Bandwidth Place 2

So I haven't really done any benchmarks yet, but that data is pretty readily available. The Ryzen chips excel in most synthetic type testing and apps which benefit from multi core workloads. They lag a bit behind the Intel competitors by around 10-15% in things like gaming performance or where single core performance is more of an important thing. The system has been very stable, and I'm pretty happy with how it is performing. Considering which GPU upgrade to make now. I really would like larger monitors, and perhaps a 3rd monitor. I thought 24" would be plenty, but it's usually not... turning up the text size in visual studio helps, but that only increase the size in the "code window"... the display of the rest of the stuff stays pretty small.

Now there are second gen Ryzen chips out, and the chip I bought less than a year ago is now $100 cheaper.

The only reason I'd want to upgrade (which I don't) is that the new chips supposedly do much better with memory compatibility and running memory at their rated speeds. I've got mine at 90% ish with some tuning. Not interested in paying $100 for an upgrade (which would include selling this chip off for as close to $200 as I could). Luckily though, I did buy an X370 board. So at least for Zen+, this board will work with the upgrade as long as I update the BIOS. I might jump to the third gen Ryzen chip, if it's compatible with my X370 board. It probably won't be.

Is there a tool out there to generate a new "signature graphic" containing your computer parts.


I can do it manually, but boy oh boy and I feeling lazy about it XD

Haha I still use Photoshop to generate the sig... but honestly we're using a picture to display text and should just be using text... the pic is a gimmick

Speaking of Ryzen, I built a new server a month ago based on 1st gen Ryzen because I wanted to cheap out and Ryzen "unofficially" supports ECC RAM. (alternative is to build a Xeon system for a few hundred more) Did not choose 2nd gen because it takes a lot of research to find out specifically which motherboards support ECC. 1st gen has way more user reports of working setups since 2nd gen motherboards are too new. As for being able to run 2nd gen CPUs in 1st gen motherboards, I didn't want to risk receiving one with a BIOS too old to use a 2nd gen CPU... so yeah, I built a 1st gen Ryzen system while the 2nd gen is already out.

Turns out the motherboard I got had a new enough BIOS for me to have gotten a 2nd gen CPU but... whatcha gonna do.

I should make a thread for that build, as is tradition

Still pretty "annoyed" at how fast 2nd Gen ryzen chips came out after mine haha.....

I think I'd like a newer GPU, but this damn ole 5870 continues to just work. I'm looking at going either 1060 or 1070 for the GPU depending on the deal.

And while I'm glad intel is finally faced with some reasonable competition, I "almost" feel like I wish I'd have went with intel instead. This build has been
nothing short of great... I don't know... maybe I'm just feeling the itch to build another PC again

Ryzen is cool.. still not faster than Intel in all situations (even with more cores), but definitely cheaper.

It is funny that the first gen got replaced so quickly but the second gen is still the latest. XD

STILL pissy that I can't run this ram kit at 3200mhz....

I just did a BIOS update that was a little more than a year and a half newer than the one I was currently running and I still can only get 2933mhz out of this "supported" Corsair 16GB set.


Interesting to note that Gen 3 Ryzen chips are launching this summer, and that the current motherboards won't support them (Zen2). I currently see no reason to upgrade from the Gen 1 Ryzen chip I'm currently running. I did recently retire the HD5870 for a free GTX 1060 3GB. Sounds 1000 times quieter, draws less power and is a pretty good jump in terms of performance. Especially for free

I had built a new PC for my dad, with a Ryzen 5 2400G and 3200MHz RAM... I set it to 3200 in the BIOS blissfully unaware that there could be any stability issues, but seems like it worked out haha. Sucks for you

Really nice free GPU upgrade!

Only 4 months later...

They fixed a lot of the "memory" issues in the second generation of the Ryzen chips. Even still, I'm not compelled to upgrade. This machine handles my needs entirely which includes near zero gaming, audio work, or video work.

The programming work I'm doing happens 90% on a company owned amazon VM (which is slow as holy crap) and some microsoft logic apps cloud based stuff.... so very little coding and compiling happens on my own machine. The only thing I do at all that warrants an 8 core / 16 thread chip is the fact that I always have at least 1 VM running and often as many as 3 VM's running.


I'm currently eliminating all of my debt and building up a 12 month emergency fund.... once that happens and the discretionary spending returns, I might be tempted to upgrade! I just have a hard time beating my "if it still works...." mindset.

I want to build a 2nd gen Ryzen machine just to board the hype train, but ahhhh lol no reason to..

Sucks to have to work on slow hardware, how long do builds take?

The amazon machine is painful... especially now that we are implementing more code analysis rule sets in the one .NET MVC5 app I focus on.... a local build takes as long as five min to finish and a deployment build can take as long as 15 min. Quite annoying as I do a lot of diagnostical / bug fixing type work. If it were more green field coding and I were building a lot less... that probably wouldn't seem so bad.

The machine itself is just horribly sluggish. VS takes 2-3 min to open, SQL server a min or two... it feels like a 5400 RPM laptop drive.

Broadband internet started killing my patience back in 2003... SSD's have made me fully impatient!

That seems so ridiculous to put you through.. like, all those minutes you spend waiting is productivity lost. So much inefficiency it boggles the mind.

I imagine a higher end AWS instance would perform better maybe?

It's kinda ridiculous yeah lol, but eh. A bigger instance would help, for sure.

The biggest problems is that my server 2012 install is BLOATED as all hell with windows "stuff". The windows folder is like 130+ GB! Those update files be runnin rampant! So occasionally my "SSD" will be full and the machine run like molasses. Would be nice if I could just develop straight on my local using a git repository like I do on my side gig.. much more "powerful feeling" experience on my machine.

Wtf, my C:/Windows is only 5.14GB, what is going on on your machine? Were there even 130GB worth of updates to download?

I now realize my work machine is actually server 2008 lol, so based upon Windows 7's really awful update system that bloats up stupid fast, consumes tons of resources, and keeps like uncompressed super big versions of all the updates apparently necessary if you ever want to remove an update? Uggh. I hate this box. And I have to work on it every day!

A few months back I go into a private contractor gig where I'm doing 1099 work on the side. The nice part is I get to use my home machine (spun up a VM for it specifically) and am getting to work with a much newer OS and much newer tech than my day job. In my day job I'm still supporting legacy ASP.NET 2.5 / 4 web forms based applications.... ADO.NET I mean UGLY. Even our "modern" project is MVC 5 / EF 5 and uses AngularJS (not Angular or Angular 2) so a really old version... legacy code is haunting my dreams.... that's why I started doing the side contracting work... cloud based, and non super slow crappy amazon VM running server 2008 and TFS 2010

On another topic: what do you use for monitors in terms of size and resolution both at work and at home?

I have two ASUS 24" 1080 widescreen sets that I just do not feel are large enough. Maybe I'm "too far" away from them but on average I probably tend to sit right at about 3 feet away at max. Reading text, it's just hard. The zooming options in the OS just never do "good enough" without causing annoyances. Zooming in something like VS or SSMS just wind up with the actual text window blowing up but the rest of the screen still being tiny to see.

I struggle between going like 47" or 52" HDTV or 27" to 32" traditional monitor. Just not sure if I should go 4K or not, not wanting to go HDTV route because it's not as sharp nor clear but the real estate is very cheap compared to a "real" computer monitor.....

Am I being a whiny little bitch, or do you too find the need for larger monitors when your staring at code hours upon hours a day?