New motherboard, the good, the bad, and the ugly

[punkncat]

Well, after discovering that my previous motherboard wasn't up to the task of a permanent overclock of my Ryzen 1700, I opted to do a bit of research and selected myself a good motherboard with well reviewed VRM's. I opted for an ASRock Taichi X370. Got myself a good tower cooler and got everything installed. It's working great, the overclock is stable, and my temps are really low. That's the good part.

The bad part was how much freaking work it is to take APART a build, redo all your cable management and get everything back in while being nervous that you don't mess anything up. That part went fairly well. I will have to take some time next weekend to neaten up the "back" side of the case a bit more.

The ugly is that my Office 2010 saw the hardware change and deactivated my Office suite. Unfortunate that phone in support is (long) gone for this, so had to kiss a key goodbye. Luckily I happened to hold onto the key for a machine I reformatted and sold some time back. I tried that key and was apparently within the number of reuses. Good thing, as I use the Office suite for work.

As to the motherboard, I had done a lot of reading and video watching about various motherboards, chipsets, and in particular the VRM. Everyone kept coming back to the Taichi and the Prime for X370. I happened to take a look on Micro Center site and they had an 'open box' for nearly 50% off retail. I reserved it and went to pick it up, got to look it over before purchase. Everything was good aside from not having the wireless antennae in the box. They even did an operational check and updated the BIOS to the bridge set that works wonderfully with the 1xxx chips. Got a really stable 3.8 OC on 1.3125V, resolved all the issues I was having with my two "premiere" gaming titles, and hasn't been over 65C with the new tower cooler.

Great experience so far.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Good to hear , it's running smooth.

 

[drea.drechsler]

Good to hear , it's running smooth.

I kind of had the same experience, even including my Office 2010 being deactivated, but with different outcomes!

I also went to change motherboard to one I found also at Microcenter, also in the 'open box' bin for like 25% off: in my case an Asus B350M TUF. But this one wouldn't recognize any NVME in the M.2 slot. Oh well, back to microcenter and exchange for a brand new MSI B450M Mortar. Goes to show you that 'open box' bin is a gamble, so always make sure you install and check it out within the return window!

When I got it installed I was amazed to find it booted right up on the NVME which had Windows10 already installed... it simply looked for and found all chipset and CPU drivers and started right up. But Windows 10 was reporting it wasn't activated. So I searched for and found the phone support number where he verified my key was valid but for some reason wouldn't work. He issued a new key and got me going on windows 10.

He also asked me if I had any other MS products (since this was pursuant to a hardware replacement) so I checked my Office 10 and it wasn't activated either. He helped me with that too: verified my Office key was valid and gave me an activation hash to enter and i was back in business. So I think that even though phone support is officially suspended you can still get support if you call the number. It may depend on the type of problem, though.