Just a little update. I haven’t spent that much time working on the system or the posts, but figured it’s worth making sure you know that I’m not dead yet, and neither is this series of posts.
According to DHL, the A8-9600 should have reached AMD on the 29th of March. But on the 3rd of April I got an e-mail warning me that if the CPU wasn’t returned within 15 days I might lose the privilege of future RMAs. Made me wonder if that penalty is worth it, and I should have kept the A8-9600. Wouldn’t have done it, but considering I’ve never had a CPU fail, there’s some temptation there.
On the 4th of April I got a message that AMD has received the CPU.
I did some testing, running Metro: Last Light Redux, FurMark and Prime95. Metro: Last Light Redux is a much better stress test than the games I ran on the A8-9600, taking 80-90W of system power at the wall, not 60-70W like the rest. Made me even sorrier I forgot to test the A8-9600 with it.
Prime95 took system power was 100W, and Prime95 + FurMark 105W (which cut FurMark’s frame rate in half). I forgot by now how much FurMark took alone. Will retest. Oh, and the system was stable throughout the testing. I’m not using it for everyday use, so can tell if everything else works fine, but for a few hours of testing it was fine.
I tried playing with the power limit option in the BIOS (System Configuration, under Advanced / AMD CBS / NBIO Common Options). There are options for 35W, 45W and 65W, but they did nothing, unfortunately. I’m disappointed, because low power use is something I’m interested in and I want to see how it affects performance. I guess I’ll have to install Ryzen Master and try to achieve results with it.
I said before that the 2200G ran fine with the 18.2.1 drivers installed with the A8-9600, except that MSI Afterburner didn’t show GPU utilisation. When I later booted the PC and ran some tests, I found out that Windows installed a newer Raven Ridge specific driver, 17.40.3735, which is newer than the one AMD has on its site (17.40.3701).
These are all the updates I can think of for now. Well, except that I ordered another 4GB DIMM from Amazon, this time a white one (it was cheaper than the red). Got it today.