Budget upgrade? 4770K to ryzen 7 2700x?

Carmmond said:

Did almost the same thing.... 4770X, 8GB ram, Gforce 970 to a 3700X, 32GB 3600, 5700XT, Asus Tuff X570. Night and day for me. Idle temps are 32 to 34 on a water loop.
Very happy! Gratz on the upgrade!

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Water will be next, but I am so bad at cable management I might not bother. Once I get it looking acceptable I just give up.

The best part of this hobby is taking a machine you love, rippings its guts out and making better than brand new.

Since you are new to Ryzen, there are some helpful things you should know...

1) AMD is not Intel, and their release strategies are somewhat... different. Intel tends to release a new chip and chipset at the same time and everything (for the most part) is solid out of the box. It can be argued that a fair chunk of this is because Intel doesn't really change much between releases anymore and artificially segments their products, but whatever. This is the rep they have, and anecdotally, it generally holds true.

AMD, on the other hand, drops new chips early and then iterates firmware quickly to fix whatever problems people run into. Early releases tend to have weird bugs for some people which AMD works out with firmware (AGESA) updates fairly quickly. This means every month or so, you should check your mainboard manufacturer's support page for an updated BIOS. If you don't you are potentially leaving performance and (increasingly obscure) bugs on the table. The flip side to this rapid iteration is that AMD platforms tend to be viable a lot longer than Intel ones. I have a brand new 3900x running great on an x370-based Asus Crosshair VI Extreme mainboard.

2) Also, chipset drivers are important for Ryzen CPUs and they are updated fairly regularly. The chipset drivers are heavily involved with how the Windows Scheduler works at assigning threads to different cores and are also integral to how Windows uses the CPU's power management features. Get the chipset drivers from AMD and not your mainboard manufacturer (they tend to lag the official AMD releases). On www.amd.com, go to "Support & Drivers" and then select Chipsets/AMD Socket AM4.

3) RAM speed matters a lot more for Ryzen CPUs than it does for Intel CPUs. This is because the Ryzen CPUs have all of their core modules (called CCXs) linked via Infinity Fabric on the CPU module. The speed of the Infinity Fabric (and thus the speed of inter-CCX communication) is dictated by your RAM speed. On Ryzen 3000-series chips, this is doubly true because (unlike on older Ryzen chips) they have a sperate I/O die that is linked up to the CCXs via Infinity Fabric. DDR4-3600 is currently the sweet spot for Ryzen 3000-series CPUs, running the Infinity Fabric at 1800MHz. You can use faster, but most CPUs kick in a divider making your actual Infinity Fabric speed lower (you can manually adjust this divider on nicer BIOS's to try and avoid this problem).

Further, tightening your RAM timings from stock can also yield noticeable performance improvements if eeking every little bit out of it is your thing. There are tools that help with this, such as the Ryzen RAM Calculator. If you go this route, be careful to follow the instructions. Just blindly copying the recommended numbers from the RAM Calculator into your BIOS rarely results in a stable system. I personally find that the free Memtest86 utility works great for RAM stability testing. RAM testing can take a while, but my personal experience has also been that if your RAM is inclined to be unstable that even though all the other tests seem to pass, it fails test 6. What I do is make RAM timing changes, boot into MemTest86 (it is run via a bootable USB stick) and run Test 6. If test 6 is good, then I run the entire RAM test to be sure. If test 6 fails, go back and adjust again.

4) Ryzen Master is software available for free from AMD. It can be used for overclocking the CPU and RAM from within Windows, but it is far more effective IMHO as a monitoring program for the CPU. It will show you the voltage draw of the CPU, and what each core is clocking to individually. Not every monitoring package works correctly with Ryzen, and several cause the CPU to never be able to reach an idle state if you leave them running. Ryzen Master does not have these problems. On www.amd.com go to "Support & Drivers" and select Processors. Pick your CPU series from here (and yes, the Ryzen Master version you need can be different depending on the CPU you have).

5) Unlike what you may be used to with Intel's reported boost clocks, AMD chips don't tend to just sit at max boost when the CPU is loaded. They usually sit 100-200 MHz lower and occasionally hit max boost on a few threads when loaded. Just be aware of this when you look at your CPU monitoring and you won't be disappointed that there is something wrong with your CPU or mainboard, it's just that AMD regards boost clock speeds differently than Intel, much like they measure TDP differently than Intel.


Welcome back to the AMD family and enjoy your new 3700x. As you yourself have noted, it is an absolute beast.

edits: spelling, grammar, clarification, and added #5 as an afterthought because this thing alone has caused so much whining on various enthusiast message boards, it is unreal. The thing runs great. You know it runs great. Why get hung up that the reported frequency is not just sitting at max boost all the time?

Great post mv,

I have downloaded Ryzen master and it seems great, thanks.

Definitely the best build I have ever done. I look forward to tuning it and enjoying it.

I am kind of re-learning all my PC stuff, it has been so long.

Great post mvmiller12!
Not my first AMD been a long road.... 486SX, AMD, Intel 300a, Athlon slot A, 4770X, 3700X.
You gave a great wrap up on your post..... besides the 4770X AMD systems have lasted longer for me.
What have you been using to stress your CPU for testing?
Again thanks for your post.

Carmmond said:

Great post mvmiller12!
Not my first AMD been a long road.... 486SX, AMD, Intel 300a, Athlon slot A, 4770X, 3700X.
You gave a great wrap up on your post..... besides the 4770X AMD systems have lasted longer for me.
What have you been using to stress your CPU for testing?
Again thanks for your post.

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Prime95 mostly