"Best" bang for the buck AM4 motherboard..??

[Rickkins]

Looking at MSI x370 sli plus
It would be to replace Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3-CF which I am completely unhappy with.
Or is there something better at around the same price point, in Canada that I should be looking at.
Not a gamer, so don't actually need gamer stuff.
Pc used for surfing and for HTPC (<-very important)



Thanks.


Here are my system specs, via speccy.

Operating System

Windows 10 Enterprise 2016 LTSB 64-bit

CPU

AMD Ryzen 7 1700 35 °C

Summit Ridge 14nm Technology

RAM

16.0GB Dual-Channel Unknown @ 1064MHz (15-15-15-36)

Motherboard

Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. AB350-Gaming 3-CF (AM4) 29 °C

Graphics

SAMSUNG (1920x1080@59Hz)

PX2710MW (1920x1080@59Hz)

4096MB ATI AMD Radeon R7 370 Series (ASUStek Computer Inc) 59 °C

Audio

Creative X-Fi Audio Processor (WDM)

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My ram is actually G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series F4-3200C16D-16GVK DDR4 3200MHZ



But for the life of me I cannot get the proper speed.

 

[eidairaman1]

Do your research.

Go to asus and asrock, msi, gigabyte, look at higher model 350 boards even.

 

[Rickkins]

Well, I've been doing 'my research', of which this is but one more stop along the way. I do thank you though for such keen insight.

 

[Mindweaver]

The board you have seems to be a good board. What do you not like about it other than not reaching your Ram speed? Have you tested the Ram in another board?

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

I would stay away from MSI, they use sub par electronic components (nikos mosfets on the cpu vrm) even on their high end ryzen platform.

 

[terroralpha]

it doesn't matter how much money you spend. All AM4 boards are pretty much the same. spending extra money won't give you anything. i learned that the hard and they very expensive way.

i had an asrock x370 fatal1ty pro, asus crosshair VI hero and msi X370 gaming titanium. all worthless. none of them were able to run any of my memory faster than 2933MHz with any of the BIOS, including the ones running 1.0.0.6b microcode. the MSI titanium, which i would like to point out is the top of the line MSI board offers for AM4 and costs $300, not only would not run my memory at the intended 3200MHz, it wouldn't even stay stable when setting the correct timings, which for my memory is 14-14-14-34-1T. i had to loosen the timings too. and it's not the memory because i now have two sets and both work perfectly on Z170 and X299 motherboards with 6600K and 7900X CPUs,

and anytime i tried OCing my CPU i would get random stability issues. some days everything was fine, other days my system would fail to post like 6 times in a row and then it would reset it's BIOS automatically. this caused my RAID 0 to corrupt TWICE! and i'm not the only one. the MSI "titanium" got panned in user review on newegg and amazon.

long story short, your board is as good as it gets for single GPUs. it has relatively good reviews compared to "high end" X370 boards. the only thing you stand to gain by "upgrading" (aka burning money) is a few USB ports and support for 8x + 8x SLI/crossfire, which you evidently do not need. you can't throw enough money at ryzen to make everything work right. believe me, i tried.

 

[eidairaman1]

SS ram is a must on ryzen

 

[terroralpha]

SS ram is a must on ryzen

it doesn't help. i dropped north of $450 for my 4x8GB kit to get single ranked (aka single sided) RAM with cherry picked Samsung ICs. the cream of the crop. that's $450 for RAM alone. still didn't work right.

 

[Totally]

SS ram is a must on ryzen

It is "nice to have" not a "must" anymore there are even a few(read: a solid half of the lists) ds kits on the qvls.

 

[eidairaman1]

It is "nice to have" not a "must" anymore there are even a few(read: a solid half of the lists) ds kits on the qvls.

For record clocks, yes @cdawall had 3600 on his ch vi hero

 

[infrared]

I love my crosshair vi hero, I can get 3600mhz stable with samsung B based g.skill trident z's. It takes a fair bit of tweaking of timings and voltages to get there though, even with the best DDR4 you can get.

I'm also very pleased with my cheapo Asus Prime B350 plus, which is running an 1800X at 3.8ghz 1.3v full load 24/7 (and 3200mhz ram). Seems pretty solid so far. I think there's a lot of decent options with B350. My advice to the OP would be to stick with what he's got, flash the latest bios, and try again to get the ram at a decent speed. If not 3200, then 2933. Chances are you would be able to do 3200, raise the SoC voltage to 1.10-1.15v, see if that helps.