ASUS B550-Plus Advice if you plan to upgrade things.

simElm

Member
Okay,

so below are the specs of the PC i bought back in June, the computer works really well and we've had no glitches or problems what so ever. The PC was for my son who for Christmas asked if we could up the memory on it, RAM and SSD, I also decided to add an additional 4TB Drive as a back up drive. My son has been doing some CAD work and wanted the RAM extending to make rendering a little smoother. Any way it wasn't so simple, we bought all the upgrades directly from PCS and thought a simple plug in would work, oh no it doesn't. I asked a friend of mine to do the installation as he has his own IT company, heres a break down of what he ended up doing, Leon is my son that he's referring to.

Please feel free to comment as I hope this subject will help others.

Here's a quick rundown of the changes to Leon's PC...

** Motherboard BIOS **
This was upgraded from version 603 to 1401. The main benefit gained was stability (the motherboard really wasn't happy with 2 pairs of RAM fitted) but there's other gains too like improved fan control and compatibility with new processors, graphics cards etc.

** 32GB RAM **
Both pairs of RAM are fitted and passed diagnostic tests following the BIOS upgrade.

** 4TB Seagate Barracuda drive **
This slotted into place without issue and is ready for use. If the This PC icon on the Desktop is double-clicked, you'll find it there - the R-drive.

** M2 SATA SSD **
Leon now has 1TB of 64Gbps storage instead of 0.5TB. It wasn't possible to "combine" both M2 drives into one volume, so the 0.5TB M2 was taken out of the PC. It's in the small cardboard box and can be sold or repurposed. You can buy one of these (https://tinyurl.com/y9x53xof) and fit the 0.5TB M2 drive to it, to format the drive/ clear its contents.

** O&O Diskimage Professional 16 **
I've installed a trial version of this program for doing backups. Close to expiry, you should get a notification (and a discounted price) for purchase of the software, which might cost around £35. A file backup is scheduled to run each Monday at 5pm. If the program is opened and you go to the Jobs & Reports tab, you'll also be able to create a new disk image (think snapshot) of the C-drive - something Leon can optionally do now and again.

** Windows 10 20H2 update **
To stress the new drive and see how it held up, I jumped Windows 10 from version 1909 to 20H2. The drive coped well. The update provides performance benefits for raytracing, refresh rates and other graphical tasks.

** Suggestion - MyASUS App **
Now and again updates will come along for the ASUS motherboard. If Leon clicks the Start button, then click Microsoft Store, he can search for MyASUS. This app by ASUSTek will allow some updates to be downloaded & installed to improve performance etc.



Case
LIAN LI LANCOOL II GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)
AMD Ryzen 7 3800X Eight Core CPU (3.9GHz-4.5GHz/36MB CACHE/AM4)
Motherboard
ASUS® TUF GAMING B550-PLUS (DDR4, USB 3.2, 6Gb/s) - ARGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3200MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2070 SUPER - HDMI, 3x DP GeForce - RTX VR Ready!
1st Storage Drive
1TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 64MB CACHE
1st M.2 SSD Drive
512GB PCS PCIe M.2 SSD (2000 MB/R, 1100 MB/W)
Power Supply
CORSAIR 750W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
CoolerMaster MasterLiquid Lite 240 High Performance Liquid Cooler
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless Network Card
WIRELESS INTEL® Wi-Fi 6 AX200 2,400Mbps/5GHz, 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD + BT 5.0
USB/Thunderbolt Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence [KUK-00001]
 

Martinr36

MOST VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
Well you've voided your warranty on 2 counts:

  1. having work done on it by someone else
  2. updating the BIOS without PCS consent
 
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