So I currently have a Ryzen 1700 system on an Crosshair 6 Hero board (X370); it's been a mixed bag honestly. Since my main game jam lately is Elite Dangerous (unstable), I've actually reverted the system completely to stock, even with 3600/CL15 G.skill B-die sticks. Lately I've been itching to see how much progress has been made with the 2nd generation of Ryzen CPUs, in terms of memory compatibility, the newer chips performance / OC abilities, etc. On impulse (as usual) I decided to drop some cash on new guts. So I went to the local Canada Computers and picked up the following:
Asus Crosshair 7 Hero X470 motherboard
G.Skill FlareX 2x8GB 3200mhz / CL14 RAM
AMD Ryzen 2700X CPU
ADATA SX8200 960GB NVME SSD (much cheaper than Samsung and nearly as quick)
The other thing that triggered this purchase was Daz (bastard!). He put a sexy EK monoblock up for sale that just happens to fix both the Hero 6 AND 7 motherboards. He drove me to this!! Didn't take many pics since this was an impulse build, but we'll start with the motherboard.
It's a lot like the Hero 6 that's my daily driver (shocker). Very sexy in black:
The astute will notice the missing VRM heatsink. That of course had to go in favor of this baby:
Yeah it looks sexy, but it has the typical EK lack of attention to detail. Even though the monoblock is board specific, they still don't provide you with pre-cut thermal pads. Lovely:
They also included the wrong size allen wrench for tightening the block down (LOL). Details aside, it is a nice piece (BIOS flash in progress below):
Also picked up this little toy from Daz a while back, figuring it would be a perfect match for my 2nd PC / 'test bench', a ThermalTake Core P5 wrapped in black and white marble vinyl. The Barrow boxfish reservoir, 250mm, with built in temp sensor and a bloody metric TON of ports:
And now for the "read the fine print dumbass" part of the program. The CH7 Hero has a lovely little M.2 port, right above the top PCIE slot:
It even comes with a heat sink, tucking your SSD nicely away and keeping it cool:
BIG PROBLEM with that M.2 slot: IF you chose to use it, you cripple your GPUs PCIE slot, as I discovered much to my chagrin after installing Windows 10 with a pair of GTX 980s. Even though both GPUs were detected, SLI wouldn't work. I was scratching my head until I read the manual: using that M.2 slot knocked me down to 8x / 4x PCIE speeds, so SLI was disabled. After moving the SSD to the OTHER M.2 slot, the one that's in PLAIN VIEW and NOT protected by a heat sink, SLI magically came back. That leaves it where it is now, testing on the P5, like so:
One more crappy photo of a pretty block, now set to purple to match the Boxfish res:
This test bench is prettier than my main rig:
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To be continued!
Asus Crosshair 7 Hero X470 motherboard
G.Skill FlareX 2x8GB 3200mhz / CL14 RAM
AMD Ryzen 2700X CPU
ADATA SX8200 960GB NVME SSD (much cheaper than Samsung and nearly as quick)
The other thing that triggered this purchase was Daz (bastard!). He put a sexy EK monoblock up for sale that just happens to fix both the Hero 6 AND 7 motherboards. He drove me to this!! Didn't take many pics since this was an impulse build, but we'll start with the motherboard.
It's a lot like the Hero 6 that's my daily driver (shocker). Very sexy in black:
The astute will notice the missing VRM heatsink. That of course had to go in favor of this baby:
Yeah it looks sexy, but it has the typical EK lack of attention to detail. Even though the monoblock is board specific, they still don't provide you with pre-cut thermal pads. Lovely:
They also included the wrong size allen wrench for tightening the block down (LOL). Details aside, it is a nice piece (BIOS flash in progress below):
Also picked up this little toy from Daz a while back, figuring it would be a perfect match for my 2nd PC / 'test bench', a ThermalTake Core P5 wrapped in black and white marble vinyl. The Barrow boxfish reservoir, 250mm, with built in temp sensor and a bloody metric TON of ports:
And now for the "read the fine print dumbass" part of the program. The CH7 Hero has a lovely little M.2 port, right above the top PCIE slot:
It even comes with a heat sink, tucking your SSD nicely away and keeping it cool:
BIG PROBLEM with that M.2 slot: IF you chose to use it, you cripple your GPUs PCIE slot, as I discovered much to my chagrin after installing Windows 10 with a pair of GTX 980s. Even though both GPUs were detected, SLI wouldn't work. I was scratching my head until I read the manual: using that M.2 slot knocked me down to 8x / 4x PCIE speeds, so SLI was disabled. After moving the SSD to the OTHER M.2 slot, the one that's in PLAIN VIEW and NOT protected by a heat sink, SLI magically came back. That leaves it where it is now, testing on the P5, like so:
One more crappy photo of a pretty block, now set to purple to match the Boxfish res:
This test bench is prettier than my main rig:
-----------------------
To be continued!
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