One computer, lots of doubts...

[fluffy_little_something]

I finally dared turn it on, it runs
But I am not sure about the memory, it said 2400, doing the BIOS update at the moment...

Idle temp (while in the BIOS) is like 48°, seems pretty high.
Fan speeds jump around wildly.

[jdnz]

Idle temp (while in the BIOS) is like 48°, seems pretty high.

temp inside the BIOS is often high due to typical BIOS code looping hard on a single core, I wouldn’t worry unless temp is also high inside windows with 0% cpu load (if it is still high in windows I’d probably re-do the heatsink paste - most likely you’ve got too much)

fan speeds jumping around in BIOS is no big deal - same reason

[fluffy_little_something]

Ah, ok
Is it safe and appropriate to pick the silent option for the processor or will that still impact the sound when using music software, like with W7?

[fluffy_little_something]

So, do higher RAM speeds automatically involve overclocking? I found XMP profiles in the BIOS, where I could pick 3200. Not sure it actually runs at 3200 now, though, didn't want to download that program, which includes some free file converter, smells fishy to me.

Strange, in the BIOS it says memory clock 1600, but in the monitor program it says 1197.


Regarding CPU temps, HWMonitor says 28°now, not doing anything except for writing this post.

[Kaine]

So, do higher RAM speeds automatically involve overclocking?

For the chips on the RAM stick, no, as they are rated to that speed. For the CPU however it works on a ratio divider against the ram bus and the optimum settings will have it on (for example) a 1:1 divider. If you raise the memory clock by inserting faster memory and don't raise the CPU controller then you end up on say a 1.07:1 divider then sometimes the system can get a bit temperamental when working with some clock offsets.

But then some work better than others, it's just a case of figuring out which. For example on the X99 generation, 2400 was great, 2600 was alright, 2800 could be terrible, 3000 would be pretty bad as well and then 3200 was fine 99% of the time without any real effort or tweaking at all. The thing is if you overclock the CPU the goalposts move with the increase in CPU speed, so it becomes a fair bit of tweaking and testing for the best setup or you just trawl the overclocking forums and see what's working already for other people.

[nIGhT-SoN]

So, do higher RAM speeds automatically involve overclocking? I found XMP profiles in the BIOS, where I could pick 3200. Not sure it actually runs at 3200 now, though, didn't want to download that program, which includes some free file converter, smells fishy to me.

Strange, in the BIOS it says memory clock 1600, but in the monitor program it says 1197.


Regarding CPU temps, HWMonitor says 28°now, not doing anything except for writing this post.

Over 2400Mhz for ram, at least on Ryzen, it's done with overclocking, but it doesn't mean it will overclock the cpu too, keep that in mind. If you have a good motherboard and especially if it supports memory freq over 2400Mhz it means it can do that, usually it will be written as 1866/ 2133/ 2400/ 2667(OC)/ 2933(OC)/ 3200(OC)+ Mhz.

[fluffy_little_something]

Gee, W10 sucks, such a messy organization.
And it keeps saying that a problem has occurred that prevents some feature from being installed. But it doesn't say what is concerned or how to fix it

And it seems that my Midi keyboard got damaged when my old computer broke, it is completely dead when connecting it to the new computer

[fluffy_little_something]

So, do higher RAM speeds automatically involve overclocking?

For the chips on the RAM stick, no, as they are rated to that speed. For the CPU however it works on a ratio divider against the ram bus and the optimum settings will have it on (for example) a 1:1 divider. If you raise the memory clock by inserting faster memory and don't raise the CPU controller then you end up on say a 1.07:1 divider then sometimes the system can get a bit temperamental when working with some clock offsets.

But then some work better than others, it's just a case of figuring out which. For example on the X99 generation, 2400 was great, 2600 was alright, 2800 could be terrible, 3000 would be pretty bad as well and then 3200 was fine 99% of the time without any real effort or tweaking at all. The thing is if you overclock the CPU the goalposts move with the increase in CPU speed, so it becomes a fair bit of tweaking and testing for the best setup or you just trawl the overclocking forums and see what's working already for other people.

No thanks, overclocking is not my cup of tea, I had hoped it would run correctly out of the box when loading the XMP profile.

[fluffy_little_something]

What about the cores vs threads, which do I have to enter in my DAW's audio settings? 4 or 8?

P'S: After some testing, it seems that specifying 8 cores in Mulab yields the best load distribution. Am running some of the Mulab demo tracks. The 1500X seems quite powerful for 4 physical cores It runs throttled at about 2 GHz most of the time, a load between 15 and 20 % with a project that is denser than my stuff ever is. And the best thing, after looping the demo project for 5 minutes, the CPU temp is only 31° according to HW Monitor Almost too good to be true

[fluffy_little_something]

But then some work better than others, it's just a case of figuring out which. For example on the X99 generation, 2400 was great, 2600 was alright, 2800 could be terrible, 3000 would be pretty bad as well and then 3200 was fine 99% of the time without any real effort or tweaking at all. The thing is if you overclock the CPU the goalposts move with the increase in CPU speed, so it becomes a fair bit of tweaking and testing for the best setup or you just trawl the overclocking forums and see what's working already for other people.

I loaded the slower of the two XMP profiles and the speed stated in CPU-Z jumps back and forth between 1546 and 2993. But the computer seems to run stable that way. How can I test if it really is a solid setting? A kind of memory stress test.

[cron]

There's MemTest86, but I haven't used it so can't vouch for it. https://www.memtest86.com/

Prime95 has 3 types of test, at least one of which leans toward testing RAM, but I think P95 is more often thought of as a CPU stresser. I have used P95 though and, even though I'd been running my RAM at 1600 (rather than 1400) for a week or so with no obvious problems, P95 failed in under a minute. https://www.mersenne.org/download/

[nIGhT-SoN]

What about the cores vs threads, which do I have to enter in my DAW's audio settings? 4 or 8?

P'S: After some testing, it seems that specifying 8 cores in Mulab yields the best load distribution. Am running some of the Mulab demo tracks. The 1500X seems quite powerful for 4 physical cores It runs throttled at about 2 GHz most of the time, a load between 15 and 20 % with a project that is denser than my stuff ever is. And the best thing, after looping the demo project for 5 minutes, the CPU temp is only 31° according to HW Monitor Almost too good to be true

I would turn off any power saving features in bios so it would run at stock speed everytime, that way you can get the most performance for music production. Also, if you haven't downloaded the chipset driver from AMD, do so and in Power Plan you'll have a Ryzen option, choose that one for best performance.

[fluffy_little_something]

I don't find any Ryzen option in Windows, only the three standard ones also known from W7.

Ah, just found out the new plan will only appear after installing the new chipset drivers, will do that now...

[fluffy_little_something]

Gee, W10 sucks, such a messy organization.
And it keeps saying that a problem has occurred that prevents some feature from being installed. But it doesn't say what is concerned or how to fix it

And it seems that my Midi keyboard got damaged when my old computer broke, it is completely dead when connecting it to the new computer

Seems those two issues were related. Windows messed up the Midi keyboard driver installation the first time, that's why it seemed dead. Luckily I did find the Midi keyboard in the device manager, but marked as a problem. A manual driver update worked.

The memory clock is 1463.2 today, does the motherboard look for the best speed itself rather than pick the default speed?

[fluffy_little_something]

Damn, forgot to back up a couple of new Sylenth1 patches I had made the days before my computer died. Can I hook up the old W7 hard drive to my W10 computer just in order to access to and copy those patches from it, without the OS part of it? Or would that screw my computer up? I got it up and running now, so I don't want to do it all over again.