I put my eye on the Ryzen 5 1400, B350 boards and 2x4 GB RAM. In a moment of madness, I have even started thinking about buying a 1600 with FlareX 3200 DDR4 RAM. After doing some calculations and reading a lot of reviews, I realized that all this power would mostly be wasted for my use case, so I decided to do some changes.
I have picked the Ryzen 5 1500X, because it was a no brainer vs the 1400: better fan, better clocks, more cache, minor price bump. I have picked the Gigabyte B350M gaming 3 board, mostly because it had dual BIOS. I went for 2x8GB of cheapest 2667 MHz RAM, but made a rookie mistake by not checking the MoBo QVL and not checking if it's single rank (yikes!). In summary, I have sacrificed a few percents of performance, but this build was a lot cheaper.
The hardware installation process went smooth (after the RAM reset to 2133 MHz) and I decided to just plug in my HDD and test it. As expected, Debian Stretch with 4.9.30 kernel ran flawlessly. Windows 7 booted and would probably work after cleanup (I had USB3 drivers installed from previous build), but I decided to reinstall it to have a clean system.
I have used a 1$ USB to PS2 converter and DVD drive to install Windows 7, but after the first installation reboot something broke and it refused to start. I have quickly found the source of the problem: the board came with an ancient F3 BIOS from march. After the BIOS update, I reinstalled Win7. This time everything worked. I have turned on mouse emulation and put in the DVD with Motherboard drivers to finally get the USB ports working. The DVD was a mess: the installer UI refused to work with keyboard navigation and the links to installers were broken. I browsed the DVD to manually install the provided USB drivers one by one, but nothing happened. I have thus decided to download the software from Gigabyte's website and this time everything worked.
After the installation of drivers, I have activated Windows and to my surprise it worked automatically (remember, I have swapped the whole system). I turned on automatic updates and it downloaded and installed over a GB of them. After reboot it started nagging with the "unsupported hardware" screen, therefore I just turned them off.
Now was the time to do some tweaks. RAM XMP profile was not working, so I decided to manually set the speed to 2400 MHz - the currently fastest officially supported speed for dual rank RAM. It didn't work, so I decided to manually enter the numbers (including the 2T command rate). It was a success! I didn't go for 2667 MHz yet, because I really don't need it. The auto overclock pushes the clocks to 3.9 GHz on low loads and with IPC improvements that's already much faster than my i3 was. The idle total system power consumption is around 40 watts which remains unchanged from my previous build. In the torture tests the new build consumes more, but the difference is only 25 Watts. Debian power consumption is slightly higher (5 watts more), but I didn't install the newest kernel yet.
Well if they wanted they could release all the same functions in a "mandatory" update for Windows 7 so u will feel the same about Windows 7 on that point of view as many do with Windows 10.
