I'm always surprised at how far some take the whole "need moar lighting!" in their tower units. Each to their own, but I just don't get the point. Surely it'll just distract from the monitor?

It's bad enough that the light to indicate that my monitor's on is ridiculously bright.
I recall one of Linus Techtips clips showing a tower, in which the side panel was actually a monitor screen, but with no backing. So you could still see into the tower, but it would also show anything you wanted on that screen.

As for Ryzen. Some odd results for Cinebench with the latest bios for one board.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I71ov8iiDP8

That temperature though.... EEK!

Some may indeed indulge into thinking they have a private red light area in their room.

My big dark steel tower just has a blue led when it's on. What i wanted is not to have a plastic looking thing there. And an easy system for putting drives in there and keeping order amongst the zillion of cables.

Thanks for the link. Although I have started shopping for parts (nice offer on samsung SSD this week, nice offer on WD HDD last week, a good price on an optic drive and a seasonic modular PSU ) , I'm still to buy the key bits : CPU, Mobo and RAM. The reason is twofold : I'm not going to build it before it' clear to me how Kubuntu 17.04 deals with Ryzen (windows 10 not being envisaged) , and until I see some bios upgrades. Haven't even made up my mind on whether to go for 1700X or 1800X, or on the Mobo ( the contenders being Asrock B350 Pro4, MSI X370 Carbon and Asrock X370 Fatal1ty K4 )

Check out this channel. They do Ryzen plus Linux stuff :)
https://www.youtube.com/user/teksyndicate/videos

I'm pretty much settled on getting the 1500X eventually. The price is really good, and 4 cores and 8 threads should be excellent for gaming. Should be a nice upgrade from my A8-5600K :) I've done a few overhauls to the PC in the last half year. I grabbed a RX 470 4GB and a Cryorig H7 CPU-cooler (which is forward-compatible with AM4). And I totally understand you not liking the bling :P I turned off the LED-logo on the card on day one, and my sidepanels are solid.

The light on the card can be turned off!?
tbh I never checked online if it could be, should've done though hehe.
D'Oh!

I don't know about XFX, but on my Sapphire-card, I can control the LEDs through the Sapphire TriXX overclocking-software.

Ah, in that case (pun ;p) I most likely can't.
Ah well. Will have to turn lights on the keyboard on & set to max to out glare the gfx card.

Oh wait, on second thoughts.... ;)


Found the side panel I was on about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxqw2ShsQoY

One thing that really bothers me is, according to wikipedia. the 1500X will be clocked slower than 1600X or 1800X. If anything, from a heat perspective, the chip with fewer cores should be clocked a little faster. It would make all the sense to optimize it for maximum single-thread (or "few-thread") performance, which pretty much implies higher clocks.

I don't understand the choice really (but maybe it's results of binning?). It almost looks like they're artificially producing a cheap low end chip. But a cheap & fast 4-core chip is something a lot of people would salivate for, right now. In fact that is the reason they still buy Intel (and whine about its price). That's exactly the weak spot for AMD, so why wouldn't they want to offer better there, I don't know. Maybe there will be a 1550X or something like that.

That said, if the 1500X isn't simply a product of binning the low performers, then it should easily overclock to 1600X and 1800X levels, maybe more. In that case, it would be offering just *ridiculous* wang for buck.

Yeah, I'd much rather that they focused their effort into improving performance instead. Keep in mind that the 1700X and 1800X have a +20degC offset

I've been doing similar, got everything now except the motherboard, which is a tough decision (and availability is poor) - have currently narrowed the choice down to the ASRock X370 Fatal1ty K4 and some Gigabyte X370 boards. No Windows on my new build either, it will be running only Linux Mint :)

From what I've heard, the CPUs with fewer cores are initially 8-cores with defects on some of the cores, and so they disable the defective cores and keep 4 (or 6) good ones. As far as I know, it's the same cores as in Ryzen 7, but fewer of them, so it shouldn't have any problems reaching the same speeds. Most 1700s can reach 3.9 Ghz from what I've seen so far. Same as a 1800X on boost :) Buying a more expensive CPUs just guarantees you that it is binned for those speeds.

Looks like the EVO-212 cools just as well as a Noctua.
https://youtu.be/VFXetkP22lE?t=444

Also shows that the 1700 is likely the better purchase.

As I wrote above, an EVO 212 is on par with a Noctua 12 single fan. And you can get more silent fans for the 212 while remaining below the cost of the Noctua. And for a 1700 I'd say this would be a perfect solution. For my rig, I eye at an Enermax T50A

For a gaming platform 1700 is certainly the weet spot, in particular if OC is considered. Even more so as the 1700 heats less thus is likely to be a better base for OC

For a non-overclocked rig with multiple uses ( rendering, video encoding and, yes gaming ), the two Ryzen 7 -X make sense imho. Nevertheless the price delta between a 1700X and a 1700 is lower than between a 1800X and a 1700X, whereas the performace gain between 1700X and 1700 is higher than between a 1800X and a 1700X. So, I lend towards the 1700X

Remains to be seen if bios improvements change something to that, that would justify the 1800's premium

First time heard anything about actual rendering times, normally it's just gaming info' hehe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSuIJECsePA
Think there's (barely) enough space in my tower for a second fan, but tbh it's fine with the one.
Idle ticks around 20-25c, don't recall temps when rendering or gaming, will check later, but it was never high.
(just tested, left rendering in Terragen for an hour, temps max'd at 55c. i7-860.)

Now all I need to do is start doing lottery to buy a Ryzen set-up hehe.

I'm indecisive about which AM4 Mobo I want...

Same here. The cheapest ATX in my country is the ASUS Prime B350-Plus, so I'm leaning towards that one.. (anyone here have it?). I currently have a MSI-motherboard, which has been very reliable, and the menus in the BIOS are nice and user-friendly. I could pay a little more for the MSI Tomahawk if it's worth it, but all the LEDs on it are kinda turning me away from it.. :P I'll have to look into if it's possible to disable them.