Finals Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
We want to draw your attention to one important detail. The AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650 processor has not made its debut for the general public and such materials as provided today are experimental in nature. Yes, you can find them at some etailers, but it is all grey market stuff. That also means that there is room for errors as we are trying to befriend a chunk of silicon that really has not made retail officially just yet. As such motherboards would be pending updates and tweaks. Fortunately, nothing serious was found, at the motherboard side, we have some comments though. BIOS support for example. I was confused by a raw BIOS (0805) which is kind of the 4th but had dull bugs like "applying settings from the second time", "intermittent iGPU and dGPU quarrels" or "motherboard failure to perform memory training at first (cold) start". The second is an ecosystem of services and services that come with ASUS Armoury Crate branded software, with a total of up to 10 units. Of course, this does not affect the performance of the system, but starting the system from 9 seconds to 14 can be slowed down easily. These services can also interfere with monitoring programs such as HWinfo. And most importantly, services can conflict with each other, sometimes turning off the backlight for the computer's turned off state can be a daunting task. I'm going to make a little remark - I've never liked backlighting, so for me, this topic is quite painful. This list is closed by the absence of the Clear CMOS button, instead, we have a 2-pin connector that needs to be closed when the PC is powered off. For me personally, it is not clear why ASUS could not make a button on the back panel. To solve this shortcoming I had to connect the Reset button (the connector is the same as the 2 pins one) to the Clear CMOS connector.
We need to talk about the ASUS ROG STRIX B550-I GAMING a bit more as that was the platform of choice for this review. yeah, 17cmx17cm baby, which contains several surprises that are not able to give us a typical representative of X570. The main specialization is simple RAM overclocking. Since I'm not a fan of nameless/unnamed AIDA64 screenshots with high frequency, it was a pleasant surprise for me to get a stable 4533C16 in 1:1 mode. You set up the timings and frequency, the rest - ASUS ROG STRIX B550-I GAMING will do by itself. As practice has shown, even the budget memory like a Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 3600C18 on Micron E-die chips will be enough for comfortable overclocking and your own experiments. And if you want more - Corsair Vengeance LPX 4133C19.
Certainly, 4566C16 is not a limit for this motherboard and in the future, I plan to share with you what is hidden at 5000+MHz. Surprisingly, a few years ago we had a 3466MHz limit. I must pay tribute to AMD and its partners, over the last year they have done a wonderful "educational work" on the X570, the results of which we can see in boards based on B550 chipset. Good VRM will allow accommodating absolutely all processors of Zen2 family, but with the remark - well-ventilated housing. Yes, it would seem that this should be respected at all times, but probably it's better to remind about it before there are any misunderstandings. LLC is extremely flexible and allows to cover all the needs of users, even if it is necessary to get to zero Vdrop in AVX load.
High-quality sound based on 7.1 channel SupremeFX and the ability to install two NMVEs will satisfy even the most demanding gamer. The laconic filling of the BIOS, it has no heap of unnecessary menu items that only confuse the user, it has absolutely everything you might need to overclock and even set up telemetry! The board has a built-in BIOS Flashback and this is a huge plus for those who like to experiment with overclocking or modification of the BIOS.
Concluding
But back to AMD the six-core AMD Renoir APU, this is the world's first hybrid processor series that have up to 16 threads onboard and truly compelling embedded graphics integrated, all that with power consumption below 65W. Within that hardware budget, you'll find 2 memory controllers, at a 7nm process will allow you to overclock the RAM to 2266MHz (this is the single data-rate) and it will not be useless overclocking. Firstly, the bandwidth and latency of RAM is very important for the cores, because they have a reduced L3 cache, and secondly, an integrated video core needs a fast memory subsystem. In most scenarios, AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G can compete on equal terms with full-fledged processors of Matisse family, but there are also some aberrations, for example, compilation speed for some reason was seriously limping behind, in AVX no anomalies were noticed. The integrated video core processing power has subsequently increased to 2 TFLOPS, which really will allow you to play titles like Witcher 3 and Battlefield V at medium quality settings and in 1920x1080, that is a reality albeit not at high framerates of course. Playing older or less demanding games will not be challenging. You should have noticed that the IGP benefits greatly from fast frequency memory. Who is this processor for? First of all, AMD initially made it clear that this is the target solution for OEM segment. Portable workstations or office computer, the very place where AMD Renoir currently sits. It does not require a serious motherboard or special RAM for further optimization and currently, it has no competitors in the likes of Intel. For those who have already purchased a processor on the Zen2 microarchitecture, we're not going to advise you to purchase Renoir, as it is more or less the same in architecture and performance, for those who decided to update their computer is worth thinking about for your typical work PC with even the ability to play games on over the IGP. And with a dedicated graphics card, the differences remain small.
In closing we'd like to reiterate that we used a grey market APU, you can spot them on various etailers and eBay. AMD had zilch to do with any sampling. That's it for this article, we hope you enjoyed this read. Considering this review was performed offsite we'll leave out awards.
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