Help an AMD guy figure out what Intel build to put together for Win7

[SIW2]

Look at the link here Windows 7 on B550 With Ryzen 5 CPU

 

[sluggerb]

Doing some googling, it looks like there are Win7 drivers for the B450 chipset from several mobo mftr's, which supports a Ryzen 7. Assuming I got a mobo with Win 7 drivers (I was looking at this one B450 AORUS M - B450 AORUS M (rev. 1.x) Key Features | Motherboard - GIGABYTE Global) would it be as simple as building the system, popping in the Ryzen, installing Windows, then the Win7 drivers from the website?Any compelling reason to go either way? It does look like the Ryzen build I would be looking at (Ryzen 7 5700X) would be around $150 more and benchmark around 10% faster. I'm thinking saving the $150 by going with the Intel build and putting that money into an SSD would be a better improvement

 

[Megahertz07]

Even if you have Win7 drivers for the B450 chipset from several MoBo mftr's, you have to add them to the Win 7 installation drive or you won't have mouse and or keyboard (missing USB3.x drivers) and you won't see the drive (missing SATA and or NVMe drivers)

 

[sluggerb]

Even if you have Win7 drivers for the B450 chipset from several MoBo mftr's, you have to add them to the Win 7 installation drive or you won't have mouse and or keyboard (missing USB3.x drivers) and you won't see the drive (missing SATA and or NVMe drivers)

I have Win7 install media with USB3 drivers added in so that's no problem, but even if I didn't, there are other 450M boards (Asrock B450M Pro 4 is one) that have USB 2.0 and PS/2 ports, so that's not a concern. I am not using NVMe drives, just SATA HDD's, and every Win 7 install I have done recognized SATA HDD's out of the box.

That said, after doing more research, it doesn't really seem worth it to spend the extra $150 for a Ryzen build over the Intel one. From what I read, the main advantage Ryzen has over the i7-9700 is that the onboard graphics are much better, but I am not using those on either chip. Benchmark wise it seems to be around a 10% performance gain, which isn't enough to justify the $$ to me. Going from my current FX-8310 to a i7-9700 will be over a 100% performance increase based on the benchmarks I have seen, which is plenty of future proofing for me. .

The only way it would be worth it would be if the Ryzen could reuse the DDR3 RAM I already have so I would not have to buy new RAM, but it doesn't, so I just don't see a compelling reason to spend the extra dough.

 

[SIW2]

UserBenchmark: AMD FX-8310 vs Intel Core i7-9700

 

[sluggerb]

UserBenchmark: AMD FX-8310 vs Intel Core i7-9700

That's what I looked at. 50% - 100% faster depending on the benchmark, and I care more about core speed since I run a lot of VM's that I dedicate cores to.

 

[sluggerb]

Just bought the CPU off eBay, i7-9700F.

Once that shows up I will buy the mobo and RAM, looks like some of the mobos sold out in the past few weeks, not sure if more are coming in, but the Asrock one I was looking at still seems to be available. I was thinking of going with the Gigabyte given SIW2's experience with it, but Amazon doesn't have it new anymore, and I want to buy from Amazon where possible to facilitate easy returns if something goes wrong.

Any compelling reason to go with 64GB or RAM over 32GB? I do a lot of VM and Photoshop works, but 32GB should be fine for that. But if I wai to long it might be a hassle to find a matching pair of memory modules down the road if I want to upgrade, and getting them now eliminates that potential future headache

 

[SIW2]

You might find the gigabyte mobo on ebay. They seem quite popular right now, not many about...

thought I just spotted one but out of stock. There is an msi 365 on qmazon
MSI B365M PRO-VDH Motherboard mATX, LGA1151, DDR4, LAN, USB 3.1 Gen1, Type-C, M.2, VGA, DVI-D, HDMI, Intel 8th and 9th Gen : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

 

[sluggerb]

I'm in the US so UK Amazon isn't where I would go, but I appreciate the lookout

I could go to eBay, and if I have to I have to, but I prefer to get as much as I can from amazon so if things go bad I have an easy return available. the Asrock board does still look available and gets good reviews so I am going to try that. But I am a little wary since the board causing the issues that started this whole mess is an Asrock board

I had to get the CPU from eBay, it will be here next week, I want to wait until that shows up before i order the mobo and RAM off amazon so I get the maximum time to build and test the system before the return window closes. I am hoping it will go smoothly.

 

[sluggerb]

Everything is ordered, CPU and memory ill be here tomorrow, for some reason even tough its listed as Prime, the motherboard is going to take a week to get here *sigh*. Hopefully the build goes smoothly!