After watching the video, it doesn't exactly spark the highest of confidence going forward... Maybe I'll go with Intel this time around...

Well, I'm back from the dead. Build went well, all in all. Great chassis, easy to work with and awesome layout for cable management. Now to the more boring parts; I'm having quite a bit of stability issues on desktop stuff and browsing, there's also a lot of trouble with certain games not finding my GPU, reverting instead to the onboard chip (my confusion at getting 15fps in Path of Exile was unmatched). I'm having audio sync issues on youtube, stutters in anything launched from the EA app, and every odd black screen - display reset blinks a couple of times a day. In gaming in general, it runs smoothly though, and quietly. I've yet to see anything go above 69 degrees Celsius (nice!).

For now, I have BIOS 4.10 installed, I haven't tampered with anything save for reducing pump/fan speed on the AIO cooler. RAM is running only at 4800 right now, it went down after the BIOS update, and I'm frankly afraid of raising it to its intended 6000 right now, pending more updates on the whole MOBO/AM5 situation. I think I'd gain some more performance with properly clocked RAM though, so there's might be a little bit of extra juice to extract here.

Couple that list list with last year's and we're looking at a pretty busted yr for AAA games...

Makes me wonder if this is going to be one of those wake up call years for them, or not, and keep facing overwhelmingly negative reviews and refunds.

We can also look forward to the inevitable launch issues with Diablo 4, I wonder it it'll be as bad as Diablo 3 with server problems in its first few weeks.

Personally, my most hyped game this year is Baldur's Gate 3, Larian Studios have yet to disappoint me.

I didn't get most of what the video said, the constant back and forth between the different voltages confused me, but here's what I got, please correct me if I'm wrong:

• There is more than one problem with the voltages. In the video he talks about two of them: the one about EXPO and another one related to the voltage going to the IO die, especifically the iGPU.
• AMD send guidelines to its motherboard partners but didn't check or made sure that they followed them.
• All the different partners are at fault, but Asus is the worst.
• The problem with EXPO was that Asus went the easy route and applied unsafe amounts of voltages to ensure that EXPO worked.
• The protection systems that Asus boards should have don't work, even those that Asus advertises to offer greater protection.
• Gigabyte has a problem where it applies more voltage than what the system reports.
• There will be more videos detailing the other problems.

Did I miss something?

Congrats for having your system up and running! I sorry to find out that you're having troubles with your new system. I hope you manage to fix them soon.

Zen4 follows the path of previous Zen architectures and is quite dependent on RAM speed to get achieve its max performance, and so yes, setting the RAM at the proper 6000MHz will increase your performance. But I'd also leave it at nominal speed right now, until Asus and AMD sort out all the problems and it's safe to enable EXPO.

There's basically two aspects to the issue. One is the CPU killing itself due to voltages which affects all vendors and the other aspect is the motherboard killing itself instead of protecting itself despite being able to which is mainly Asus but could be with other vendors as well.

The reason why the CPU is killing themselves is something that GN doesn't have a full understanding of yet. Their theory is the failure may be triggered by a differential between SoC and other voltages potentially originating from the IO die around the iGPU area. This could be something that happens asap or it could be something that degrades the cpu overtime. Once the problem happens, it creates a short killing the CPU. At this stage, the Over Current Protection from the motherboard vendors is supposed to kick in and save the motherboard from dying along with the CPU. The problem with Asus motherboards is that the OCP doesn't kick in and instead it continued to feed the dead CPU with more and more power until the dead CPU reaches well over 200C and the pins melt. Asus has a sophisticated controller on the motherboard that's supposed to detect this but Asus set the OCP limits too high so the controller says "400 watts going to at 120 watt CPU? Sure why not?"

AMDs current fix is to limit various sets of voltages to make sure this doesn't happen and not just SoC/Expo. This should lessen the degradation or fully eliminate it but GN believes that there could be more issues because the platform is such a mess as they dug into it deeper. As of right now, if the CPU does fail, AMD will warranty it even under Expo but no one is sure if Mobo will agree to it.

Did you do a full reinstall of the OS or just placed the SSD with the old OS and data intact? If you did, then I'd suggest uninstall all previous drivers if you haven't already. Also go into device manager and see if there's anything missing that you may need to update the drivers to. The main one is certainly the chipset driver from AMDs website. Also you can disable the iGPU in the BIOS and see if that fixes the issue.

Both my system drive and games drive are completely clean, I have nothing from my old rig at all, save for some documents and files. I actually haven't installed the AMD drivers for X670E yet, I saw that they were dated back to late February so I wasn't sure they'd do much for a brand new chip. I'll install it later tonight. Which menu in the BIOS holds the iGPU settings and disable function?

It's an absolute blast playing though, games are running super smoothly and the display is amazing. I'm getting a stable 130-144 fps on Horizon: Zero Dawn on max settings in native 4K. Red Dead Redemption 2 runs between 105-120 on max settings in native 4K. It's like re-discovering gaming for me! I installed Jedi: Fallen Order as well, but for some reason it looks quite bad. Tried fiddling with the few setting available but can't seem to make it look as well as I hoped. It runs fine though, unlike the sequel. I've e-mailed the retailer where I bought my components, they're officially part of the AMD deal with a free copy of Survivor, but they haven't actually sent me the coupon yet. From the looks of it though, I might as well wait since it seems to run atrociously on PC right now, regardless of hardware.

Yea you need to install the Chipset drivers asap. They are critical for X3D to work. I don't remember where it's location in the BIOS. You could also disable it through device manager and see if that works.