Bit of a Rant about Ryzen & AMD

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Ryzen is a hell of a chip and although marketing pointed it at "gamers" which I'm still not sure what the hell that terms really means in the real world, .

It means that the games that are out now along with drivers have been in production for years. they're both built upon older architecture. when you look at the general purpose cpu benches, that shows you the true strength or ryzen. in all honesty I still have yet to run into a game i can't run with my [email protected] running (even GTA5)@1600x1200 85Hz regardless of what the haters are gonna say. (you can't game with AMD!!! 8370 what??? PILEDRIVER???, WHAT!~~ HAHAHA LOL) F Off
 
I will temper my original comment about the cooler situation to say I did find a low-profile AM4 cooler from Noctua that was for sale with everything included (not mail in and wait weeks or forever for the kit).
 
Honestly, it's probably a bit of both. Maybe I should have been more skeptical of early adoption, but OTOH, it doesn't excuse AMD either. So at least half my fault, in that respect.
I was skeptical, still bought the 1700. But I decided to rock a cheap b350 until AMD gets a motherboard out that doesn't suck or they figure out all these BIOS/driver nightmares. I'm honestly getting tired of waiting though, I could be just impatient or I'm ready to move on at the end of the year with intels new platform or see if AMD really does drop a good chipset.

I will say that I love the performance of the chip. Very rock solid CPU, yes lacks in the features department, a bit power hungry and OCing is boring but when all is said, the CPU is really good still.
 
It means that the games that are out now along with drivers have been in production for years. they're both built upon older architecture. when you look at the general purpose cpu benches, that shows you the true strength or ryzen. in all honesty I still have yet to run into a game i can't run with my [email protected] running (even GTA5)@1600x1200 85Hz regardless of what the haters are gonna say. (you can't game with AMD!!! 8370 what??? PILEDRIVER???, WHAT!~~ HAHAHA LOL) F Off


Agree on that. my Fx9370 at 4.9 and 290 was a solid machine that did very well in anything outside of maybe Arma 3. Doom and battlefield type stuff generally run 80fps or better. Ill be going zen soon but kinda waiting on some new boards like maybe a sabertooth without any rgb crap (yeah right)...regardless Zen is a clear upgrade to my Fx just as that was for my Phenom2. maybe with a vega i can go 4k unless i gasp...switch to nvidia...since zen seems to be capable with a 1080.
 
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Was it really this bad? Weekly BIOS updates, monthly microcode updates, and huge RAM compatibility issues?




I keep hoping so. But I'm as tired of AMD hype and rumors as I am of the snail's pace of Intel's 'advancements'. Maybe this is just the first iteration, and things will improve. But I've zero faith in either company at this point.

This is your own fault - if your ram was operating at 3200 and everything was working fine, why the hell would you update the bios? And seeing that once you did your mem clock dropped, why didn't you just flash back? I don't think you can even lay the blame at AMD for a bad bios, that's on the motherboard maker, period. I can see some of your points, but this is not a beta system - it works fine out of the box at stock speeds even on non QVL ram. You may not be able to overclock the ram to it's rated speed, but that's not indicitive of a bad or beta system, especially as improvements have been released fairly quickly. You'd have an argument if it wouldn't boot or was unstable in stock configuration, but I have seen very few cases of that and most were due to bad ram (or another component) altogether.

As to overclocking, 1700's are getting 20-30% oc vs. their all core base clock. That's certain not poor overclocking imo, but the opposite. If you bought an 1800x and some non qvl 3600 ram before reading any reviews, I could see you being a little frustrated that it wouldn't hit 4.2ghz+ with ram at rated o/c speeds, but the thing would run fine at stock speeds (unless you got a bad component, which did not seem common except for a bios issue on the crosshair VI, again a motherboard manufacturer issue). It running fine at stock speeds is not a 'beta' system, but a decent start to a brand new architecture. Getting above that is gravy, and expecting it to be at z270 levels of maturity from the get-go is foolish.
 
You should go out and drop 1500 plus on a 6900, x99, and 4 sticks of ram, then you can come back and make a thread about how it's no faster in real world tasks.
 
Also, it's not the AGESA code that borked your ram speeds. I updated my bios to the latest AGESA and was able to up my ram speed from 2400 to 2666. Shipping bios was only running at 2133, so there's been steady improvement. It sounds like you got a bad bios version, just flash back.
 
Also, it's not the AGESA code that borked your ram speeds. I updated my bios to the latest AGESA and was able to up my ram speed from 2400 to 2666. Shipping bios was only running at 2133, so there's been steady improvement. It sounds like you got a bad bios version, just flash back.

Users of several different boards, from different manufacturers, reported not being able to attain as high RAM speeds after flashing the BIOS containing AGESA 1.0.0.4a, so that seems like a trend. A few also reported achieving higher speeds than before. Clearly, RAM support is a complicated issue, and tweaks that AMD or motherboard manufacturers apply to improve the stability for some users might have the opposite effect for others.

RAM support is definitely the weakest part of Ryzen still, especially after it was discovered how important it is due to the Infinity Fabric issue.
 
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The OP is upset because the hype train got out of control yet again and he failed to pull the stop cord, Ryzen is a solid chip and stacks up well against its lga115x rivals despite being a completely new uarch. Full featured chipsets will come in the naples server/workstation versions and they should be compared against x99 HEDT.

Ryzen is to AMD what sandybridge was to Intel, the start of a uarch that will mature and get better overtime.
 
The OP is upset because the hype train got out of control yet again and he failed to pull the stop cord, Ryzen is a solid chip and stacks up well against its lga115x rivals despite being a completely new uarch. Full featured chipsets will come in the naples server/workstation versions and they should be compared against x99 HEDT.

Please, tell me more about myself, Dr. Phil. No hype train here -- there's another post where I solicited opinions on which chip I should buy for my situation. I was correct to toss out the 7700k and 6850k options. That left Ryzen and the 6900k. I took a chance on the Ryzen. The consensus from forum denizens was Ryzen was the best fit for my use case and budget. And in some ways, it turned out okay. Price was very good. Work-wise, it's a major step up from my 2600k. And in other ways, I rather wish I'd have gone with the 6900k (at an absolute level, it's still the better performer overall -- just so damned overpriced), and I'm very disappointed with the Agesa 1004 update.

Ryzen is to AMD what sandybridge was to Intel, the start of a uarch that will mature and get better overtime.

You may be right. The one positive thing is that the AM4 socket will supposedly have a long shelf life. So if Zen sees marked generational improvement, it's an easy upgrade. But Ryzen isn't quite there yet. AMD made a huge leap forward with this uarch, but they were so far behind that it may still be a case, ultimately, of too little, too late.
 
You cannot be that concerned about your budget if you are willing to buy a Skylake-X or Coffee lake rig if it has 6c/12t for $350 in 4-5 months time when you've just splurged on a new Ryzen CPU, Mobo and Ram after keeping a 2600k for years
 
You cannot be that concerned about your budget if you are willing to buy a Skylake-X or Coffee lake rig if it has 6c/12t for $350 in 4-5 months time when you've just splurged on a new Ryzen CPU, Mobo and Ram after keeping a 2600k for years

I could sell the Ryzen CPU and Mobo, and reuse the RAM (and everything else in the build), if it came to that. But it probably won't. Realistically, unless the next BIOS update bricks it, or something, I'll keep it. It is good for my work, after all. Encoding and rendering on this machine is just on a whole different level than my 2600k.

At this point, the post is more for other folks who are trying to decide between the same CPUs. It ain't as easy as it looks. There's a budget range and a use case for Ryzen, but it's a lot narrower than I originally thought.

There are some folks in the Intel forum who explained it better than I can. Some smart folks over there, who really analyzed the benchmarks and the uarchs. And as far as I'm concerned, they made their case.
 
It depends on how you look at things, If you want the absolute best then yes intel is the way to go but if I am getting 90% of the performance for 80% of the cost with AMD then for me its a no brainer and AMD will win out, especially if the performance deficit is only in 1 or 2 area's.

I game at 1080p and to me its irrelevant bollocks if the difference between 2 chips is 20 fps when the slower machine is already displaying far more frames per second than my eyes can see, Ryzen would still be top of my list, the money saved on the CPU is a faster ram kit or better GPU
 
It depends on how you look at things, If you want the absolute best then yes intel is the way to go but if I am getting 90% of the performance for 80% of the cost with AMD then for me its a no brainer and AMD will win out, especially if the performance deficit is only in 1 or 2 area's.

AMD is good for the money, which is a welcome change given that they weren't good at all, IMHO, during the Bulldozer days. But it's still a budget proposition for now. It's the cost savings that make it interesting.

I game at 1080p and to me its irrelevant bollocks if the difference between 2 chips is 20 fps when the slower machine is already displaying far more frames per second than my eyes can see, Ryzen would still be top of my list, the money saved on the CPU is a faster ram kit or better GPU

Yeah, it's a fair point, and part of the original reasoning I had for buying a Ryzen in the first place. To be fair, the Ryzen + 1080 Ti cost less than a 6900k alone, so there's that. But when you get into the top performance tiers, everything starts to cost a lot more.
 
I guess you could say that in vacuum, I loved this machine. It's a huge step up. But the Intel guys showed me what I could have had, if I wasn't a cheap ass.
 
Optimizations Won't Fix This

At first, I thought the optimizations for DOTA 2, Ashes, and Total War were promising. But all of these games showed a host of other issues too. In other words, these were cases where Ryzen performance wasn't merely unoptimized, it was downright buggy. They fixed the bugs, and Ryzen benefited, but that only put Ryzen performance where it was supposed to be. In a highly threaded game like Ashes, we saw Ryzen barely edge out a 7700k. In some cases under OC, it still lost to the 7700k. The 6900k remained comfortably dominant.

There may be fixes for buggy implementations like Rise of the Tomb Raider. But don't expect a magic bullet to make Ryzen competitive with the 7700k. It will never be, not in this iteration anyway. You're looking at 20-30% performance deficit on average, in 1080p, in non-GPU bound scenarios, and that's a big sacrifice to make. And even if games get more threaded, Ashes is showing you a best case scenario for Ryzen: competitive with the 7700k

The 6 core Ryzens compete a little better with the 4c/4t Intel parts, though. 4 threads is starting to become a bottleneck in some everyday situations, and so there is an argument for a 6 core Ryzen over a 7600k. But we're not going to see 8 threads become a bottleneck during the lifetime of this crop of CPUs anyway. So the argument for a 1700 or 1800X over a 7700k in gaming is moot.

And some even post that you should get an I3 for gaming, the reality of gaming software is that it hardly pushes more cores and certain titles do but what you are forgetting that there is only one way that programmers optimize and that is Intel only.
AMD is trying to change this attitude of 4 cores or 2C4T. Ryzen is not going to compete with a product that has been out for a good while on a process that Intel has for a long long time expecting anything else would rather silly.

AMD is not a well oiled machine it is in markets where the competition is very brutal. Under these circumstances it did not do badly, for the budget they have it is even a very good product (even for gaming) just not as well rounded as most of us hoped it would be. Saying that this is a beta product is not true.
 
And some even post that you should get an I3 for gaming, the reality of gaming software is that it hardly pushes more cores and certain titles do but what you are forgetting that there is only one way that programmers optimize and that is Intel only.
AMD is trying to change this attitude of 4 cores or 2C4T. Ryzen is not going to compete with a product that has been out for a good while on a process that Intel has for a long long time expecting anything else would rather silly.

AMD is not a well oiled machine it is in markets where the competition is very brutal. Under these circumstances it did not do badly, for the budget they have it is even a very good product (even for gaming) just not as well rounded as most of us hoped it would be. Saying that this is a beta product is not true.

I wouldn't call it a beta product at all (boards are crappy though), but I would call it an unoptimized product. I think it will get better over time. Zen+ can't get here fast enough if you ask me.
 
Ryzen is to AMD what sandybridge was to Intel, the start of a uarch that will mature and get better overtime.

Not even close. Sandy bridge has lasted so long mostly because of it's groundbreaking performance and OC headroom. Two things the current ryzen chips don't have.
 
Another thread. Buy intel and be happy. In the first paragraph you contradict everything you say in long essays afterwards. You say oh it beat 7700k in gaming finally in some games, where it was suppose to be but then lost to OC one. No fuckin shit. LOL we knew from day one it will lose in gaming to 7700k.

My Rants Over. lol
 
Another thread. Buy intel and be happy. In the first paragraph you contradict everything you say in long essays afterwards. You say oh it beat 7700k in gaming finally in some games, where it was suppose to be but then lost to OC one. No fuckin shit. LOL we knew from day one it will lose in gaming to 7700k.

My Rants Over. lol

Fair point. The question is, can AMD hang around in the high performance market space while consistently losing in gaming? I don't know... the Intel fanboys convinced me that they were closer to the truth on this one. Of course, the way they seem to want an Intel monopoly is just bizarre (are they insane?), but it can't be denied that the best chips are still Intel, even if AMD has a compelling price/performance argument.
 
Fair point. The question is, can AMD hang around in the high performance market space while consistently losing in gaming? I don't know... the Intel fanboys convinced me that they were closer to the truth on this one. Of course, the way they seem to want an Intel monopoly is just bizarre (are they insane?), but it can't be denied that the best chips are still Intel, even if AMD has a compelling price/performance argument.

I didnt know 1080p was the high end gaming space. Oh wait it's 4k where they get the same frame rate as Intels. Hell some people are starting to try out 8k now. Gpu is king in gaming the cpu is just not a big deal.
 
I didnt know 1080p was the high end gaming space. Oh wait it's 4k where they get the same frame rate as Intels. Hell some people are starting to try out 8k now. Gpu is king in gaming the cpu is just not a big deal.

Of course. And oddly enough, in high res, you see Ryzen move up the ladder for some reason I've not seen adequately explained yet. You will see in 4k that even in the GPU bound scenario, Ryzen often pulls a several FPS win over Intel's offerings for some inexplicable reason. Of course, lower res, Ryzen gets its ass kicked.

*shrug* Ryzen just behaves damned odd in a lot of benchmarks. It's clear there's a lot of CPU muscle there, but the results are oddly inconsistent sometimes.
 
Just like we dont know why a Ryzen performs better with a AMD video card then with a Nvidia one. Some of it just being a whole new architecture and programmers need time to utilize it better. It is what is and far to many have made a bigger deal out of the small things Ryzen has issues with. When your over 100 fps it really doesnt matter anyway if you have 120 or 135 your past the refresh rate of 95% of the monitor market.
 
Just like we dont know why a Ryzen performs better with a AMD video card then with a Nvidia one. Some of it just being a whole new architecture and programmers need time to utilize it better. It is what is and far to many have made a bigger deal out of the small things Ryzen has issues with. When your over 100 fps it really doesnt matter anyway if you have 120 or 135 your past the refresh rate of 95% of the monitor market.

That's really only the case in a few games, like Rise of the Tomb Raider. As I said in the original post, it's clear some games aren't just unoptimized, they are downright buggy. If I were doing benchmarks right now, I would not use Rise of the Tomb Raider as a benchmark, because it's just so schizoid for reasons that don't make sense. It's not representative of gaming performance in general, which is the whole purpose behind benchmarking in the first place.

Similarly, even though Ryzen looks good in Ashes of the Singularity, I wouldn't use that for a benchmark either. Kyle has expressed more than once that it's more of a near-synthetic benchmark at this point, than a game that's really played frequently (even though I play it, lol -- but I'm an outlier, I've always liked Stardock RTS and 4x games).

I don't know. I mean, I'll concede that maybe I'm being too hard on Ryzen, and maybe I let the Intel fanboys (really, they are as bad as the AMD fanboys, if not worse -- you don't see AMD fanboys claiming the world would be better if Intel didn't exist at all) get to me a little. But Ryzen is in a weird place. Bulldozer was just indisputably behind in all performance metrics. Ryzen is... a mixed bag. In some tests, it looks really good, in some it doesn't. A mixed bag is certainly a huge step up for AMD, and I don't want to minimize that accomplishment. But at an absolute level, it's just not quite there. And it's almost maddening to see AMD get so close and not quite make it.
 
Well Zen+ comes out next year so will get to see what they improved. Only thing that matters is that processor you use does what you want and does it well enough. There will always be someone telling you how you should have done it. My answer to them has always been simple, when they buy it for me then I will accept what they think is best, until then I will buy what I want.
 
Well Zen+ comes out next year so will get to see what they improved. Only thing that matters is that processor you use does what you want and does it well enough. There will always be someone telling you how you should have done it. My answer to them has always been simple, when they buy it for me then I will accept what they think is best, until then I will buy what I want.

If AMD got like 10% more out of it, clocks and/or IPC-wise... it'd have been a whole different ballgame. Maybe with Zen+ they'll get it. But Zen+ will have to contend with 6 core Coffee Lake, so the core advantage won't be as strong. On the other hand, Coffee Lake won't be bringing clock speed or IPC improvements... so a boost for Zen+ in either or both would go a long way to leveling the playing field some.
 
If AMD got like 10% more out of it, clocks and/or IPC-wise... it'd have been a whole different ballgame. Maybe with Zen+ they'll get it. But Zen+ will have to contend with 6 core Coffee Lake, so the core advantage won't be as strong. On the other hand, Coffee Lake won't be bringing clock speed or IPC improvements... so a boost for Zen+ in either or both would go a long way to leveling the playing field some.

Expect at least 10% based on what I have heard for Zen+ as for how it will overclock, my guess is only a little bit better might hit 4.5 or 4.4. Coffee Lake is nothing more then the same chip without a IGP and more cores, I truly dont expect it to perform any different. It was supposed to be 10nm process but Intel cant do it yet, so it got released on 14nm which I expect is pretty close to as good as it's going to get for Intel.
 
Expect at least 10% based on what I have heard for Zen+ as for how it will overclock, my guess is only a little bit better might hit 4.5 or 4.4. Coffee Lake is nothing more then the same chip without a IGP and more cores, I truly dont expect it to perform any different. It was supposed to be 10nm process but Intel cant do it yet, so it got released on 14nm which I expect is pretty close to as good as it's going to get for Intel.

We'll see. Plus side is I can drop in a Zen+ in this board, if the improvement is good enough to merit it. AMD at least supports its sockets for longer.
 
Of course. And oddly enough, in high res, you see Ryzen move up the ladder for some reason I've not seen adequately explained yet. You will see in 4k that even in the GPU bound scenario, Ryzen often pulls a several FPS win over Intel's offerings for some inexplicable reason. Of course, lower res, Ryzen gets its ass kicked.

*shrug* Ryzen just behaves damned odd in a lot of benchmarks. It's clear there's a lot of CPU muscle there, but the results are oddly inconsistent sometimes.

Vishera could match Intel's finest at 4k in certain scenarios. With Ryzen IMAO, the higher res is just introducing a GPU bottleneck, and putting it in a better light.

AMD has a history with doing better at higher res, like with their GPU's, when Hawaii came out, they were getting slammed at 1080p,
move up to 1440-1600p and better drivers, and the tables flipped(780/780Ti), same with Fiji, it didn't start gaining steam till 1600p. Tahiti when it came out was an underdog till you started pumping up the AA, than it could sail right by the competition at higher res, then with better drivers it blasted right by Kepler(670/680) which it still does to this day.

Ryzen will get better, the mobos anyways, because your only as good as your platform.

AMD has always overbuilt their hardware, more cores, more Ram, higher bandwith, so when it's launched it's under utilized until a year or 2 later(insert fine wine analogy here),
which hurts them in the now times. Most people do not care about tomorrow but want their performance today.

I care about price vs performance, if I can get 85-90% of the performance @ half the cost, I'm fucking there dude. :)
 
Vishera could match Intel's finest at 4k in certain scenarios. With Ryzen IMAO, the higher res is just introducing a GPU bottleneck, and putting it in a better light.

Well, that's what I thought at first, too. If the GPU bottleneck is, say, 100fps... you would expect the field to narrow. What Ryzen does in several benchmarks (and even Toms noted it) is actually *win* in a GPU limited scenario. So, maybe the 7700k gets 100, and the Ryzen gets 105. Which makes no real sense to me. As soon as you drop to 1080, Ryzen gets slaughtered. So, it's odd. I was wondering if maybe it had something to do with AMD's SoC method or something, that maybe it's getting better access to the GPU in marginal limited scenarios or something.

But really, I've no idea. It just happens often enough that I was curious about it.
 
AMD has always overbuilt their hardware, more cores, more Ram, higher bandwidth, so when it's launched it's under utilized until a year or 2 later(insert fine wine analogy here),
which hurts them in the now times. Most people do not care about tomorrow but want their performance today.

Do a little investigation into AMD's ability to process 4 complex x86 instructions versus intel being able to only do 1 complex + 3 simple in a clock cycle and how long AMD has been able to do that. Then think of the old term "Wintel". Next, consider Intel's exclusive use contract with Dell and other system builders. Last, look at when multithreaded apps started seeing widespread adoption and compare it to when Intel started offering multicore CPUs to the masses versus when AMD did.

A pretty shitty picture should be forming.

Those fuckers at Intel are good. They're damn good. And I'm not talking about their engineering staff.

This and price/performance ratio is why I have always supported AMD unless it absolutely did not make sense to do so.
 
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Do a little investigation into AMD's ability to process 4 complex x86 instructions versus intel being able to only do 1 complex + 3 simple in a clock cycle and how long AMD has been able to do that. Then think of the old term "Wintel". Next, consider Intel's exclusive use contract with Dell and other system builders. Last, look at when multithreaded apps started seeing widespread adoption and compare it to when Intel started offering multicore CPUs to the masses versus when AMD did.

A pretty shitty picture should be forming.

Those fuckers at Intel are good. They're damn good. And I'm not talking about their engineering staff.

This and price/performance ratio is why I have always supported AMD unless it absolutely did not make sense to do so.

Yeah, I know the deck is stacked against AMD. I'm not sure what any of us can really do about it, though. AMD has fewer resources, less cash, less industry support, and is fighting against two near-monopolies (though I think AMD has it somewhat easier in the GPU space than the CPU space). So it isn't that I don't respect what they can do... I really do. We're just in a place where AMD can't win unless they really knock it out of the park. That's where the bar is set, and they have to hit it. It ain't fair, and it ain't right, but it is what it is.

And to AMD's credit, they have done it before. K7 really took the wind out of Intel's sales. K8 was almost as effective, and the Athlon X2 dual cores were really awesome back in the day. AMD came close with Ryzen. Maybe they just need to tinker it some more, I don't know. But it's not a knockout blow -- neither is it a complete failure.
 
Do a little investigation into AMD's ability to process 4 complex x86 instructions versus intel being able to only do 1 complex + 3 simple in a clock cycle and how long AMD has been able to do that. Then think of the old term "Wintel". Next, consider Intel's exclusive use contract with Dell and other system builders. Last, look at when multithreaded apps started seeing widespread adoption and compare it to when Intel started offering multicore CPUs to the masses versus when AMD did.

A pretty shitty picture should be forming.

Those fuckers at Intel are good. They're damn good. And I'm not talking about their engineering staff.

This and price/performance ratio is why I have always supported AMD unless it absolutely did not make sense to do so.

Yeah you defiantly get it. Intel has been greasing the right palms with just the right amount of money for an extensive period of time.
Intel spends more money a year on advertising than AMD does in 2 years of R&D. If the Intel and Dell fiasco never would of happened and AMD could of put out as many Athlon XP commercials out as Intel did with the P4, mabey BOTH AMD & Intel could be household names and we ALL could have organic quantum chips using atoms for storage in our brains by now.
 
Well, that's what I thought at first, too. If the GPU bottleneck is, say, 100fps... you would expect the field to narrow. What Ryzen does in several benchmarks (and even Toms noted it) is actually *win* in a GPU limited scenario. So, maybe the 7700k gets 100, and the Ryzen gets 105. Which makes no real sense to me. As soon as you drop to 1080, Ryzen gets slaughtered. So, it's odd. I was wondering if maybe it had something to do with AMD's SoC method or something, that maybe it's getting better access to the GPU in marginal limited scenarios or something.

But really, I've no idea. It just happens often enough that I was curious about it.

Mabey because the GPU is needing more data at the higher res and the i7 is just running out of steam? just pulling shit out of my ass there.
Like comparing a turbocharged 4 banger against a bored and stroked V8. Sure the 4 banger is quick around town and in the twisties, but get it on the open highway and it gets it's doors blown off by the V8.

I know this isn't a correct assumption but it is something to think about without going into strength and weaknesses of Infinity Fabric and CCX design.
 
I can't wait to get a 1600, but just waiting on the ITX boards. The good news is that by the time the ITX boards come, most of the firmware issues will be resolved so I don't have to go through the early adopter pain. Went through it with X99, it's a pain in the rear end.

anyways a nice 1600 SFF system is a nice upgrade from my 4790
 
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