Gadgetory

Raven Ridge didn't have the smoothest launch for compatibility even outside of pre-launch reviews we had issues getting our retail purchased samples up and running J noted instability issues before launch or well at launch Kyle has tweeted about frustration of trying to get the AP is working and we've done the same finally after lots of troubleshooting and some talking to AMD and others we got the AP is working pretty much smoothly at this point it's actually going well now the fact of the matter is that these can actually be good products as a middle ground between discrete GPUs and game ready graphics hardware in APU packaging but some use cases will require additional care to get it up and running and we'll be talking about the steps we took to get a perfectly stable Raven Ridge system which should hopefully help others having similar issues especially since it's actually out and you can buy it before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly makers of the conductor not liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below so this is more or less what half of the war zone looked like as we were troubleshooting Raven Ridge trying to get it up and working and after I sent out a Valentine's tweet in response to am the horizons Twitter account Valentine's tweet they messaged me and said what problems are you having so we try and fix it so that was partially helpful the rest of it that got us to a functional stable Raven Ridge was just just beating our heads into the wall until it worked for like 16 hours basically so it does work now that's good we can go over all the issues but a recap of the problems so some of these you've seen other youtubers talk about probably I believe J talked about this first one which is video TDR failure it's a blue screen of death we have the same problem and we were able to find a solution I'll go through the solutions separately other issues that we've encountered or folks we work with have encountered include large network file transfer BSOD is on msi motherboards not sure about the others but I know the wireless drivers on the msi board for sure had issues and one of them was large network file transfers another one is onboard Wireless causing a BSOD in general and issues with version 1703 Windows versions 1703 freezing or hanging in potentially resulting in a BSOD as well so I was another problem we'll talk about that in a moment because 79 is required to get it to work I know but I'll get there gpu-z had a known bsod issue that will be fixed within days of this video coming out Windows has a there's a timer bug with MSI boards that we showed in a separate video previously so that was with this board that I think is a be 350 board from MSI so we showed a timer bug there where you could basically trick benchmarks into getting multiples of the score just by putting the system to sleep and it would basically fake the base clock because the windows time would operate slower than real time check that video if you haven't seen it so that was an issue 3dmark installation corruption this one's really annoying it is fixable though so that's good but basically 3dmark this box of shaken 3d mark wood upon certain BSOD user crashes it would basically break to a point of requiring an uninstall and reinstall and then finally some boards like the asrock pro 4 are still severely lacking and bios options in general and there is a sort of solution for this as well but it's not really a great one ideally the vendors get their BIOS in a shape that is it's just better but there are half steps for now so the fixes let's go through these video TDR failure is the big one that I think a lot of people will see and these are all kind of wrapped up in each other but the short of this one future mark uses gpu-z technology the tech power up utility gpu-z so future mark uses part of that 3d mark requires a manual install of the newest sis info version to get it to not fail when you're running it on an APU so if you have 3d mark installed with the sis info version it comes with then you might need to go to their website and manually download the new version that they just launched and use that that should fix some blue screen issues and some issues with three mark corrupting itself I think I think they're tied together I'm not clear on that but either way it'll fix one of them and the other one will get fixed through all this other stuff so that's step one gpu-z the the maker's techpowerup GPZ they're all aware of the issue that's all done by wizard so that should be fixed within a couple of days at this point also running GPZ at all will cause a blue screen doesn't matter if you're using 3d mark but that will definitely instantiate the issue because when you launch leading market it calls for the sis info file if it's pulling the one that GPZ includes then that's that's where the issue occurs the video I think that's the video TDR failure but either way it fixed most of our problems so that's one thing you can do another one for Windows issues general stability crashes blue screens freezes and Hanes so first of all we would recommend installing the chipset drivers first and the GPU drivers second because and this may have changed by now but last I checked with the retail version of the product cuz we bought it we weren't sampled so we actually did do this as consumers it's not like a pre-launch complaint but the last I checked the chipset drivers that I used did contain the correct driver set for the APU for Raven Ridge however it contained a an older or an incompatible GPU driver of some kind if he didn't Express install to the effect that installing the GPU driver first and then the chipset driver using Express install would result in an overwrite of the GPU driver so you'd have the Raven Ridge APU Vega portion not functioning so we'd have to reinstall the GP driver yet so chipset first and GPU next thing we also noticed that performing a clean install of Windows version 17:03 via Microsoft's media creation key the USB key that you make we noticed that that and then upgrading to 1709 could further cause issues so basically the finding is you know a lot of people have versions 1703 media creation keys especially in media cuz we use them all the time so if you go from that and then upgrade to 1709 which seems like it should be sufficient that was causing some of the Haines and crashes we were getting and you could scroll through event viewer and see them popping up so the fix to that was make a new media creation key with version 1709 on it the newest one and install that clean with no windows upgrade pathways so not using Windows Update to get from o3 to own.i you just start at o.9 and the only reason not to do that is well there's really there's not a reason not to do that because it takes even on a slow USB key it takes minutes to make it so we would recommend doing that just start at 7:00 to 9:00 you need to do a clean install to make sure everything works properly and it'll just it'll make life way easier to go that route rather than trying to do the upgrade path which sadly does not work very well for us so it may be different this is a big your mileage may vary thing all these boards have like half functional BIOS - pretty much fully functional BIOS depend on which board it is so that's another big factor to the gigabyte for example I think has like three new BIOS revisions in the last they have three BIOS revisions that work with Raven Ridge so that's just a shooting gallery you pick one and you hope it does what you need we found testing with the gaming k5 which has some of the best features in general we found testing with that board that the absolute latest that time of filming BIOS revision is the one that worked the best and the two that supported Raven Ridge but came out before or at least one of them anyway didn't work as well for us so keep that in mind as well you may need to try a couple of those as for the rest so Windows is the big one gpu-z is a big one that'll be fixed - in 3d mark was also with a Sisson fo thing a big problem that you wouldn't really expect that to cause the issue software shouldn't be causing blue screens but updating sis info will fix that limited BIOS settings are kind of a concern but should somewhat be although I guess with the x4 70 and B 450 or whatever they call it so for limited BIOS although we typically don't like software for overclocking the CPU or CPU components like an IGP typically we prefer to do that through bio it's not through software but Rison master is surprisingly not awful so you can actually use it to overclock the GPU pretty reasonably it gets stuck stuck around 1650 1655 something like that so you get to 16 50 megahertz or so if you're lucky you push SOC voltage you can do that through eyes and master as well so if bios isn't giving you those options which some of these don't I want to say this one I think did not have a GB overclocking options but I've tested so many boards in such a short period of time now I can't even keep straight which ones had issues of the house which didn't so yeah if it if the board doesn't do what you want Ryze and masters okay it's not ideal but it's okay it works fine a gigabyte I think has the best BIOS revision for the IGP overclocking right now but they've had plenty of issues of their own with with BIOS if you kind of read through the forum's with Raven Ridge so it's gonna come down to your configuration very specifically in some cases I think that's most the basics so to recap it if you have had issues with Raven Ridge like we did we bought it on day one I'm sure people out there bought it on day one if you've had problems getting it working hopefully most of those will go away within the next week like this coming week so I don't think you're gonna be in the dark too long motherboards are kind of a problem a lot of people were asking about upgrading motherboards where what do you do if you buy a board or how do you know if a board is already good to go with Raven Ridge and these doing some stuff there so if you go retail physically the boxes that actually have the correct BIOS on it to support Raven Ridge will have a sticker on them so you buy from Micro Center that'll make it easy for you alternatively if you have a shop locally that can flash bios for you they should be able to take care of that and these also I think doing some kind of flash kit now that I read about so that should be taken care of but if you're not aware your board may show up you put Raven Ridge in it it doesn't do it's because that's Ron Byers in it so you need to put Rison in it or figure out what AMD is doing to support your region or whatever that boot kit was so that's one of the other things look out for but overall some boards keep in mind also won't support Raven Ridge really I mean it's like this the crosshair six it'll work it'll boot and it will support the CPU but you don't get any IGP out it has no video out so make sure you look at the i/o on the boards as well but yeah recapping the most important stuff clean install of Windows version 1709 don't go the upgrade path it just it sucks so 1709 clean install 3dmark install that and gpu-z if you want gpu-z you're gonna have to update it later but install them both and then after installing them both go manually grab the new sis info file if it's not included in the 3dmark package when this video comes out and then keep an eye out for GPZ updates like by I don't know with them between Monday and Wednesday is it's kind of what my understanding is so yeah I think everything should smooth out it's it's been frustrating but it should smooth ahead it looks like there's actually like a path to making sure these bsod issues go away and the thing is that like I want to call them minor issues because on one hand these are problems that will be fixed pretty soon it's not like an inherent hardware flaw it's more software and BIOS and firms like all these things working together on the other hand they are technically major issues because anytime you have a blue screen of death or it crashed a desktop or system hang that's a major problem it's like sev one issue when you're reporting it and testing so but it should be fixed if you've had problems that's how to do it if you haven't had problems that's awesome I'm happy for you you whatever you did work then you got lucky too so yeah not everyone will have issues getting Raven Ridge working however clearly from the reviewer community alone pretty much everyone's had some kind of problem along the way somewhere well there's just wireless drivers causing crash or this video TDR failure that is more or less resolvable so yeah our platforms finally fully stable feeling good about testing it now for performance doesn't seem like it's gonna be crashing all the time and corrupting stuff anymore so keep an eye out for that subscribe as always for more go to store that gamers Nexus Don that to support us directly and gonna patreon.com slash gamers Nexus if you'd rather support that way thank you for watching hopefully it works out for you if you bought Raven Ridge I'll see you all next time