A little off-topic here, but does anyone have links to some reliable tests and the like for the ECC ram usage on Ryzen? (Specifically with Linux & ZFS)

The most 'official' pronouncement that AMD ever made on the topic, is I think the following reddit AMA with AMD engineers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def6vs2?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x Otherwise there's a dearth of information; at most you get a forum or reddit thread that devolves after a couple of comments into a quarrel between people who are clearly out of their depth, and people who know stuff but can't be bothered to explain anything to their less fortunate peers.

If you are going for an x570 then as far as can tell anything around the £200 mark and above are all good. If you are looking for linux friendly then I'd go for asrock. I do have my eye on the taichi for the future.

Do any benchmarks actually show a noticeable difference between a good x470 and a x570 with the same CPU and RAM? They didn't when I bought mine. Definitely not enough to justify the 100€ difference back then. I used some of that cash to get better RAM instead.

Just to close out this thread. I've decided to either get a 7 3700X or a 9 3900X, both of which are way more than I've currently got, so I'll just keep saving. the 3700X is, of course, amazing --- especially at 65W!

But then again, by the time I've saved that much, I'm within striking distance of the Hive Queen herself: the 3900X. Granted she comes in at 105W, but that's still --- wow --- still so, so cool given her power!

The kicker to all this is that the i7 4790 I'm currently using guzzles a whopping 85W! Yow!

Thanks to everybody who helped me out with guidance and insights; you folks are great! I'll try and remember to post one more time once I've actually made the purchase, sometime in the (hopefully, not too) distant future. :)

Well folks and friends, I put in my order for my new AMD CPU today! It cost me about the same as my first entire gaming computer build to buy it and a new AMD motherboard, but I believe it's worth it.

In the end I bought the mighty Ryzen 9 3900X! Back and forth, back and forth I danced between this and the righteous, much more efficient Ryzen 7 3700X. In the end, the angelic choir singing "Holy, holy, holy, 12 core, 24 thread, 70MB GameCache almighty, Aaaaaamen!" seduced me.

To house this heavenly tabernacle of divine power, I ordered a Gigabyte X570 AORUS Elite motherboard.

So, that's it. Goodbye to my Intel i7 4950 and the old Asus mobo it's been living in, and hello to (what I hope will be) the last CPU I'll need for a long time. Thank you, again, to everyone that helped and guided me with this very big decision. Change, in any form, requires strength, so thank you, too, for sharing with me the strength of your experience.

And thank you, lastly, to Liam for this wonderful space for Linux gamers!

Last edited by Nanobang on 23 February 2020 at 4:57 pm UTC

Yep, went 3900x as well. Figured with compiling, rust development and some other stuff can make use of the extra cores plus higher max boost on a single core. Also went with the same motherboard. Seems to be working fine for me and like the quality of the board so far! Enjoy the mobo! Only thing I adjusted was the fan curve(you can adjust this in the bios, there is an F? key that takes you right to it), basically let it be a more gradually ramp up of speed so it isn't such a spin up when the temperature spikes.

Enjoy!