Which X370 board should I consider? (I love Gigabyte and ASRock boards btw)

  • Gigabyte GA-AX370-Gaming

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    4

indydude345

Member
Nov 5, 2016
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I recently upgraded to the Ryzen 5 1600, and was looking at getting an X370 mobo, but it just didn't fit in my budget. I'm impatient, so I went with a B350 chipset. I knew deep down that it wouldn't OC that well, but I went with it anyway. Well, I kind of screwed myself, so to speak. It worked just fine for a month or so, I was able to get my CPU to around 3.8-3.9GHz while barely touching the voltage. (However, I think ASRock's BIOS takes care of the voltage.) And my memory, which is G.Skill 3200 speed, ran at around 2800MHz, which was fine with me. I know that Ryzen loves faster memory, so I thought the 2800MHz was perfect. One day, I turned on my system and was faced with the depressing glare of the boot screen over and over. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I thought maybe my PSU had gone bad or something, and wasn't supplying enough power for the OC. (An EVGA 750 GQ.) I took my PC to a friend's house and used his SeaSonic SSR 850TD, which we both knew worked just fine. Still the same problem. So we sat for a few hours, went through some settings, had some Mountain Dew, and later I went home with my CPU at 3.4GHz and my memory at 2400MHz. Di-sap-pointing. Still the same setting as I write this. I don't really have much of a problem with it as I did when it first happened, because I plan on getting an X370 board in a week or so now. But after all this nonsense, one question I have: Has anyone, anyone at all faced this same problem? I contacted ASRock and they said it qualified for an RMA but I can't do that because I wouldn't have a PC to use. I'm sure if I sent it in, they could tell me what's wrong, but I just wonder if anyone has also had the same misfortunes I have.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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Hmm, not sure what to tell you. What kind of CPU and case cooling did you have?

I have several rigs, all with ASRock AB350M Pro4 motherboards, and Ryzen 5 1600 CPUs.

Most of them overclock no problem to 3800Mhz, at 1.3625V.

I tried pushing one of them to 4000Mhz, at 1.400V. It only booted maybe once out of every 5-10 tries.

Inside Windows 10, once booted, it seemed quite stable, though. I had the memory, Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 2x8GB kit, running at 2667. (It can boot at 2800, but it seems to have errors in Windows when running at that speed.)

I did some Cinebench R15 runs at 4.00Ghz, for another thread on here, but when I tried for that, while bumping the RAM up to 2800, it POSTed (eventually), but then it crashed running CB R15, and I restarted, and it never restarted.

I almost wondered if I had killed my chip, because it wasn't booting, at all.

I finally had to remove my RX 470 4GB card, and clear the CMOS.

What a PITA.

So, in my estimation, those boards should be good for 3.8Ghz on an R5, and 2800 RAM, but more than that? Well, they're not the best overclockers, but they will overclock some.
 

indydude345

Member
Nov 5, 2016
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Hmm, not sure what to tell you. What kind of CPU and case cooling did you have?

I have several rigs, all with ASRock AB350M Pro4 motherboards, and Ryzen 5 1600 CPUs.

Most of them overclock no problem to 3800Mhz, at 1.3625V.

I tried pushing one of them to 4000Mhz, at 1.400V. It only booted maybe once out of every 5-10 tries.

Inside Windows 10, once booted, it seemed quite stable, though. I had the memory, Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 2x8GB kit, running at 2667. (It can boot at 2800, but it seems to have errors in Windows when running at that speed.)

I did some Cinebench R15 runs at 4.00Ghz, for another thread on here, but when I tried for that, while bumping the RAM up to 2800, it POSTed (eventually), but then it crashed running CB R15, and I restarted, and it never restarted.

I almost wondered if I had killed my chip, because it wasn't booting, at all.

I finally had to remove my RX 470 4GB card, and clear the CMOS.

What a PITA.

So, in my estimation, those boards should be good for 3.8Ghz on an R5, and 2800 RAM, but more than that? Well, they're not the best overclockers, but they will overclock some.
My system is in the Fractal Design Focus G, I have more than adequate cooling (3x 120mm fans, have positive air flow all the way ;)), the CPU cooler is the stock one that comes with the R5 1600, but I have it at full speed all the time to get rid of any thought of overheating. I do plan on getting a better CPU cooler here very soon, (a big, beautiful air cooler :hearteyes:) but this all happened under normal conditions. Also, I had done some DC projects and a lot of gaming even with it at 3.8, so I know the CPU wasn't having a problem with cooling. That's why I just don't understand it. There haven't been any BIOS updates either, not since before this oddity. When I get a new board, I might just get this one RMAd because I do want to build another Ryzen system sometime in the future.
 

indydude345

Member
Nov 5, 2016
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VirtualLarry

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Well, this particular Ryzen 5 1600 rig I'm on is watercooled with a MasterLiquid Lite 120, a low-end AIO. I'm doing mining on the RX 570 4GB at -15% power limit, and the CPU, using NiceHash. The CPU is NOT 100% loaded, it really only uses 6 threads for mining, one for each core. Utilization is 55-65%.

I decided to push it a bit, and cranked it up to 4000Mhz, and initially I set it at 1.400V, but it spontaneously rebooted, when I was updating Firefox Nightly. So I had to reboot, bump the vcore to 1.4250V (or was it 1.4125V?), and re-installed Firefox Nightly, and set it to mine, and so far, so good. I'm not so sure that it wouldn't reboot if I tried OCCT with it though.

This particular chip was pretty finicky about 4.0Ghz. Didn't really want to do it stable, IIRC.

I was doing some more hardcore DC on it, with 10-11 threads, though. Temps still got to 80C earlier this year, on water, when I was overclocked, so I removed the overclock.

Now that the CPU load doesn't hit 100%, it's probably going to be OK.

My daily estimation for mining is about the same as before I overclocked.

So, this ASRock AB350M Pro4 board CAN overclock an Ryzen 5 1600 CPU to 4.00Ghz, stable (more or less). I don't know if I'm cooking the VRMs though, this case has fairly lousy cooling.

I was getting a weird sort of "mouse lag" too, when booting it at 4.00Ghz. Hard to notice now.

Edit: 5-10 minutes in, listening to internet radio, with firefox nightly open, and mining with NiceHash, it black-screened. Oh well. So much for 4Ghz.

Set it for 3800Mhz, 1.3250V, OCCT:CPU test running, hitting 53C, in a 68F room (possibly slightly colder), hasn't crashed 8min into the test.
 
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Indus

Diamond Member
May 11, 2002
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I think I know the problem.

Check your SOC voltage in bios. It needs to be at 1.1v or a little more but ASRock boards are generally undervolting it at 0.9v by default.

So either change it manually or apply an offset.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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Yeah... but... there IS NO "SoC voltage" setting in the BIOS on the AB350M Pro4. Sadly.
 

indydude345

Member
Nov 5, 2016
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Well, some good news. I actually got it to 3800MHz yesterday without any problems (been running TN Grid all night, and it hadn't seemed that it had restarted), but I still cannot get the memory above 2400MHz. Which is fine, but with 3200 speed memory, it seems like a waste of money. Oh well, I'll just wait for my X370 board!
 

indydude345

Member
Nov 5, 2016
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Yeah... but... there IS NO "SoC voltage" setting in the BIOS on the AB350M Pro4. Sadly.
This is correct. I searched for it in the BIOS, and I could not find it. Now the problem is the memory... which I have messed with the voltage and the XMP profile, and nothing. Still 2400MHz.
 

repoman0

Diamond Member
Jun 17, 2010
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Yeah... but... there IS NO "SoC voltage" setting in the BIOS on the AB350M Pro4. Sadly.

Ugh, that is unfortunate. I have this board and just ordered a 3200MHz RAM kit after seeing some of the latest benchmarks. Sometimes I regret moving to mATX ...

Guess we'll see if I have a magic chip that can operate this kit at default SoC voltage. I may have to swap my case and buy a better motherboard if not :rolleyes:
 

indydude345

Member
Nov 5, 2016
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@VirtualLarry My Ryzen chip almost went to 4.1GHz, albeit not sure of the stability or the longevity. I saw this when I installed it in an X370 Killer SLI from ASRock. I think it was around 1.5V (we had attached a voltage meter to the board), which was insane for my CPU. I wish I had gotten a screenshot of it, or did a Cinebench run. I only had it in there for a few minutes, just wanted to see what it could do. I was quite impressed, think I got a pretty good chip. :D
 

Indus

Diamond Member
May 11, 2002
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@VirtualLarry My Ryzen chip almost went to 4.1GHz, albeit not sure of the stability or the longevity. I saw this when I installed it in an X370 Killer SLI from ASRock. I think it was around 1.5V (we had attached a voltage meter to the board), which was insane for my CPU. I wish I had gotten a screenshot of it, or did a Cinebench run. I only had it in there for a few minutes, just wanted to see what it could do. I was quite impressed, think I got a pretty good chip. :D

Hey I have a killer but my ryzen 5 1600 will only do 3.85 @ 1.38.

It boots at 4.0 at 1.4 but won't stay stable under aida 64. I'm blaming load line calibration missing from the board since I've seen voltages dip from 0.06-0.09 under load. For example my overclock which is set to 1.38.. it'll dip to 1.30 under aida 64 load.

So I think I may need a new motherboard.
 

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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OP: Have you actually validated you're stable on your overclocks? I see no mention of that. Overclocking is never a guarantee. I've had zero success getting my 1700X stable at 4.0Ghz and it' s still a bit flaky at 3.9Ghz.
 

indydude345

Member
Nov 5, 2016
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OP: Have you actually validated you're stable on your overclocks? I see no mention of that. Overclocking is never a guarantee. I've had zero success getting my 1700X stable at 4.0Ghz and it' s still a bit flaky at 3.9Ghz.
I would if I was capable of doing so on my mainboard.
 

indydude345

Member
Nov 5, 2016
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No. I thought that I would do it at a later date, as I had a lot of other things that I was doing. That month was the first month I had my Ryzen system, and honestly the first week or so I was not even worried about validation. I was just happy with my new PC.
 

repoman0

Diamond Member
Jun 17, 2010
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Okay, I am messing around with my new RAM now. I've got 12 instances of Memtest for windows running now with my 1700x at 3.8 GHz / 1.35V and RAM at 3200MHz 14-14-14-28 with 1.4V. We will see if it passes ...

It took quite a bit of fiddling to even get it to boot any faster than 2133 (including 2400 :| ). The secret seems to be to not use XMP and set timings and voltages manually. I used the timings from the_stilt in this post (probably somewhere here on AT too):

http://www.overclock.net/t/1624603/rog-crosshair-vi-overclocking-thread/20660#post_26178558

and set the memory multiplier in AMD CBS rather than in the main screen. But I think the default XMP timings, at least for these sticks on this board, are totally broken.

The other "secret" is to put the sticks in slots A2 and B2 rather than A1 and B1 ... apparently that's common knowledge but I couldn't boot any higher than 2666 without swapping them.
 

Ratman6161

Senior member
Mar 21, 2008
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The latest revision is 3.10, which is installed :D

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AB350M Pro4/index.asp#BIOS
just out of curiosity did your problems start after updating the bios? I've got the ab350 pro (without the m) but I had to essentially go back and start over. That said, my memory performance has gotten better with each new bios. My ddr4 2400 is now up to 3066. No improve ment in CPU though which has been at 3.85 from the beginning (r5 1600)
 

indydude345

Member
Nov 5, 2016
112
61
71
Okay, I am messing around with my new RAM now. I've got 12 instances of Memtest for windows running now with my 1700x at 3.8 GHz / 1.35V and RAM at 3200MHz 14-14-14-28 with 1.4V. We will see if it passes ...

It took quite a bit of fiddling to even get it to boot any faster than 2133 (including 2400 :| ). The secret seems to be to not use XMP and set timings and voltages manually. I used the timings from the_stilt in this post (probably somewhere here on AT too):

http://www.overclock.net/t/1624603/rog-crosshair-vi-overclocking-thread/20660#post_26178558

and set the memory multiplier in AMD CBS rather than in the main screen. But I think the default XMP timings, at least for these sticks on this board, are totally broken.

The other "secret" is to put the sticks in slots A2 and B2 rather than A1 and B1 ... apparently that's common knowledge but I couldn't boot any higher than 2666 without swapping them.
I've never messed with timings or anything like that for memory, perhaps this would be a good time to try. And swapping the sticks to different slots? Haven't heard that one yet, I shall try that as well. As for the BIOS, I started having these problems even before the BIOS update, I thought the update would fix them!
 

Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
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I have a different b350 board with a 1700 (Gigabyte AB350M Gaming 3) and I can't seem to get memory over 2666. I currently have it at that with CAS 14 and I am memtesting it. Latest bios, F7a. I will try raising SOC voltage if needed. I also have 3200MHz RAM, my guess is that the B350 boards are a bit pickier, especially if you don't have Samsung Bdies. My memory is Patriot, not sure what ICs are used.