Good morning all,

I built my new machine on Sunday and I'm going to install a system too. It's built on a Ryzen 5 3600 cpu, and rx 590 graphics, MSI b450a pro main board and xmp overclock for running the 16 GB ram (Gskill Ripjaws V) at 3200 MHz.

Yesterday I tested the system on an old USB drive install which runs generic drivers and 4.19.44 kernel (said install works very well with last year model Intel laptop). This is a puppy Linux system (fatdog64), which works very well with a last year model Intel laptop. Using this and other older systems (Ubuntu 14.04 live) I noticed that there are serious hangups with some graphical interface applications, especially web browsers. Firefox will often hang (unresponsive tab while CPU usage was always very low) or not execute commands or take very long times to become responsive (then it will work normally for some inputs, then unpredictably hang again). Same thing happened with chrome while other apps seemed to work normally (libre office). System menus did occasionally slow or hang (especially file manager - ROX, but also the graphical interface). I did not troubleshoot much, but before installing a new system I would like to know: is this normal with older kernel, unoptimized systems on modern Ryzen? Or I should suspect hardware issues? And, more importantly:

Is this the kind of performance issues I may run into if I don't run a Zen optimized kernel?

Regards,

Gian Andrea

This definitely sounds like something I'd expect from an older, pre-5.0 kernel on anything Zen. When installing my current desktop (1000 series not 3000, but not THAT much has changed insofar as cpu support) I had major issues with Debian until I was able to get the backports kernel installed.

Thanks, this is relieving. Meaning I can expect a new kernel to not work this way (I confess for a while I was scared about my new build).

On a negative note though, this means the USB key which I used to rely on as a backup system is now basically useless. Not ideal... I will have to look for something newer.

Probably stating the obvious here, but if the problems persist with a newer kernel, remove the overclock and see if that fixes things. You may want to check your ram by running memtest on it overnight and see if any errors are reported.

Yes of course. In fact, I don't have time on a weekday for an install, but I did some checking. The same problems I noticed yesterday also happen with the XMP profile disabled and RAM running at "normal" speed.

In any case I'm updating the bios, just in case...

Aaand, after updating the BIOS the system hangups became much less annoying. It's not perfectly usable, but much smoother and can be used if really necessary...

It's kinda funny working on a system where you launch Gimp and it opens up in a second, you open VLC and very heavy Libre office files, everything is as fast as a spacecraft, then you open up Firefox, open three tabs, click on a second tab and..it hangs for a minute.

Are you running Arch and is it still freezing up requiring a reboot? Also, is your ram on the motherboard manufacturer's approved list?
I've always built with Intel but AMD is getting more and more attractive. However, it's stories like yours that give me pause. I've heard that AMD boards tend to be more finicky about their ram which is the reason for my questions.

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No wait, I still didn't install Arch (I will this weekend, hopefully). I am testing the PC with the systems I have on my USB drives, which basically means some puppy linuxes (most of the testing I did is on a 4.19.44 kernel on fatdog Linux) and a live Ubuntu 14.04 with the original kernel. This means those are all old kernels which I kinda expected not to work perfectly (still, the issues I got took me by surprise - I already ran the same installs on an older Athlon64 and I did not experience any issue). I will definitely complain strongly if I have the same issues on Arch with a current kernel.

Interestingly, yesterday I tried to boot some older puppy linuxes on 3.10 kernels (32 bit). The surprise is, I did not have any noticeable performance issue (probably because it runs as if the chip were a 32 bit x86 and not amd64?).

I will surely write back about my experience after I install a modern system.

As for the RAM there isn't an official QVL list from MSI, but Gskill has been used without problems by other people.

Also, no hang up I had was a freeze requiring a reboot (which I would tend to blame the RAM for). Most were temporary freezes of single applications. Typically, I would open a ROX window (file manager) and it would take 30 seconds to open. Or opening a folder in the same window, it would freeze for some seconds while all the other apps were running correctly. Yesterday after the bios upgrade, the problems were less evident. I would rather say I did not have any problem with Ubuntu and the older puppies, and occasional hangups with *some* applications on fatdog. Actually I noticed that some applications (Gimp, Libre Office, VLC) did not experience any problem whatsoever (despite being quite memory hungry), while others (Chrome, Firefox - also memory hungry, ROX - which is very lightweight) were unresponsive (temporary and occasionally).

Yeah, all the major manufacturers had quite a few issues getting their BIOS to work well with Ryzen. I have a Dell laptop that STILL won't boot without kernel line modifications even closing in on 2 years after it was released (and Dell hasn't attempted to fix it with an updated BIOS either). The most recent releases have started to really improve the Ryzen experience in 2 ways:

1. DRASTIC improvements on RAM compatibility
2. Much better stability with linux overall due to proper hardware enumeration to the kernel.

Good question. However I've been running my first gen Ryzen 7 with Ubuntu without problems and I love it. Just get a lot of good RAM that meets the motherboard specsheet and you're good to go.

I built a second PC myself, this time with a second gen Ryzen 5 2400G (4 cores, 8 threads) and that runs, I have to say, even more buttery smooth than the Ryzen 7, albeit under Windows (kids, you know). I did like the build-in Vega graphics however it was not fast enough to play Fortnite on high settings (go figure) so I had to install a 1050Ti as well.

I can really recommend the AMD Ryzen 5 for general desktop use; when I need to build a new desktop I will choose a Ryzen 5 for that purpose again.

Just an update: I finished my install and everything works well, and fast. I have not had any crash whatsoever. I spend the first hour using the PC and I got my first problem when cairo-dock would not work (then I realized I had been using wayland, not xorg... I had never been able to use wayland, coming from Nvidia hardware, and the way it worked almost without problems amazed me).

So far I can recommend a Ryzen

Mines growing a bit old now (1st Gen 1700x), but still love it.

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Hi there i wanted to open a new thread but since this is about Ryzen 3rd gen : anyone running Linux Host + Windows 10 Guest VM (GPU pass through) with Ryzen 3k? What distro, GPUs and tips would u give others keen to do this? I am thinking

Ryzen 3600
16GB DDR4 3200 ( 8 x 2)
B450 or incoming 550/520? (depending on how IOMMU implementation is with the newer chipsets)
Host GPU : GF8400
Guest GPU : HD 5450
The 2 GPUs above i have on hand and the Windows guest is not for gaming (apps only)
Linux Distro : Endeavour OS /w Deepin DE or Manjaro Linux /w KDE Plasma DE

I'd get 32 or 64 GB of memory (I have 32, if I could I'd choose 64)

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