Good motherboard for Ryzen (first-gen)

[Greg V]

On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 5:53 AM, Eric van Gyzen <eric at vangyzen.net> 
wrote:
> I would like to build a Ryzen desktop.  Can anyone recommend a good 
> motherboard?
> 
> I'm planning on a first-gen, because the second-gen has similar 
> stability problems as the first-gen had, and AMD hasn't released 
> errata for the second-gen yet (as far as I know...I would love to be 
> wrong).

IIRC the weird freeze/segfault bugs were only in the early batches of 
1st gen. If you get 2nd gen, you're *definitely* getting a stable chip. 
My R7 1700 is from Aug 2017, never had any issues. So a 1st gen bought 
today should be fine too of course, unless *somehow* you get very very 
very old stock.

> I would like to be a cool kid with a Threadripper, but I can't 
> justify the cost, so I'm thinking maybe a Ryzen 7 with /only/ 8 
> cores.  :)
Yeah, yeah. Good discounts on 1st gen Threadripper can be found these 
days though… but still there's board cost + RAM cost (you have to 
fill up 4 memory channels on TR if you want performance to not suck).

> Ideally, I want an Intel NIC, ECC memory support, and a 3-year 
> warranty.

For ECC, you can google board name + ecc ram. You can often find 
reports on forums/subreddits/whatever.

Since you care about warranty, you probably don't care about 
overclocking, so do not watch the following videos: B450 boards — 
https://youtu.be/yWAwOH-egFs X470 — https://youtu.be/L8T2gzIkw78 :)

But still, good power delivery is important for an 8-core even at stock 
settings, so avoid the latest ASUS TUF board, and super cheap boards in 
general.

I have an MSI X370 SLI PLUS. The firmware is good, RGB lighting support 
is good (most important thing! lol. controllable under FreeBSD with 
https://github.com/nagisa/msi-rgb), the VRM is okay but not super great 
(8-core @ 1.39V 3.95GHz → ~100 ℃ without any direct airflow over 
the VRM heatsink). NIC is Realtek, recognized by re(4), I never tried 
it (I use a Mellanox card). Audio is Realtek, works fine 99% of the 
time (very occasionally sound stops working, sysctl 
dev.hdac.0.polling=1 brings it back). There is a pin header for the SPI 
flash chip  to recover a failed firmware update (I actually did this 
once :D), but the pins are tiny (2mm instead of the usual 2.54).