Build Complete Ryzen7 2700X/GB B450M DS3H and W10 upgrade giving me fits.

[Charlie98]

RE: DESK in sig below.

This is my primary desktop I built in 2011, I just replaced the 2500K with a new Ryzen 7 2700X, ASRock B450M mobo, and 2x16 Crucial Ballistic RAM. I also did a clean install of Windows 10... and I have had nothing but problems.

What I've done: Installed new hardware, booted up lickety split. Installed Windows 10 on low mileage SSD, SSD tests good in previous use, and using other utilities. Installed mobo drivers (ASRock only has 2 RealTek drivers for this board...) and CPU drivers (AMD has 6 chipset drivers delivered in a single download.) Once I got it going, I installed all the software I was using on my previous install... all as new installs using the latest downloads, or loaded from CD's. I installed the OS with only the SSD attached. I am using the OEM CPU cooler and a CPU temp monitor... my temps are 35-45C. Memory is in slots A2/B2 as per the instructions. I am running the Ryzen power profile in Windows, including 90% minimum power state.

What it's doing: The entire system is laggy. Some programs operate like they should (QuickBooks, for example,) and some utilities (like Crystal Disk, antivirus programs, Firefox and Thunderbird.) There are some programs that refuse to work... Acronis being one. The odd thing is how long it takes to open... I'll click on an icon, get the control window, and... nothing. For 4 or 5 minutes. Then it will open... sometimes, sometimes not. Programs indicate 'not responding' a LOT... sometimes they crash, sometimes they come back. Even opening This PC to look at the drives... it takes the system 1 minute to populate.

The newest thing to show up is... after switching in a new SATA cable... it won't boot into Windows automatically, I have to F11 and select the SSD for boot. I've tried to change it in the BIOS, but the BIOS doesn't see it, now... but it does when it starts???

What have I tried: Well... I reloaded the OS, again... thinking I got a borked install the first time. The second install is worse. I've switched the SATA cable. I've benched the drives. I've stress-tested the CPU. I've benched the GPU. I've not checked the memory... I don't have a good utility for Ryzen/Windows 10... but I don't think it's that... but I'm open to suggestions.

This is my first major upgrade since 2011... and to AMD with Windows 10. I thought it would be easy... at least as easy as all my Intel/Gigabyte/W7 systems were, this thing is turning into a nightmare.

 

[Charlie98]

I am glad you took my suggestion on the NVME drive, and I see it has worked out well for you. Maybe one reason its behaving now ???

I don't know. Question to you.... why would it act any different otherwise?

 

[Markfw]

I don't know. Question to you.... why would it act any different otherwise?

To be honest, I don't know. But I DO know that new hardware sometimes does not like old hardware. Example (personal) I got a couple of EPYC 7551 ES chips. after fighting with them on 2 different motherboards and 4 OS'es, I was ready to give up. They would reboot in the middle of the OS install, but up until then all was fine. I finally found a BIOS version and a motherboard they liked. It worked perfectly. It was IO related. I have no idea what the problem was.

So in your case, the older SSD's could have caused some kind of a problem. Just a guess, but one with some reasoning behind it.

 

[Charlie98]

Reason I ask, I've had no luck with the older Crucial SSD in this updated system. I hooked it in yesterday to wipe it and use it as a scratch drive... and it locked the system up just like it did when I was trying to use it as the OS drive. I booted into Acronis to use the disk wipe utility... and it only wiped about 5% of the drive and said it was done. I did the same thing upstairs on my game rig... and it wiped it completely without issues. For that matter, I hooked it up to my OLD desktop (I have the motherboard rigged up to run) and didn't see any problems. Out of curiosity sake, I might try to install it, again, on the updated PC... just to see.

In the meantime, I installed the old Intel 120GB SSD I used as a scratch disk in the updated PC... it installed and is working without problems.

 

[Charlie98]

Update #41235 (or thereabouts. This thing is driving me insane.)

Long story short, after I installed the Intel SSD as a scratch disk, it initially was behaving OK... but the system started to hang more and more as we went along, ultimately behaving much like it did in the OP... 5 minutes to open Disk Management, Acronis, and some other programs... 1-2 minutes to populate the PC screen, CPUz, and a few other utilities. It would post and boot into W10 fine... and some programs would work fine, but anything having to do with the drives would wad the system up. So... long story short, I started shutting things off. I disabled all of the drives and USB utilities except the OS drive, and then started to add them one by one. What I found was the old Rosewill USB card reader I mounted in the front panel seems to be the culprit... or at least one of the 4 readers. I shut them all off except the SD reader (which I still use,) and everything seems to be working well, now. I've not hooked the scratch SSD drive back up, yet... that will be the tell.

I have to admit... I'm getting pretty frustrated with what is supposed to be a higher performance system... I was about ready to abandon the AMD CPU and go back to Intel, damn the cost, but trying to calm down and approach it logically seemed to provide a solution... at least for now.

 

[Charlie98]

If you all want to have a laugh... here are the SATA ports... of the 4, 2 are obstructed by the GPU. Thankfully I had a LH 90^ SATA cable, and the GPU has enough clearance behind it for the plug. This particular board is about 1.5" shorter than any of my other mATX boards (you can see the idle standoff just to the right of the SATA cable in the first photo,) so it puts the GPU right on top of the SATA ports. Yes, I understand it's not intended as a gaming board, but the chip requires a discrete GPU for the display... I don't think they thought that one out very well... because RGB!

 

[killster1]

Update #41235 (or thereabouts. This thing is driving me insane.)

Long story short, after I installed the Intel SSD as a scratch disk, it initially was behaving OK... but the system started to hang more and more as we went along, ultimately behaving much like it did in the OP... 5 minutes to open Disk Management, Acronis, and some other programs... 1-2 minutes to populate the PC screen, CPUz, and a few other utilities. It would post and boot into W10 fine... and some programs would work fine, but anything having to do with the drives would wad the system up. So... long story short, I started shutting things off. I disabled all of the drives and USB utilities except the OS drive, and then started to add them one by one. What I found was the old Rosewill USB card reader I mounted in the front panel seems to be the culprit... or at least one of the 4 readers. I shut them all off except the SD reader (which I still use,) and everything seems to be working well, now. I've not hooked the scratch SSD drive back up, yet... that will be the tell.

I have to admit... I'm getting pretty frustrated with what is supposed to be a higher performance system... I was about ready to abandon the AMD CPU and go back to Intel, damn the cost, but trying to calm down and approach it logically seemed to provide a solution... at least for now.

well if its such a nice new system why use old ssd and old usb memory card reader with it! gives you a reason to use usb c or 3.1 devices, new hard drives or a bigger nvme so you dont need a "scratch" drive. everything runs from one nvme on my systems hp920 1tb for 100$ and then i plug in a few 8tb sata + a few 1tb ssd for storage.

 

[Charlie98]

well if its such a nice new system why use old ssd and old usb memory card reader with it! gives you a reason to use usb c or 3.1 devices, new hard drives or a bigger nvme so you dont need a "scratch" drive. everything runs from one nvme on my systems hp920 1tb for 100$ and then i plug in a few 8tb sata + a few 1tb ssd for storage.

Well... a number of reasons... coming full circle back to when my Samsung 840Pro FAILED. Why add writes to my OS SSD when I have a perfectly good SSD to use as a scratch drive? Further, this isn't a nice new system... it's simply an upgrade to my old system; by upgrading my system, I was able to spend more money on the processor and memory (and, ultimately the OS drive) rather than needlessly replacing everything in the box. As far as the card reader... why would I replace a seldom used but necessary reader with a new one... when the old one works? As it turns out, it may not be playing nice with the new parts, but it's age doesn't arbitrarily mean it should be replaced. Following that logic, I would replace all of my perfectly good HDD's... And spangly new parts don't always play nice together, either...

 

[VirtualLarry]

So... long story short, I started shutting things off. I disabled all of the drives and USB utilities except the OS drive, and then started to add them one by one. What I found was the old Rosewill USB card reader I mounted in the front panel seems to be the culprit... or at least one of the 4 readers. I shut them all off except the SD reader (which I still use,) and everything seems to be working well, now. I've not hooked the scratch SSD drive back up, yet... that will be the tell.

I have to admit... I'm getting pretty frustrated with what is supposed to be a higher performance system... I was about ready to abandon the AMD CPU and go back to Intel, damn the cost, but trying to calm down and approach it logically seemed to provide a solution... at least for now.

I had that problem with a budget system that I built, back in the pre-Ryzen days. Used to put in cheap card readers ($5-8 or so), but when I paired that up with a cheap-o Biostar mobo, and a cheap case PSU, I had no end of problems with USB problems and boot problems. Cheap card readers can do that to you (including Rosewill in the bunch).

I can pretty-well assure you, that with well-behaving hardware (*card reader excluded here), the AM4 / Ryzen platform is quite nice, well-performing, and generally stable.

 

[Topweasel]

What I found was the old Rosewill USB card reader I mounted in the front panel seems to be the culprit... or at least one of the 4 readers. I shut them all off except the SD reader (which I still use,) and everything seems to be working well, now. I've not hooked the scratch SSD drive back up, yet... that will be the tell.

I have to admit... I'm getting pretty frustrated with what is supposed to be a higher performance system... I was about ready to abandon the AMD CPU and go back to Intel, damn the cost, but trying to calm down and approach it logically seemed to provide a solution... at least for now.

Ha its still nothing I would think of. But I had built a 3930k (SB-E) system for a co-worker who was creating and editing drone videos for disc golf parks on his spare time. Anyways a pretty kick butt computer (and intel in this case). One thing he added to the build was a random chinese 7-1 or 12-1 5.25 card reader (kinda what the Rosewill is) and had numerous lockups and spontaneous reboot issues. I spent a week reloading the OS, running every test, and so on. Eventually figuring out it was the card reader that was causing all the issues.

 

[Charlie98]

I may ultimately DX the card reader... or move it to a different PC. I could also just disable it until I need it using the device manager, I guess. The system still hits a small speed bump when I do anything with the drives, so I'm thinking it's still struggling with it. I did reinstall the SSD scratch drive this morning, and it... more or less... is behaving OK, still. Acronis actually made all 3 backups last night, so we will see what it does tonight.

I guess part of the struggle with this is... the past 5 builds... all Intel builds... were easy as cake. I would read about OS problems, hardware conflicts, driver issues, and I've never had any of that, really. Finding it's something as simple and benign as the card reader is like finding out the dog is pissing in your shoes...

 

[killster1]

I may ultimately DX the card reader... or move it to a different PC. I could also just disable it until I need it using the device manager, I guess. The system still hits a small speed bump when I do anything with the drives, so I'm thinking it's still struggling with it. I did reinstall the SSD scratch drive this morning, and it... more or less... is behaving OK, still. Acronis actually made all 3 backups last night, so we will see what it does tonight.

I guess part of the struggle with this is... the past 5 builds... all Intel builds... were easy as cake. I would read about OS problems, hardware conflicts, driver issues, and I've never had any of that, really. Finding it's something as simple and benign as the card reader is like finding out the dog is pissing in your shoes...

well i suppose it depends what you are doing to if you need scratch drives and usb card readers. I mentioned usb c or usb3.1 which will give you SPEED, a old card reader sounds like usb 2 and is giving you issues. if you dont have constant writes then "wearing" out a ssd drive doesnt really sound like a thing. Yes the 840 series had issues and many of them failed but other ssd's have SO many TB of writes and no failures. I just use a usb3/usbc card reader nothing built into the case. I just use regular nvme 1tb no scratch but i do download / extract to non OS drive since i pull alot of data and seems silly to write constantly to the os drive. If its work related then always cool to upgrade with a purpose.

 

[Charlie98]

Final update...

I swapped the Intel SSD scratch drive for the original 500GB Crucial MX500, and just pulled the USB plug on the card reader, more of an experiment than anything. Everything is running well! Disk Management pulls up and populates, Acronis opens and WORKS, and anything else I try seems to work much like the older system. Now the trick is to get Windows 10 configured so I can stand it...

Final parts...

AMD Ryzen 2700X, $160 (MicroCenter)
Gigabyte B450M DS3H, $63 (MicroCenter)
Crucial Ballistix 2x16GB 3200MHz DDR4 RAM, $160 (MicroCenter)
WD SN750 500GB NVMe SSD, $100, (MicroCenter)
Windows 10 Pro, $140, (Newegg)

Total $620

Although I didn't have budget limit, I was trying to keep it under $500; the inclusion of the NVME drive and the high dollar RAM blew my total over $600, but... whatever. I'm also missing out on 3rd Gen Ryzen... and I'm OK with that, it's just a work computer. All those parts went into a box with other parts that are between 4 and 7 years old, including the case, PSU, and GPU. A full new build probably would have put me at $1200, so I get a 'new' computer for roughly half the cost, and I probably would have gone mITX if I would have started from scratch, anyway.

 

[killster1]

Final update...

I swapped the Intel SSD scratch drive for the original 500GB Crucial MX500, and just pulled the USB plug on the card reader, more of an experiment than anything. Everything is running well! Disk Management pulls up and populates, Acronis opens and WORKS, and anything else I try seems to work much like the older system. Now the trick is to get Windows 10 configured so I can stand it...

Final parts...

AMD Ryzen 2700X, $160 (MicroCenter)
Gigabyte B450M DS3H, $63 (MicroCenter)
Crucial Ballistix 2x16GB 3200MHz DDR4 RAM, $160 (MicroCenter)
WD SN750 500GB NVMe SSD, $100, (MicroCenter)
Windows 10 Pro, $140, (Newegg)

Total $620

Although I didn't have budget limit, I was trying to keep it under $500; the inclusion of the NVME drive and the high dollar RAM blew my total over $600, but... whatever. I'm also missing out on 3rd Gen Ryzen... and I'm OK with that, it's just a work computer. All those parts went into a box with other parts that are between 4 and 7 years old, including the case, PSU, and GPU. A full new build probably would have put me at $1200, so I get a 'new' computer for roughly half the cost, and I probably would have gone mITX if I would have started from scratch, anyway.

well 3600 was pretty close in price, nvme is pretty expensive prob could have got a 1tb nvme for around 100, the ram overpriced unless purchased 6 months ago.. but the fact you bought in store with easy return might have been worth the extra $$. windows 10 pro 140$?!?!?!?!!? yikes never spent that much for windows before

 

[Charlie98]

well 3600 was pretty close in price, nvme is pretty expensive prob could have got a 1tb nvme for around 100, the ram overpriced unless purchased 6 months ago.. but the fact you bought in store with easy return might have been worth the extra $$. windows 10 pro 140$?!?!?!?!!? yikes never spent that much for windows before

Because time was of the essence, I know I paid a bit more for some of those parts... it is what it is. 2700x vs 3700x was almost double, at MC, anyway, which is why I picked the 2700x. The NVMe was VERY expensive vs what I could have gotten it for at Newegg, for example... but they had it, and it's not a Samsung (I won't buy another Samsung,) or Crucial (what I thought was the problem at first.) The RAM was a compromise... I didn't have a whole lot of time to research what I was getting, and I wanted to maximize my RAM speed.

 

[DrMrLordX]

@Charlie98

Glad you got your system working better now that the old card reader is removed. Pity it apparently caused so much trouble. Nevertheless, AMD has done a pretty poor job of supporting older CPUs with newer AGESA versions. I would not recommend running a UEFI revision on any AM4 board with Pinnacle Ridge that is newer than Dec 2018 (or so). Anything after that might have Matisse support in it, which is completely unnecessary for what you're trying to do.

In addition to that, one UEFI revision on my x570 board caused my 1TB 970 Evo to vanish except from the boot menu (what?!?!). That seems similar to one of your problems on the ASRock board.

 

[Charlie98]

@Charlie98

Glad you got your system working better now that the old card reader is removed. Pity it apparently caused so much trouble. Nevertheless, AMD has done a pretty poor job of supporting older CPUs with newer AGESA versions. I would not recommend running a UEFI revision on any AM4 board with Pinnacle Ridge that is newer than Dec 2018 (or so). Anything after that might have Matisse support in it, which is completely unnecessary for what you're trying to do.

In addition to that, one UEFI revision on my x570 board caused my 1TB 970 Evo to vanish except from the boot menu (what?!?!). That seems similar to one of your problems on the ASRock board.

Well, and it still is a little wonky. Any time I change SATA ports, it puts the CD drive as boot #1, and then lines all the other drives up in the boot menu... which is a bit irritating. I think that was one of the problems before... along with the card reader not playing nice, I think it was going down the list of devices every boot looking for an OS, and for some reason fixated on the card reader.

My Gigabyte board was flashed with the most current BIOS, and still seems to be doing OK. I know there was some issues with Ryzen and power management, and maybe other things I don't know about... but it's behaving well enough.

 

[Torn Mind]

So still flaky?

Typical AsRock. My H77M board has been mostly stable for the past 8 years 24/7, but it came with gremlins regarding the integrated sound. Plug the headphone jack and it's does not always catch. I moved on to a really expensive DAC by OPPO, so it doesn't really matter, but if the mobo is flaky and return isn't a hassle, do it. That's why I would steer guys to buy from Amazon or B&M first.

You should have exchanged or bought a second identical board. Your problems can affect data, unlike my AsRock board, which is only related to sound.

Every new computer product comes with the risk of problems that exist when only freshly made because doping silicon isn't perfect nor is soldering.

Also, is the RAM on the QVL?

 

[Charlie98]

Actually, it's doing pretty well. I just got the non-OS drives sorted out, and the RAM isn't giving me any problems. I don't know if you caught what the actual culprit was... the USB card reader. Once I unhooked that... everything started to behave. At the end of the day, I did return the ASRock board to MicroCenter and got my current Gigabyte board, but now that I know what's up, it's not fair to blame the ASRock board. I liked the BIOS GUI better, for one... GB's BIOS is atrocious. It was a slightly bigger board, and the SATA ports were at a 90^ angle, the GB board has them hidden behind the GPU.

I have an old H81 ASRock board still in service, it's been running 24/7 for something like 6 years with zero problems.