X370/X470 and lessons learned

[sjfehr]

I had the misfortune of suffering a hard drive failure last week, on a PC well past its prime. And thus then the "fun" of impatiently trying to get smart on the latest generation of everything using nothing but my cell phone! Man, tech changes fast, hah. I've always spent months planning builds before, but this time I found myself ordering way too soon, egged on by same-day Prime shipping. In the process, I learned a few lessons that can hopefully help others.

Lesson 1: Discovered many X370 boards do NOT work with Ryzen 2xxx in practice and are not (yet) shipping with new BIOS. "Can be upgraded" is worthless if you're stuck with a board that won't POST and you have no way to upgrade the BIOS. The motherboard manufacturers are not at all clear about this on their websites which appear to have all been written before Ryzen 2nd get was released, and simply say they're compatible with Ryzen. Ugh. [This was a Gigabtye GA-AX370-Gaming, but there's similar language on other X370 boards' websites and sales listings]

Lesson 2: Picked up an X470 board, but after much frustration, I discovered I could not create a RAID larger than 2TB because my old video card didn't support UEFI, and was forcing the whole motherboard into CMS compatibility mode. I had a 4TB RAID1 running within 5 minutes of Amazon ringing my doorbell with the new video card. So, if others run into issues where they disable CMS but it turns right back on: could be an old peripheral card. If so, either need to ditch the old or live with BIOS limitations.

Lesson 3: If you're using encryption on your backups, make damned sure you back-up your encryption certificate(s), too! I got super super lucky I had a copy on an old hard drive (that lasted just long enough to export it before dying, too), but I was sweating bullets for a few days!

Specs:
Gigabyte X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming
Ryzen 2600x (w/ stock cooler)
16GB Crucial 3000GHz DDR4
MSI Radeon RX560 4GB
2x 250GB WD Blue 3D NAND SSD, RAID1
2x 4TB Seagate Barracuda 4TB, RAID1
32" & 24" 1080P monitors

 

[Woomack]

If X370 mobo doesn't support 2k Ryzens then it's from old delivery and was collecting dust for a couple of months. I don't know what about other brands but ASRock (at least in EU) was reflashing their whole stock just before 2k Ryzens premiere. They even took employees from other departments to help so they will be ready on time.

That certificate thing is more Windows related. If you have hardware encryption and all components support it (TMP module etc ) then certificate should be on the drive. I guess only some SSD support that. If you don't have it then when you create certificate then is a suggestion to keep a copy. Personally I would probably forget about it

 

[sjfehr]

Well, Gigabyte is going to have the opportunity to flash the new X370 BIOS on this board when they get their RMA back. :\ I ordered from Amazon.com, from a new warehouse that just opened in my area, with same-day Prime; not the situation you'd expect to get old stock, which is why I suspect they're still shipping from the factory like that. What really irked me most was the promise of Ryzen support all over the website and Amazon page, but then not supporting my Ryzen. Good on ASRock for doing it right; boo on Gigabyte and Amazon for not.

Setting up EFS encryption on Win7 pro was easy when I first set it up, just right-click a file (or folder) and select "Encrypted" and voila, the files have really strong encryption, and it turns green to show you. It's software-only as far as I know. What it does NOT do is tell you how the encryption works or what certificate was used to encrypt the files- that's something we're just expected to know, I guess. Storing the decryption certificate on the encrypted drive rather defeats the purpose of encrypting the files in the first place... but also rather defeats the point of a backup if you don't. If you're storing the certificate on the same drive, you might as well just store unencrypted. It's a mistake I won't repeat!

For those who might stumble on this thread with the same problem I had and who don't know, EFS uses your user certificate which is stored in the registry and you need to export as a .pfx file ("manage user certificates") and import onto whatever computer will be viewing those files. Microsoft disabled EFS support on Win10 Home, which can read and decrypt individual files, but can't open EFS-encrypted spreadsheets that are also password protected, and can't copy encrypted folders (which is another frustration when trying to restore backups) and they euphemistically refer to EFS-encrypted files as "personal files" which is not at all obvious or intuitive when trying to decrypt.

 

[trents]

Yes, the school of hard knocks is still in session.

 

[Alaric]

Yes, the school of hard knocks is still in session.

Working on my PhD as I try to figure out what radiator will fit a NZXT mid tower... LOL

 

[bigtallanddopey]

Even the gigabyte website says compatible with second Gen ryzen with a bios update. All x370 boards are still listed as revision 1.0 as well.

So basically sounds like they will not be shipping any boards with an updated bios. I cannot imagine that they will have just produced enough boards at the start of production and kept thousands in stock. They must be producing boards right now for x370 and so they should easily be able to install the latest bios.

Really poor from gigabyte and doesn’t help AMD one bit. A big selling point of ryzen is the compatibility across a wide range of motherboards, thus in the long run you can save money if you get a new cpu when compared to intel which you need a new chipset. Not munch incentive for AMD to keep this kind of thinking if it hurts their reputation.

 

[Woomack]

Big part of this situation is actually AMD fault as they release microcode too late and motherboard manufacturers have no time to prepare products. New motherboards should have new BIOS but not all manufacturers will reflash their whole stock. ASRock is not the largest and they had to reflash 40k motherboards in 2 weeks only in EU as AMD wanted them to be ready for premiere of 2k Ryzens. I guess the same was with Gigabyte and others but Gigabyte in general keeps much larger stock and has more motherboard models. Also look at Gigabyte support, they would rather change PCB revision and release new product than fix any issues with existing products.

AMD is losing a lot because of their actions. They could wait with premieres some more or they could release updates much faster. There were couple of ways to be prepared. Every single AMD premiere is the same. They just don't work good with their partners or they don't trust them.