Ryzen 7 7800X3D + A620 Chipset, Is It Worth It?

foreign [Music] books today we are taking a look at a product that I wish I wish I never bought because boy oh boy did this thing end up shafting me wasted just heaps of my time it was very painful but I'm going to use it as an opportunity to include some info that I would usually skip over in our reviews of pre-release products as technically that sort of information it's not really relevant if the issue is solved let's say before the product's publicly available so if we had maybe a driver issue with a particular Graphics product in a certain game but the issue was fixed before the review was finished then we would normally just not bother mentioning that because well it's become a non-issue for the the buyers of the product Because by the time you get your hands on it problem solved it was just at a painful part of the review process and in instances where I have mentioned a bit of a messy review process let's say basically there were numerous issues with the product that probably heavily limited my time with it so I had to explain why the review is probably cut a bit short I didn't have the information we would like or probably more that there were ongoing issues that were worth bringing to your attention as a potential buyer anyway in this example I did buy the product it has been publicly available for weeks now so I'm very much coming at this one from the angle of a consumer so someone bought the product so yeah I'm more critical of products that you can go out and buy because really issues like the ones that I have with this board should have been solved or addressed or not even happened before they were publicly available the good news though in this example I was able to contact the manufacturer so ASRock in form of the various issues that I was having and got them to mostly fix them today's sponsor spot is brought to you by gigabytes GeForce rtx40 Series Laptops the aorus 15x and 17x are premium gaming machines with up to Nvidia GeForce RTX 49 laptop Graphics delivering a great Ray tracing experience in a performance optimized design thanks to the new Ada Lovelace architecture these new Systems Support dlss3 frame generation enhanced Max Q efficiency and super fast AI acceleration you may also be tempted by the excellent gigabyte G5 which offers a range of powerful RTX 40 series gpus and the latest 13th gen Intel processors all in an attractive great value package for creators on the go gigabytes Aero series have you covered the Aero 14 is just 17 millimeters thin supports HDMI 2.1 and Thunderbolt 4 plus it has fast CPU and GPU options need a bit more screen real estate the Aero 16 has you covered for more information please click the link in the video description so let's rewind a little bit late last month AMD announced their entry level a620 chipset for the am5 platform promising sub 100 US motherboards supporting ryzen 7000 series processors one of the first announced and released motherboards to use this affordable chipset was asrock's a620m Dash hdv m.2 plus which was also available without the plus featuring a cut down vrm and has to be said such an affordable am5 motherboard is certainly an alluring Prospect for many of you and as such dozens of our float plane and patreon members asked for me to test it out so I've purchased the m.2 plus version from ueg as it features an actual vrm heatsink and at the time of purchasing included support for 170 watt CPUs such as the ryzen 9 7950x on the CPU support list so I was very keen to see what the a620m hdv m.2 plus could do as especially after having been so impressed with the ASRock b650m hdv m.2 just weeks earlier the b650 version of the hdv is an excellent value motherboard and at present costs just a hundred and twenty dollars U.S and amazingly has no issues powering the ryzen 9 7950x with its 850 amp power stages and I would say this is the best b650 motherboard on the market right now the question is though could the same vrm but with too fewer 50 amp power stages so half a dozen in total be enough to tackle the 7950x now you might say why does it matter no one is going to pair a 16 core CPU with a cheap a620 board now that might be true though I'd never like to be the one making such an assumption rather I'd like to know exactly what the product I'm buying can and can't do especially if I'm interested in taking advantage of am5's platform longevity with future upgrades possibly to a more powerful higher end CPU after all if the b650m-hdv m.2 can run the 7950x at full speed just fine without any kind of thermal or throttling issues is it worth saving a further 20 on this a620 version well the intention of this content is to find out so I've purchased one from Newegg I've thrown in our test system and I've got to work the first stop was to visit the ASRock website and download the latest boss revision as it's always best practice to update a motherboard before testing the latest bias available at the time was version 1.19.as05 so I flashed the a620 board installed the 7950x which is a CPU that was on the CPU support list going into all of this testing now it has to be 7750x is the ultimate of vrm Benchmark given that it's the most powerful am5 processor currently available now when running our cinebench R23 all-core workload what I found out almost instantly was Hardware info detecting thermal throttling but this wasn't a CPU issue rather it appeared to be the vrm throttling the a620 board would only let the 7950x briefly run without power limits before enforcing a 90 watt cap now this was a bit strange because we were only measuring a vrm temperature of 70 degrees which is reasonably cool but the worst part were how the power limits were being enforced rather than just clocking all the cores down to an appropriate frequency that fit within the power limit the board would let as many cores run at the maximum frequency as it could while slashing other cores down to 544 megahertz and this caused horrible stuttering in games with the 7950x basically the ball was broken with the 16 core CPU so I decided to try the 7700x the ryzen 7 processor is a 105 watt part so surely it would work but again the board enforced a 90 watt limit which saw the CPU running well below the TJ Maxx but it again meant that at least half of the cores were clocking down to 544 megahertz resulting in terrible all-core performance and even issues when gaming so surely the 7600x would work but sadly no that wasn't the case the same issues were again present and despite having just six cores around half of them were clocking down to 544 megahertz under load I then installed the 65 watt ryzen 9 7 900 and while there was a lot less throttling here performance overall was still bad as some cores were still dropping down to that dreaded 544 megahertz I decided to fire up shadow of the Tomb Raider which is quite a CPU intensive game and found that after 20 minutes of walking around the village section that we use for benchmarking performance was up around 310 FPS which I believe is normal but after walking around for another 10 minutes thermal throttling started to kick in and the frame rate did lower and one percent lows were even worse so I came back to the same area as before and noticed that frame rates were now fluctuated between 220 and 260 FPS and that's quite a dip from the fairly steady 310 FPS I was seeing prior after Consulting the digital thermometer I discovered that the rear PCB temperature was indeed back up to 70 degrees and the cores were down clocking to 544 megahertz causing the loss of performance just seeing in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at this point I knew something was up the board couldn't possibly be this bad so I reached out to ASRock on April 14th in form of my findings they replied explaining that I should use the latest bars revision which I was and they then asked me for some details about the test system which hadn't changed from all of my previous b650 testing they then wrapped up their reply simply by saying my results differ to theirs so that being the case I went ahead and wasted a further three days trying to get the board to work correctly with no success I recorded more footage like what you can see here where performance with the 7700x degrades with every single cinebench R23 run so something was obviously wrong then three days after my initial reply from ASRock they sent another email on the 17th informing that there was a new boss that I should install which fixes CPU performance so that sounded very promising that was version 1.19.as07 but the real kicker was the second part of their email where they told me that the ASRock a620m-hdv m.2 plus doesn't support 170 watt CPUs and that I should check the CPU support list and sure enough upon adding the new boss revision to the website ASRock removed 170 watt CPUs from their support list so to be clear prior to my emails ASRock was advertising this a620 motherboard to support 170 watt CPUs on their CPU support list but now that is no longer a thing after informing ASRock that I had in fact checked the CPU support page before buying the board and was aware that as of the 16th 170 watt CPUs were on the support list the they confirmed that yeah I was correct about that they had since removed support because well the board wasn't meant to support 170 watt CPUs that was a mistake which okay fair enough but by this point I'd now wasted three days testing this thing and now it would seem the data was largely irrelevant as we had a new bus Which ASRock claimed does fix CPU performance the good news though being that after all of this ASRock did manage to fix the board or at least for 65 105 and 120 watt processors while officially removing support for 170 watt models though the board will still boot with those models installed here's a look at how the a620 board behaves with both bias revisions in cinebench r23's 10 minute Loop test as you can see the original as05 boss was very broken and with the fixed version the 7700x was almost 80 percent faster though oddly the 7800x 3D only saw a nine percent boost as the original performance wasn't nearly as bad inconsistent performance does occur though when thermal throttling is introduced even when using a three run average the good news though is that with the latest bias the 7800x 3D and 7700x are now performing as they should delivering comparable performance on the a620 board to that of b650 and even x670 models and the same is also true for the ryzen 9 7900 which saw a 31 increase with the new bass boosting the score to 24 504 points which is roughly where it should be the 7950x though which is 170 watt part and isn't supported officially anymore well that doesn't perform as it should though the new boss is a massive improvement over what we were seeing with the previous revision but a score of 21 356 points will be as good as it gets for this a620 board for the 7950x and that's a score that is 44 lower than what it should be still the 120 watt 7950x 3D worked as expected with the latest bias scoring an impressive 35 751 points and 86 improvement over the previous boss revision now the cinebench R23 single core performance is where it should be as this is a very light load test which doesn't stress the vrm so both bars revisions do work here in games though we did see that for the most part there is a big difference between the two bars revisions especially if you're in a stress test for a long period of time which we've done here these are 30 minute stress tests not just the usual 60 second Benchmark passes and the only exception was the 7800 X 3D which should have suffered more with the as05 bias when compared to the 7900 but for some reason it just didn't perhaps the 3D V cache is helping avoid a noticeable performance loss as the cause throttle anyway for most of the CPUs after a warm-up period we found performance was very poor with the original boss but with the updated version which addresses CPU performance CP performance in games is now as expected and here's a look at vrm Thermals starting from the top of our graph we see at the 7950x3d is now pushing the board up to 82 degrees with the latest boss whereas previously the board had a 70 degree thermal cap the 7950x on the other hand is now around 92 degrees and I suspect the board now has a 90 degree thermal cap or it really could be up around 100 degrees let's say depending on where ASRock is measuring from but from the rear side of the PCB the peak temperature is now 90 degrees interestingly the 7900 and 7800x3d are now performing better and running cooler with the new bar so I suspect ASRock has gone and done some voltage optimization as well then we have the 7700x which sees a six degree increase in varium temperatures with the latest bars revision and for those of you wondering this is how the a620m hdv m.2 plus compares to entry level b650 boards when running the 7950x as you can see with around a 90 degree thermal cap the CPU is averaging a clock frequency of just 3615 megahertz which is almost 30 percent lower than most b650 boards and here's how that translates to Performance just 21 356 points which means asrock's own budget hdv b650 board is 75 faster and keep in mind that board costs just 20 dollars U.S more so there you have it it's been a long journey for us with the a620m hdv m.2 plus and while I'm glad we were able to push ASRock to fix the board as quickly as they did at the end of the day this it's just not a product that you should even consider there's just no getting around the fact that it is twenty dollars cheaper than asrock's own b650m hdb m.2 a board that can support all ryzen 7000 series processors without any performance or thermal concerns not only that but the extra 20 for the b650 board buys you two and a half gigabit Lan whereas the a620 boards limited to just gigabit land you also get PCA 5.0 m.2 support with a heat spreader whereas the a620 board is limited to pcie 4.0 and there's no heat spreader there's more USB ports on the i o panel and you get better USB support in general you also get a pre-installed IO shield and on top of that you also get better PCI expansion support with a second pcie times 16 slot wired for times 4 bandwidth and this is replaced with a times one slot on the a620 model in short the a620hdv is a massive downgrade from the b650 hdv it is simply not worth all the drawbacks to save a measly 20 and the A5 platform it also promises broad platform compatibility with support for multiple upcoming CPU Generations so limiting support now to save twenty dollars it just seems like a bad idea but this brings me to my biggest concern with the a620m hdv m.2 plus and motherboards like it if you come away from this video knowing all of the facts about this board and you still decide to save the 20 and get it fine you're certainly free to do so but what I'm not keen on is someone purchasing this motherboard under the impression that it supports all AMD socket am5 ryzen 7000 series processors and that's what asrock's product page claims on the overview and specification tabs and we're still up until just a few days ago even the CPU support list page noted support for 170 watt processors but thankfully we were able to get ASRock to fix that ASRock also offers a non-plus version of this board with two of these six power stages removed creating a four-phase board which only supports 65 watt processors thing is though unless you specifically visit the product page and check the CPU support list you'd never know this again the product advertisers and claims to support amd's socket am5 ryzen 7000 series processors and the specifications table lists under CPU supports AMD socket am5 ryzen 7000 series processors and it's not until you click on the support tab then the CPU support list that you discover that just 65 watt models are supported what ASRock should have done here in my opinion is name the a620m hdv m.2 plus as the a620m hdb slash 120 W and the non-plus as the a620m dash hdv 65w because the real CPU support for each motherboard is significantly more important than knowing if the secondary m.2 slot is connected to the CPU or the chipset which isn't even made clear in the product name anyway and I don't mean to just pick on as rock here this is something I've grilled AMD about over the past week they really need some kind of validation program to ensure their customers are getting the support they deserve looking over a620 motherboards from other partners we see that MSI claims support for 170 watt CPUs on their Pro a620m-e which I've got to say has a pretty awful looking environment I haven't tested it so I can't say for sure but I'd be very impressed if that board supports 170 watt CPUs correctly gigabyte also claims 170 watt CPU support on their a620m gaming X though that board does look like it has a chance of supporting Parts like the 7950x and then we have Asus who also lists support for 170 watt CPUs on their Prime a620m-a-csm and I'd be very surprised if it actually does at least at the expected level of performance and that means if the Asus and MSI boards are indeed limited to 120 watt or even 60 watt Parts like I suspect they really need some kind of indication of this in the product name and on that note online retailer Newegg is doing a better job than ASRock of informing customers that these a620 boards are limited to 65 watt and 120 watt Parts by including that information in the listings title so great job there Newegg anyway hopefully this is something we can improve on the AMD side of things moving forward as we've been pretty unsuccessful in our attempts to solve this issue for Budget Intel boards which are a complete and utter disaster and a real Minefield for consumers but we'll keep pushing there as well at least when we get a chance I know a lot of you have asked for b760 board reviews and stuff like that obviously we've invested a lot of time on the am5 front at this point not because we prefer AMD but because am5 is a platform that will be used for at least two more generations of CPU so therefore it makes sense to invest the time there whereas the Intel 700 series of boards will be pretty well dead after well this point forward no more future CPU Generations or at least new architectures on those boards I'll try and get to them but I am prioritizing am5 for the reason just mentioned better investment on our end and there's obviously a lot of you interested in am5 as well anyway I'm gonna do it for this video hopefully you enjoyed the sort of sort of different approach to testing motherboards because of all the issues we have with this publicly available board I do have one more b650 board the gigabyte M K MK board I'll be checking that out soon and seeing if that's any good because that's available like 120 as well similar to the hdv b650 so and then they'll be I've got a dozen other b650 boards already tested sort of the mid-range and then I'll look at the high-end board so there's a lot more am5 b650 stuff coming up probably mostly done with a620 for now I don't just I can't see how it's worth it unless you're getting these boards like fifty dollars I don't see it anyway like subscribe do all that stuff uh float playing patreon if you want to get more involved I I provided a bit of sort of BTS information behind the scenes information about this board as I was testing it and sort of explaining my journey as I went because it's quite frustrating but we we sort of got there in the end float playing patreon you get access to our exclusive Discord server I talk about products like this behind the scenes content q and A's and monthly live streams check it out if you're interested if not that's perfectly fine and I would like to thank you for watching this video I'm your host Dave see you next time [Music] foreign

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 176,296

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: DMKV1Cm25KQ

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023