I just wanted to pass along a few notes on building Ryzen systems since I know a lot of people are thinking about builds.
CPUs and Cooling
Unless you are going crazy on cooling and spending a ton on it, just get the AMD Ryzen 7 1700. The stock cooler is good for getting the chips to 1700X and maybe 1800X speeds.
Motherboards
If you are only doing one GPU and maybe a 10GbE card, a few SSDs/ HDDs and not looking for lots of USB, get a B350 motherboard.
Aside from PCIe, SATA and USB, the X370's have a few advantages. Some of the B350 boards have, at best, very few 4-Pin PWM headers. For example, the ASUS B350 board we have been using has only three which is really low.
Another X370 advantage is that the firmware seems more mature.
Finally, the Ryzen motherboards are using a new Realtek NIC. The impact of this is that it is not recognized by default in many OSes. The B350 boards are particularly impacted as they aim for cost optimization. Many of the X370 boards use Intel i211 NICs which are supported in everything.
My advice, assume you need a B350 board, then buy up for features. If you want a Type-C connector, for example, and it costs $70 more for a board with one, make that decision knowingly.
Memory
Compared to Intel, this is still very immature on the AMD Ryzen platform. There are plenty of horror stories. It seems like Samsung based RAM is the best.
Building the next system, I am going with DDR4-2666 for 64GB. The RAM modules are less expensive. Also, getting 2x 8GB seems to be easy to get to DDR4-3200. At 4 DIMMs, DDR4-2933 seems a more realistic goal. It does matter which board but a good part of this is that the motherboard vendors are waiting on AMD.
My advice, plan for no more than DDR4-2800 if you are going 64GB. A side benefit is that it is also considerably less expensive. Save that money today for a future upgrade.
CPUs and Cooling
Unless you are going crazy on cooling and spending a ton on it, just get the AMD Ryzen 7 1700. The stock cooler is good for getting the chips to 1700X and maybe 1800X speeds.
Motherboards
If you are only doing one GPU and maybe a 10GbE card, a few SSDs/ HDDs and not looking for lots of USB, get a B350 motherboard.
Aside from PCIe, SATA and USB, the X370's have a few advantages. Some of the B350 boards have, at best, very few 4-Pin PWM headers. For example, the ASUS B350 board we have been using has only three which is really low.
Another X370 advantage is that the firmware seems more mature.
Finally, the Ryzen motherboards are using a new Realtek NIC. The impact of this is that it is not recognized by default in many OSes. The B350 boards are particularly impacted as they aim for cost optimization. Many of the X370 boards use Intel i211 NICs which are supported in everything.
My advice, assume you need a B350 board, then buy up for features. If you want a Type-C connector, for example, and it costs $70 more for a board with one, make that decision knowingly.
Memory
Compared to Intel, this is still very immature on the AMD Ryzen platform. There are plenty of horror stories. It seems like Samsung based RAM is the best.
Building the next system, I am going with DDR4-2666 for 64GB. The RAM modules are less expensive. Also, getting 2x 8GB seems to be easy to get to DDR4-3200. At 4 DIMMs, DDR4-2933 seems a more realistic goal. It does matter which board but a good part of this is that the motherboard vendors are waiting on AMD.
My advice, plan for no more than DDR4-2800 if you are going 64GB. A side benefit is that it is also considerably less expensive. Save that money today for a future upgrade.
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