X3D for gaming. And I am not sure the 3D cache is helping much in workloads you want 12 or 16 cores for. I don't know, was a very strange design choice imo. The market that could potentially benefit from this split design seems pretty niche to me.

I just wanted 1. The best of both worlds as I explained, and 2. Same thread count I already had with a 5900x even though I don't really do anything that requires it

 

So I didn't want less threads.

[The Pook]

AMD ditching 4/8 CCX/CCD mantra when?  6/12 would be sweet.

 

Ryzen 9 X950X = 24c/48t

Ryzen 9 X900X = 16c/32t

Ryzen 7 X800X = 12c/24t 

 

then the Ryzen 7 X800 X3D = 12c/24t on one CCD 

[neurotix]

1 minute ago, The Pook said:

AMD ditching 4/8 CCX/CCD mantra when?  6/12 would be sweet.

 

Ryzen 9 X950X = 24c/48t

Ryzen 9 X900X = 16c/32t

Ryzen 7 X800X = 12c/24t 

 

then the Ryzen 7 X800 X3D = 12c/24t on one CCD 

This is what I'm hoping for for Zen 5. It's long past time to increase thread counts. A 16c/32t for $500 would be nice.

[ENTERPRISE]

I opted for the 7950X3D already, I am not benching with it so that is not much of a concern to me. I have a mixture of workloads and I wanted to see how the 3D V-Cache variants faired. 

 

So far as motherboards, I stayed away from Asus as they have proven to disappoint me on the last occasions I have owned one. I have gone for the MSI MEG Ace which seems to have a decent balance of feature set. Having owned a MEG series of motherboard before with MSI I was confident in my choice, but proof will be in the pudding once it is all set up.

 

So far as the RAM, yeah, 6000Mhz is the sweet spot, so that is what I got with some Corsair Dominators. 

[neurotix]

Ok, I will go through the list of things you need to do to get the V-Cache working correctly in games:

 

1. Set CPPC preffered cores to >Auto< in your BIOS.

2. Download and install AMD chipset driver 5.02. Make sure it installs the 3D V-Cache Optimizer service. Don't use the latest one as it runs the chip like 20c hotter for no performance gain.

3. Change to Balanced power profile in Power Settings.

4. Enable Xbox Game Bar. You don't need to use it at all but for the V-Cache to work in games it has to be on.

 

I think that's it. Hope it helps. For any single core tasks you will want to change to High Performance power plan.

Edited July 13, 2023 by neurotix

[ENTERPRISE]

40 minutes ago, neurotix said:

Ok, I will go through the list of things you need to do to get the V-Cache working correctly in games:

 

1. Set CPPC preffered cores to >Auto< in your BIOS.

2. Download and install AMD chipset driver 5.02. Make sure it installs the 3D V-Cache Optimizer service. Don't use the latest one as it runs the chip like 20c hotter for no performance gain.

3. Change to Balanced power profile in Power Settings.

4. Enable Xbox Game Bar. You don't need to use it at all but for the V-Cache to work in games it has to be on.

 

I think that's it. Hope it helps. For any single core tasks you will want to change to High Performance power plan.

 

Thanks for the advice

 

Point 3 and 4 seem odd though. Restricted to using Balanced power plan seems odd unless AMD tied there management specifically to that power plan. Will have to test that and Ultimate Performance to see if there is a difference. 

 

No surprise though that Microsoft have tied things up to the XBOX Game Bar however. 

[neurotix]

38 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

 

Thanks for the advice

 

Point 3 and 4 seem odd though. Restricted to using Balanced power plan seems odd unless AMD tied there management specifically to that power plan. Will have to test that and Ultimate Performance to see if there is a difference. 

 

No surprise though that Microsoft have tied things up to the XBOX Game Bar however. 

 

You are restricted to using Balanced power plan while gaming if you want the V-Cache to work. The chipset driver modifies the Balanced power profile and if you run a game in windowed mode and check Ryzen Master, you should see cores in the 2nd CCD parked (it will say sleep), to enable the 1st CCD to run as fast as it possibly can without throttling for the best game performance. If you turn PBO on and set boost override to +200, you should see the 1st CCD topping out at 5150MHz. Mind you, Ryzen Master might not say so (it doesn't in my case) but HWINFO64 or Afterburner's OSD should show you hitting those clocks.

 

The Xbox game bar thing, I have no idea about, just know that it has to be on. I think AMD and Microsoft worked together on this for the Windows scheduler to properly place gaming threads on the 1st CCD. They have said it is less than ideal, but what they've come up with for the time being and future updates may remove this requirement.

 

If you set it to Ultimate Performance the 3D V-Cache will go unused, and instead you should see the 2nd CCD hitting 5625-5650MHz (with +200 boost override). Some games need the higher clock speed, some games need and will run faster in Balanced with the V-Cache.

 

Despite my complaints about my jacked up system not boosting, it was still worth it even so- I mainly play Forza Horizon 4 and 5 and in the ingame benchmark on Forza Horizon 5 on my 4090 I got 160fps on my 5900x I upgraded from, 192 fps with the 7900X3D, and 195 fps with the 7900X3D + highly tuned memory (6200MHz cas 30). As I had suspected, my 5900x was bottlenecking the 4090.

 

I was able to redo all the 3D benchmarks (3dmark, Superposition etc.) with the 2nd CCD when it was still boosting, and also all the relevant processor benchmarks as well, so I still got a lot more global points on hwbot as well as many hardware team power points. I am still pretty unhappy about the situation but hoping the reason a BIOS update for my board is taking so long is that they are fixing it.

 

Here man, this is the video I watched when I first got my setup and did the 4 things I mentioned in the earlier post. He does a good job explaining things.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yOYfT_r0xI

 

Edited July 13, 2023 by neurotix

[Sir Beregond]

5 hours ago, The Pook said:

AMD ditching 4/8 CCX/CCD mantra when?  6/12 would be sweet.

 

Ryzen 9 X950X = 24c/48t

Ryzen 9 X900X = 16c/32t

Ryzen 7 X800X = 12c/24t 

 

then the Ryzen 7 X800 X3D = 12c/24t on one CCD 

Its technically 8/8 CCX/CCD now. 4/8 would be Zen 2.

 

But I totally agree, I'd love to see a 12 core CCX/CCD.

 

  

6 hours ago, neurotix said:

I just wanted 1. The best of both worlds as I explained, and 2. Same thread count I already had with a 5900x even though I don't really do anything that requires it

 

So I didn't want less threads.

I get that, but isn't the default behavior to do core parking on the non-X3D CCD in gaming workloads? That essentially turns the 7900X3D into a 7600X with 3D v-cache, and the 7950X3D into a 7800X3D.

 

I don't know maybe its just me but instead with fiddling around with this weird hybrid CCD approach that has janky scheduling solutions that is sure definitely appealing to a niche market, the option was simple. 7950X for those needing more professional workloads, and a 7950X3D with both CCD's having 3d v-cache for those that want it on higher core parts. I don't think the way they did it makes any sense at all.

 

But that's just me.

 

Edited July 13, 2023 by Sir Beregond

[Fluxmaven]

Maybe a bit of bias considering I have two AM5 setups, but I think you made a pretty solid decision going AMD this round. The only reason I would consider balling out on an intel platform is if I actually cared about HWBOT  The 13900KS with an Apex or a Dark is the way to go if you want to do serious overclocking. 

 

For a mixed workload the 7950X3D should be a pretty solid option for you. I agree with some of the other comments, the 7900X3D doesn't make much sense due to the nature of how it parks cores. It's literally the only part in the lineup that I can't see any justification for buying. 

 

As far as motherboards go, I've already mentioned in this thread that despite the Asus hate train, I am running them for both my AM5 setups. The Crosshair Gene was just because I really liked the look of the board . The ITX board I intended to go MSI, but my local Microcenter mostly stocks Asus, Asrock and Gigabyte. 

 

I still have the 5900X in an MSI X570 Ace. I've had that board since they first launched when I ran it with a 3900X. Aside from early bios slow boot times, it's been absolutely rock solid. I've even spilled coolant on it (thankfully powered off at the time) and it's still going strong. 

[kaliz]

good choice for going AM5 and the MEG mobo! I just get all socket mobo's to play with but if i really had to buy just one system i would get something like a 8800X3D or a 14700KF and wait for a bit!