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Gaming Discussions

Red Team Monthly Sweepstakes: February

Hi all! The February Sweepstakes is now closed and the winner will be contacted via PM and email. Be on the lookout for the March Sweepstakes thread, coming soon!

Hey Red Team, LET’S DO THIS!

Enter now for your chance to win an ASUS TUF B550M-Plus!

02dc3ac98b8e9eca4633a33d49a7df21.png

 

Entering is easy, just follow these steps:


1. Make sure you’re a registered user and have a ranking greater than or equal to Novice III.
(Hint: you can level up by participating in discussions!)

2. Simply reply to this post with anything! Although it’s not required and won’t increase your chances of winning, feel free to tell us what your favorite AMD product is, what game you’re currently playing, or just say hi. 

Example reply:

a. “Hi! I’ve had a lot of fun playing Jurassic World Evolution 2 recently. Currently playing through the campaigns and excited to start some of the challenges! ”

3. Hit “Reply” and that’s it!


The February Sweepstakes Entry Period opens on Tuesday, February 1, 2022, at 12:00 p.m. Central Time and Entries must be submitted by Monday, February 28, 2022, at 12:00 p.m. Central Time.

For more information about how to enter, visit the blog!



*NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open to legal residents of the 50 United States (D.C.) and Canada (Excluding Quebec) 18 years or older who are members of the AMD Community forum with a ranking of Novice III or greater. Ends 12/31/2022. For Official Rules, including odds and prize descriptions, visit  Red Team 2022 Monthly Sweepstakes Rules. Void where prohibited. Sponsor: AMD, Inc.

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Ashley
Ryzen 7 5800X • Radeon RX 6900 XT • Gigabyte X570S AERO G •
125 Replies
halgameguru
Adept I

Fingers crossed. Need to move up from my current 350

SirNealalot
Adept I

Much excite for the TUF series! My first mobo was a Sabertooth x58. Good luck everyone with the giveaway! 😄

M0T1VE8
Adept I

I had a previous Asus tuf motherboard and it was built really well.  Asus has some of the easiest bios to work with too so whomever wins this board will have a great setup maybe paired with a 5600x.

Will the January winner win this too and have a system or will two people have to buy something?

ardankyaosen
Miniboss

"Please, sir (or ma'am), I want some more."

Thanks.

EddieCane330
Journeyman III

Still using a Asus B450 mb on my 3600x so this would be a decent upgrade!

German_AC
Adept II

Tuf Gaming stuff are great products! Lets gooo

Artificial intelligence is no match for human stupidity.
TSTsankov
Adept I

Didn't get the CPU, want the MB :]
XelaVo581
Adept II

hi!

Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts
Subsilent00
Adept III

I'm looking for the best graphics card from AMD. It would be nice to have an AMD Radeon RX 6800.  Thanks for the giveaway!

freakjap
Adept II

Cha Cha Kitty!

BigAl01
Volunteer Moderator

My submission for the February 2022 Monthly Sweepstakes is a build I did just over a year ago that I call 'Through the Looking Glass'.  This gaming machine has 32 GB of DDR4 3600 Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro RAM and a whopping 1200W Be Quiet! PSU. The Motherboard is the ASRock X570 PG Velocita, and it was ready for the new (at the time) 5000 series without a BIOS update being required. The All-In-One (AIO) CPU cooler is the same Cooler Master unit (ML360R) I used in my Ryzen-Nine build in March of 2020 - very colorful and great at cooling the CPU. For storage I of course went with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus drive at 1 TB for the system drive, and then a few Western Digital Blue SATA SSD drives at 2 TB and 500 GB for data / backup. There are no spinning HDD drives in this build. The components are matched to a 32" ISP 4K monitor from LG, along with a Corsair K60 RGB Pro keyboard and mouse pad. Oh, I guess that's a Corsair Dark Core RGB Pro mouse too.

What sets this gaming machine apart from previous builds at Big Al Computers (my personal website) is the idea of hanging the case (Thermaltake P5 or at least part of it) below the glass table. To do this, I had to fabricate a steel frame, using shelf brackets and steel bars. This frame simply hangs onto the edges of the metal in the glass table that I already had (The glass table was previously supporting Osborne-Again-2, built from my old 1983 Osborne Executive computer, which I moved to another location). I made it out of steel because it had to be strong. I didn't want to hear a crash in the night from a weaker design, you know what I mean? Anyway, the Thermaltake P5 case (minus it's own glass top and feet) just sits on the metal frame. I had to install the P5 motherboard tray to rotate the motherboard 90 degrees - moving it closer to the CPU cooler; otherwise the CPU cooler pump / CPU block would not reach the CPU. I added three more RGB fans to get more airflow across the components, and thus I needed to fabricate a frame to hold these (now I used aluminum bar instead of steel).

Overall the system is running very well. I would like to find a figurine of Alice to place on the case, and so I will keep an eye out for one. I have installed several games and this machine made it debut at my Memorial Day 2021 LAN party.  Everyone was vaccinated for that event of course.  

Through-the-Looking-Glass_ (35) (Center).jpgThrough-the-Looking-Glass_ (2) (Medium).jpgThrough-the-Looking-Glass_ (8) (Medium).jpgThrough-the-Looking-Glass_ (19) (Medium).jpgThrough-the-Looking-Glass_ (31) (Medium).jpgThrough-the-Looking-Glass_ (33) (Medium).jpg

As Albert Einstein said, "I could have done so much more with a Big Al's Computer!".
apstwitch
Adept III

That board looks almost too good to hide in a case.

 

lowteck
Miniboss

LET’S DO THIS!



Too Many CPUs & GPUs to list...

Go Team Red

BlackSabbath
Adept II

Hi this is bord old gl all

Robbert
Adept III

Hi there! Still floating in between RDR2 and Diablo 3!

Likebrews
Adept II

It would have been nice to put last months sweepstakes prize on this mother board with a new build and case!! I will have to settle for just the mother board now...

AMD Ryzen R7 2700X on MSI B450 Tomahawk Max 64GB Corsair RGBPro RAM MSI Armor 8GB RX580 WD NV750 Black Creative xFi Fatality 7.1 Twin MSI Optix MAG27322CQR
Duh_buhl
Adept I

good luck everyone!

CosmicV
Adept I

Thanks AMD!

This board is a great foundation for a basic system. It may not have all the bells and whistles but it has enough where it counts for the average user/gamer/professional.

The AM4 Socket allows any Ryzen 5000, 4000 and 3000 series chips (like the 5700G , 4700G, 3600X etc.), easily handles 3200GHz RAM (up to 4600 OC). It can support max 128GB RAM which is great, and also can use ECC memory (unbuffered) for those that need a Workstation.

It has a DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 2.1 which is great for connecting to 4K screens, however since it's not the top of the line X570 Chipset , the B550 has less connectivity with only one(1) PCIe 4.0 slot (at 16x) and only three PCIe 3.0 slots (16x, 4x and 1x).

I'm saying all this not because someone paid me but because I know computers and that this info may help people understand what this prize is.

It's not the best motherboard out there by far, but it is very good for the basics, and has some great features on top. For example I like that it has fairly good heat sinks for the VRMs, Chipset and some M.2 slots.

I personally like the B550 boards over the X570 only because it doesn't need active cooling on the Chipset.. in otherwords, it doesn't use a fan for cooling the chipset which may end up failing at some point or create additional fan noise. That's just my personal opinion because I really like silent PCs (and fans tend to die eventually or make loud noises in later years). This board has four(4) fan headers which isn't a lot but it's enough for most people. You probably won't be using water cooling with this system unless its a 240/280 or less.

Many higher-end motherboards offer more than 4 SATA ports, but 4 should be enough for most people (really). I believe most people just have one or two drives anyway (a fast M.2 NVMe for the boot drive, and a larger/slower drive for storage).

With this board, you can use the fastest drives on the market that support PCIe 4.0 at 4x, which means up to ~7.5GB/s speeds. It has one other M.2 slot that runs at PCIe 3.0 speeds which is still not bad at up to 3.2GB/s. So two(2) M.2 drive options and four(4) SATA-III (6GBps) options is actually really good if you don't need more than 6 drives.

SATA drives are still really good for additional storage since you can get some 1TB or 2TB SSDs for fairly cheap these days and they can run at up to 550MB/s speeds and much lower I/O latency than mechanical drives... you may not even notice a difference in speed between the M.2 drives and the SSD SATA drives for basic system operations and smaller games.

You can even do RAID 0/1/10 on this if you want to, but since there's only one PCIe 4.0 M.2, and one M.2 PCIe 3.0 slot, you probably wouldn't do it unless it's off the SATA ports. I personally use two mechanical storage drives running off SATA in RAID 0 so that it's a little faster for longer file transfers. I also have RAID 0 with older SSDs and they run close enough to 1100MB/s when combined (Samsung 850 Pros).

It has a 2.5GBps LAN port which is really awesome since 1GBps is rather old now and I'd like to see more faster network options going mainstream.

It has 7.1 Sound with a Realtek S1200A chip, which means 108 dB SNR output and 103 dB SNR stereo input (line-in/mic). It's good if you're using the back panel inputs for audio, but most people just use the audio that comes with HDMI (from the graphcis adapter) so this to me isn't that important but it's a good thing to have just in case.

This has 14 USB ports, 8 at the back , 6 at front for a total of 14. One of the USB ports is the newer Type-C and the rest are the standard Type-A.

Two are the fastest USB 3.2 Gen 2, then Six are USB 3.2 Gen 1 (which is what used to be called USB 3.0), and then Six are USB 2.0 which are  still fine for older hardware and devices that don't need as much speed (like mouse/keyboard, older USB drives, etc.).

One of the most important things I look for in a Motherboard is a BIOS recovery option that allows me to update the Motherboard Firmware without having to boot up the system.

This is important if your BIOS gets corrupted and essentially 'bricks' the motherboard. I had this happen to me as well as many others who have had the misfortune of updating their BIOS and during it experienced a power failure (which stopped the BIOS update before it could complete). This board has ASUS's 'CrashFree BIOS 3' feature that can bring back a dead motherboard that had a corupted BIOS. My definition of BIOS here is the [B]asic [I]nput/[O]utput [S]ystem, which is more commonly referred to as UEFI now.

ASUS is also one of the brands that is known for their quality, although they also make lower end products, this is the TUF branded Motherboard which features some higher quality parts and designs for better stability when over-clocking. It's by no means the highest end, but it's not the lowest end either, it's actually pretty good for most people.

It even has a PS/2 port which is great if you have an older keyboard that you still like to use. Also Linux users can use that and free up a USB port. I know not every one would care about a PS/2 port in 2022 but I actually do!

There's a lot of things to look for when choosing a Motherboard and I'm sure there are a lot of questions for people new to computers so I hope the above helped someone get an idea of how great this give-away is.

I've recently been exploring some older PC titles and finishing those games I've put aside in the past. Older games can be really fun to play these days because with even mid-tier/low-end hardware of today.. you can play a game from 5-10 years ago as if you're running the best system possible when the game first released.. so you can pump up the graphics and detail to the max and experience it the best way possible. I only wish that newer versions of Windows would keep up with backwards compatibility so that we wouldn't need workarounds for things like EAX sound (Fallout New Vegas, F.E.A.R, KOTOR and many others made good use of it.. and I know ALchemy is a workaround as well as DSOAL but it may not always work the same or be as compatible and 5.1 Audio with EAX is a blast with those older games).

Well, that's enough for now. Thanks again AMD for the give-away, much appreciated!

 

majicalpanda
Adept II

The first and only board I ever bricked was a asus one T.T 

rockmuncher
Adept II

Cool looking motherboard

TSTsankov
Adept I

So only for people in the US?

thealwaysgreenPNW
Journeyman III

O look my best friend in 2022, The PS/2 Port. 

Ol' Reliable

😄

 

Drahzzel
Journeyman III

I needs this!

drewster
Adept II

Looks like a nice board.  Could use it to build a system for one of my children

My computer is 10 years old and needs some serious upgrading or out right replacement.  Here is hoping.

Roger0072
Adept II

Hmm interesting.  ASUS board tho so I'm on board

hlaks
Adept I

Looks like a sick Mobo with lots room for upgrades.

kernelalas
Adept I

Nice Motherboard! Can't wait to see it in action.

Gl all

Evankt
Journeyman III

This is a reply. Hopes high reality low 😅

jeffp7
Journeyman III

the B550 would be the perfect baseline for my wife's new build to replace her aging i5-7400!

Ready to get her on all AMD!

 

--

Jeff

Ryzen 5 3600X     Radeon RX 5700  AsRock x570 phantom 4 gaming  48Gb RAM

 

jamesc359
Forerunner

I'm currently playing through Control. It's okay, but the game play borrows heavily from other games (and an infamous TV show) and it's very noticeable.

jpamayo
Adept I

Hi! I currently have the Gigabyte X570 AORUS Elite Wifi but am thinking of upgrading my GPU, which has me considering a new processor to pair with it, which then has me considering replacing the motherboard and just doing a completely new build, lol

So this would be a nice jump start, but I'm on the fence whether to get the GPU first, wait for prices to come down a bit or just go ahead and get everything now. I mostly do gaming and photoshop, some web dev programming.

Anyhow, I currently have the AMD Ryzen 5 3600x with an AMD Radeon RX 5700 which is pretty good but I would like to upgrade from 1080 gaming to 1440 so was considering upgrading to the 6600xt. Will that be good enough for 1440 gaming paired with the right CPU?

Thanks!

It would be so cool to win!

Cortello
Adept I

from b450 to b550 yes

dcslatter
Adept II

Would love to get this and start building a computer for my grandson.  He wants to get into game design.

I spent my time with Sniper Elite.  

 

c0mput0r
Adept I

Having fun playing Gods Unchained currently. 

Zainal0
Adept I

Have been enjoying the Path of Exile leagues, and looking forward to killing more time on it.   Getting the most out of my rig, which definitely could use some upgrades, but we will do that slowly, lol.