X370 - Gigabyte K5 vs MSI Carbon

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MorgothPl

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As my z97 mainboard died, I decided to - instead of getting z97 - to sell the cpu and get 1700 instead (and don't tell me to wait for Coffee Lake, as I don't want to participate in Intel shens with z370)

Now, I know that I don't want Asus board - I stopped being a fan after my z97 deluxe and issues with their software.

I'm looking at some medium class boards, like MSI Carbon and Gaming K5. I did some research on forums and Reddit, and I know even less than before googling :)

MSI is supposed to have crap bios, and their VRMs are from cheaper boards with some no name capacitors and such.

Gigabyte is supposed to have that soft brick issues and some other bios issues.

So which one to choose? I'll cool them with the a240g EK aluminium kit, so the ability to feed the pump and fans would be a pro.
 
Dunno about the pump (power mine off psu directly), but I have two akasa rosewill 140mm fans running off a single fan header just fine on my K5.

The K5 doesn't have LLC adjustment or absolute voltage adjustment (only offset) for vcore and vsoc, no LLC for vdimm either. Bios settings appear temperamental for some people, though mine have stuck for the most part (did have some issues, but not since I rma'd for the softbrick issue). The "common options" menu that some am4 boards have is not available.

There may be other issues I'm forgetting, but I think that covers the major ones.
 
VRM on my carbon seem to be pretty good since its 8 phase layout they run pretty cool. I can tell you i am still on bios 1.5 since i was able to get my gskill 14cl RGB mem to run at the 3200 i was happy with that. The AXMP profile worked fine for me. I have the 1700x and i do not have any OC going. I believe the newest bios fixed the strange OC issues with setting voltage above 1.3(was locking peoples cpus in at 1.5ghz or some crap) THe only issue i have with my NVME drive seems to be on reboots, which doesnt hurt too much because i leave the PC on all the time, and the shut down works fine.

I believe there is LLC lvl 1-5 or even more. Since i do not have my CPU OC i cant tell you how much it effects it. I believe it has LLC on the memory as well. I think MSI has been a little slower on bios updates but it has been pretty stable for me.
 
From the 2, I would go for the Gigabyte. Indeed the MSI has it's issues.
Another option could be the X370 Gaming K4. Heard good thing about this one as well.
 
I did find out more that it seems to be related to my BPX nvme drive, so other than that i do not have any issues on my msi board.
 
Finally decided to splash some more cash and went with Gaming 5 from Gigabyte. Loving that board. Went 3,7 on the 1700 on auto, can easily hit 4,0 and after BIOS upgrade to August release, my memory goes xmp 3200mhz without problems.
 
MorgothPl said:
Finally decided to splash some more cash and went with Gaming 5 from Gigabyte. Loving that board. Went 3,7 on the 1700 on auto, can easily hit 4,0 and after BIOS upgrade to August release, my memory goes xmp 3200mhz without problems.
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Careful with latest bios, seems vcore can go really high under some circumstances. There are a few talking about it on the Gigabyte forums and a thread here, I think.
 
I have a Gaming K5 in a Thermaltake V3 case. CPU (a currently-non-overclocked 1600X tends to run hot (40-45C). When running Prime95, after about 11 minutes, the VRMs hit 100C according to hwinfo64. Also, the machine randomly hangs when I try to put it to sleep.

Not overly impressed, when coupled with the things mentioned above.
 
1_rick said:
I have a Gaming K5 in a Thermaltake V3 case. CPU (a currently-non-overclocked 1600X tends to run hot (40-45C). When running Prime95, after about 11 minutes, the VRMs hit 100C according to hwinfo64. Also, the machine randomly hangs when I try to put it to sleep.

Not overly impressed, when coupled with the things mentioned above.
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Yeah, prime95 isn't kind to cpus or vrms even under the best of conditions. The k5's vrms aren't great, and with inadequate airflow (which isn't difficult to achieve due to the design) they quickly overheat. The sinks have plenty of surface area, but it's all hidden under a basically flat top, so you have to blow air right at them to cool them down.

My 1600 (non-x) runs about 45c overclocked to 3.725Ghz @ +0.082v, and the vrm sit at around 70c max (AIDA64 cpu+cache, don't feel like frying my cpu with p95). Both are watercooled, but the vrm actually were a bit cooler with stock cooling iirc. They did get up to 90c with stock cooling running p95, I think, but that test really is hard for anything, nevermind mediocre 4-phase vrms.
 
Nobu said:
you have to blow air right at them to cool them down.
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There was no good place to put a fan in my current case (an old Thermaltake V3)--the top rear fan mount is blocked by the CPU power connector. So today I replaced it with the ASRock x370 gaming itx/ac. So far I like it better--the CPU temps are a lot better even on Prime95 (seemed to be stable at 65C after 90 minutes). No VRM temp sensor, though, according to hwinfo64. Might see if anyone I know has an IR thermometer.

So far (4 hours) I like it. Couple of things that I have to see if I can get working better: after running the fan calibration, it wants to run both system fans REALLY fast, which is a bit noisy. When I reboot, it takes like 5 tries, where the fans & lights come on for 2-3 seconds, then power off, before it actually starts. And my RAM, which is Corsair 3000, and is set to XMP 2933 in the uefi, won't actually run at that speed, but drops to 2133. These are relatively minor, though.

I'm on the current bios, 3.00.
 
1_rick said:
There was no good place to put a fan in my current case (an old Thermaltake V3)--the top rear fan mount is blocked by the CPU power connector. So today I replaced it with the ASRock x370 gaming itx/ac. So far I like it better--the CPU temps are a lot better even on Prime95 (seemed to be stable at 65C after 90 minutes). No VRM temp sensor, though, according to hwinfo64. Might see if anyone I know has an IR thermometer.

So far (4 hours) I like it. Couple of things that I have to see if I can get working better: after running the fan calibration, it wants to run both system fans REALLY fast, which is a bit noisy. When I reboot, it takes like 5 tries, where the fans & lights come on for 2-3 seconds, then power off, before it actually starts. And my RAM, which is Corsair 3000, and is set to XMP 2933 in the uefi, won't actually run at that speed, but drops to 2133. These are relatively minor, though.

I'm on the current bios, 3.00.
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Yeah, sounds like it's failing memory training and falling back to jedec speeds. My k5 did that a lot when I tried 3200 until the latest bios, and then it was still unstable. You may need to adjust voltages or llc. Seems adjusting tRC up helps a bit too (default of 54 was a bit low, setting it to 56 made it a bit more stable at 3200, though it still failed memtest).
 
Hmm. I went and checked corsair's site: it says the SPD settings are 15-15-15-35 but "tested latency" is 15-17-17-36, and the voltage is 1.35. The memory worked fine in my K5. In the ASRock, I adjusted the timing to match the tested numbers, and then it seems not to fail training--none of those quick restarts--but it still only runs 2133.

I can run a memtest, but, like I said, the memory worked fine in a different motherboard. (IIRC this mobo doesn't have LLC settings, but I can go back and check.)

I had to manually adjust the fan curve to quiet my Corsair HD120--the fan testing in the bios set it to something like 80%.
 
Not to hijack this thread, but today I just swapped out my carbon with the Asus rog strix x370-f and it's running 4x8GB of ddr4-3200 flarex memory without any problems. My carbon would make a grinding noise when booting up and only support two sticks of ddr4-3200 flarex memory. Also, the usb 3.0 front panel headers didn't work and the second m.2 drive would lose connectivity. I'm about to rma it and sell it, but I'm definitely not voting for the MSI X370 gaming pro carbon.
 
1_rick said:
Hmm. I went and checked corsair's site: it says the SPD settings are 15-15-15-35 but "tested latency" is 15-17-17-36, and the voltage is 1.35. The memory worked fine in my K5. In the ASRock, I adjusted the timing to match the tested numbers, and then it seems not to fail training--none of those quick restarts--but it still only runs 2133.

I can run a memtest, but, like I said, the memory worked fine in a different motherboard. (IIRC this mobo doesn't have LLC settings, but I can go back and check.)

I had to manually adjust the fan curve to quiet my Corsair HD120--the fan testing in the bios set it to something like 80%.
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Yeah, your memory is probably good, just mentioned memtest because while it was better, it wasn't completely stable, and (if it did work) I didn't want you to possibly assume it was all good and five days later have to reinstall windows due to corruption or something.

Don't think I'll be much more help in troubleshooting, unfortunately. I'm not well versed in the nuances of stabilizing overclocked ram, mostly play the test, adjust timings, test, adjust voltage, test...dance.
 
Nobu said:
he nuances of stabilizing overclocked ram
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You would hope that the motherboard--which, IIRC, has settings for up to 4000 speed--could handle 2933.

A little bit of tweaking, mostly increasing the 4 big settings by 1-2 clocks, got it to not fail training, which is nice, except for the part about running at JEDEC speeds. Sure wish I could get the speed I paid for. :(
 
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