The Story Behind My Latest Disaster: A Rise to Fall from Risen to Ryzen

I'm writing this article as a cautionary tale, a warning to all those who dare to venture into the world of CPU upgrades and testing. It's been six years since I started this journey, and I've learned a thing or two about what goes wrong when you're not careful. So, if you're considering upgrading from Risen to Ryzen, or even just thinking about making a change, listen up.

My latest test rig was supposed to be a breeze. I had all the necessary components, including my trusty 2600X and a few other goodies for testing purposes. But, as it often does, fate had other plans. I was in the middle of setting everything up when disaster struck - the power supply cable killed my SSD. Yes, you heard that right. The power supply cable. It's not like I didn't see this coming; after all, it's a common issue with these types of cables.

As I sat there staring at the dead drive, I couldn't help but think about all the testing I was supposed to do. Cinebench, Geekbench, Blender - you name it. All the tests that would show me how the Ryzen 3000 series stacks up against its Risen counterpart. But now, it seemed like all that work was for naught.

But, being the professional that I am, I decided not to give up. I took this as an opportunity to reach out to my community and see what they thought I should do next. And, let me tell you, I got some great feedback. One of the most common suggestions was to test the 1600X against the 2600X. But, here's the thing - I didn't have a 1600X. I had borrowed it from my daughter's build, and now I needed to buy one just to do the comparison.

So, that's where you guys come in. I want to hear from you. What kind of testing should I do? Should I stick with Cinebench and Geekbench, or add some other tests like Blender and 3DMark? And what about bottlenecking? How can we truly understand if we're getting any improvements in total max FPS?

I also got a lot of feedback about the importance of updating my inventory. Apparently, I never updated it, and now I'm missing out on testing an entire CPU generation. So, that's another thing I'll be working on.

But, enough about all that. The real question is - how can we prevent these kinds of disasters from happening in the future? How can we make sure that our power supply cables are safe and reliable? And what about SSDs? Are there any specific precautions we should take when using them?

As I sit here writing this article, I'm reminded that even with all my experience, I'm not immune to mistakes. But, that's the beauty of it - I can learn from these mistakes and use them as a way to improve myself.

So, if you're considering making any changes to your system, take heed of my warning. Make sure you do your research, test your components thoroughly, and never underestimate the power of a good power supply cable. And, always keep in mind that there's no such thing as too much testing.

Reinstalling My OS and Drivers: The Bitter Taste of Failure

As I sit here writing this article, I'm surrounded by the remnants of my failed test rig. The empty box of my dead SSD, the discarded power supply cable, and the pile of broken dreams. It's a bitter taste, but one that I'll have to get used to.

The task at hand is daunting - reinstalling my OS and all the drivers. It's not just a matter of downloading the latest updates; it's about rebuilding everything from scratch. The thought of it is overwhelming, but I know I have to do it.

As I boot up my system for the first time in weeks, I'm greeted by a familiar face - my Windows 10 installation screen. But, something feels off. It's not quite right. And then it hits me - I forgot where I left my backup drive.

Oh, the horror! My backup drive is missing, and with it, all my precious updates and drivers. It's like losing a part of myself. I'm back to square one, forced to reinstall everything from scratch.

But, as I start the process, something strange happens. I realize that this is an opportunity in disguise. A chance to start fresh, to try new things, and to learn from my mistakes. It's not easy, but it's a reminder that even in failure, there's always room for growth.

And so, with a newfound sense of determination, I begin the arduous task of rebuilding my system. I'll download all the latest updates, reinstall my drivers, and hope that next time, everything will go smoothly.

The Community Response: What You Want to See from Me

As I write this article, I'm surrounded by a sea of comments and messages from my community. It's amazing how quickly the feedback has rolled in, with everyone sharing their thoughts on what I should do next.

One commenter suggested that I test the 1600X against the 2600X, while another mentioned the importance of updating my inventory. And then there were those who recommended additional tests like Blender and 3DMark.

But, it's not just about the testing itself; it's about the community that's come together to support me. Your feedback has given me a renewed sense of purpose, and I'm grateful for your input.

So, what do you want to see from me next? More testing? More articles? Or perhaps something entirely different? Whatever it is, I'll be listening. And, who knows, maybe one day I'll even get to test the 4000X series against its Risen counterpart.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys do you see sense here I bet you were expecting a video this morning about rise and second generation and I was expecting to have a video ready to go for you guys to watch this morning as you can see I have all my testing stuff out here here's my 2600 X my 2700 X multiple multiple motherboards old gen new gen but in typical fashion of when a new launch happens I am having problems not a problem with AMD and not a problem with Asus but a problem that reared its ugly head out of nowhere that completely obliterated my ability of getting a video out for you with results on time I think you guys should expect that by now ms:i brings ultra-thin gaming to life at their new GS 65 stealth the four point nine millimeter bezel 144 Hertz 1080p panel nvidia graphics and 8th gen intel cpus make the new GS 65 self a true powerhouse with a small footprint find out more and how to preorder by following the link in the description below series why I'm making this video rather than just powering forward is because when I explain to you the problem and I show you what's happening here you'll understand why I wasn't able to get these results out on time and I owe it to AMD with all of their hard work going into the Rison platform since last year to give them a review that is reminiscent of what the view the buyer is gonna actually get so I first have to show you the problem so here is what we're experiencing right here here's my test bench it's setup it's got the 2700 X in there it's got a GTX Titan X Peaks I want to try and see if bottlenecking is a thing obviously the RAM they sent the motherboard and my RM 850 X power supply from Corsair so when it powered on do you see how it instantly turned off now that is typically indicative of a circuit protect it's built into the power supply to keep you from killing your stuff that immediately triggered a red flag in my mind like oh crap it could be a bad motherboard could be a bad CPU could be a bad power supply knowing I've used this power supply and other builds I didn't start there so here is what I basically did so as you can see when I push power now nothing happens it's in a protected state although we are still getting power to the motherboard 12 volt is not actually going so the only way you can get it back is to power cycle it and then wait for the power to turn off as you can see turn it back on test it again and same exact result you can see the fan spins for a second lights up so on what I would normally do in this case is start removing things from the system removing USB seeing if that solves anything wait for the light power to turn off because until the power actually drains out of the caps the board will not reset powers went off to the power supply now for like 10 seconds that's how much power these caps actually retain there we go so now I can turn it back on check it again same exact result process of elimination I would move over here to the mother or the mrs. Anton motherboard this is a graphics card so now I'm gonna go ahead and wait for this to turn off I need even if I push the power button it doesn't drain the caps because the power button does nothing when it's in this state take out the graphics card power back up give it power same result so now this is where I typically would go crap we're drilling down to just the CPU now starting to get really worried going crap please don't tell me I got a bad CPU don't don't tell me that because if I say I got a bad CPU from AMD everyone's gonna say AMD J says AMD sucks jeiza Intel shill and that's not the case here I want to give you guys a true video about the performance of these parts so the next thing I did was I went ahead and unplugged my 12 volt power from the CPU kind of like when I did that video about my where I accidentally blew up my dad's computer unplugging the 12 volt power and having the computer then power on tells me that the CPU was bad or at least the power delivery to the CPU and that was what we experienced in the other video in fact I'll put a link here you guys can go and check it out so I check this out without the CPU plugged in same exact result so that immediately told me we weren't dealing with a bad CPU now I'd already swapped out the motherboard I have two of these motherboards I was sent one by Asus and sent one with the AMD package the same unboxing you guys saw the other guys do have all the same parts so now I went okay what the heck could it possibly be switched out the motherboard it made no difference whatsoever check this out you ready unplug the SATA cable from my SSD power it back on and check that out ok alright so now the power of deduction or deducing or whatever we want to call it would probably tell you that this SATA cable could possibly be bad so I swapped the SATA cable over to this one here and we actually ended up with the same result with this plugged into the SSD let me demonstrate and there we go thinking that it was now the power I unplug the power cable plug this back in wait for this to reset also knowing it wasn't my graphics card I'm gonna go ahead and plug that back in now give it some power because now we want some video right we want to make sure we're actually getting video this is all the kind of stuff you go through when you're troubleshooting any sort of system that gives you this sort of a failed boot now I get a lot of people arriving email saying my computer will click on for a split second and click off and as you can see it could be many different things ok so thinking is probably a bad SATA cable we went ahead and plug everything back in thinking we're up and running and there's the same problem here is now where things got really interesting so the SSD is not actually fully operational unless both of these are plugged in you can plug in your SATA data connector or you can plug in your SATA power independently but it doesn't really do anything as long as both are not plugged in so I'm going to show you right now is with this unplugged how we're actually going to get a video signal oh you know what helps when we actually plug in VGA cables how's that and there it is what we're doing here is this a process of elimination so obviously we've drilled past the CPU we drilled past well normally I would try the memory as well but I didn't obviously so we went drill past the CPU we drove past the GPU we started unplugging things we unplugged all of our USBs and as you can see we are now sitting here currently inside of the BIOS check this out you ready you got both of those in frame Nick yeah Oh what just happened there so now and I know that there was power going through the SSD cuz it's warm it's actually a little bit warm right now this Drive is now dead which is why you don't have a video today because what we determined is this power cable with no phrase anywhere no loose pins anywhere no pinched wires all of the connectors are perfectly intact as you can see none of these wires have any terrible bends on them like that been bent over really badly everything looks perfectly fine there is no damage anywhere on this cable so now if I switch over to another power cable here and this is where I start to get concerns that maybe my power supply was going bad so my next step was actually gonna be to try a different power supply but I'm glad I didn't because the power supply is actually fine as I will demonstrate right now there we go so you can see new power cable plugged in SATA data cable still plugged in and we are now currently booting and we will make it to the BIOS this like I said killed my drive so if I take this drive right here which is my my 500 gigabyte evo 850 or 850 Evo it works fine it will detect however my 250 gigabyte Drive oh no keyboard detected geez so if I go over here to boot check it out see how my boot options and my boot priorities and boot override is completely grayed out this drive does not detect any longer so if I plug in my other drive now you will see that this Drive will indeed detect showing that both the power cable and the SATA data cable are perfectly fine so what that actually did was it took this this drive right here is a risin OS install this is the drive we use we do Rison testing because we don't want to be overlapping intel drivers and Rison drivers and chipset drivers and stacking that stuff when we go back and forth between systems because that can cause all sorts of weird funky problems that's not fair to either manufac sure when it comes to doing performance testing I don't have a backup Rison OS drive and considering the fact that I would have to then reinstall all my games of stuff because I'm an idiot that put all the draw at the games on the same install as this because again the game installs you know based on the OS and I want to keep everything simple I never cloned this drive again or party or did an image of it so now that means I have to reinstall windows 10 have to reinstall the two major updates have to reinstall all the security patches have to reinstall all the games all the drivers and there's no way in heck that that was gonna actually be done in time so you can see right here how it's saying reboot and select pop proper boot device that is because this drive has no OS on it so if we reboot you'll see this Evo drive shows up see there it is right there Samsung SSD Evo 500g so this Drive unfortunately now is about as good as a doorstop and it's even too short for that so it's good for nothing now unfortunately this course there power supply cable killed it I'm lucky didn't killed that drive because I did try a boot with this one but I think the repeated testing eventually just took its toll on the SSD but the reason why I don't test this stuff way in advance because I've been doing this for almost six years now and I have learned that there are always last-second UEFI updates BIOS updates I think there's even a AMD storage update that had to go live at the last second and in fact one of the tools that was sent over by AMD that's part of Rison - and some of the stuff that's built for that was updated yesterday yesterday meaning a lot of the testing we would have done up until now would have to be redone so I no longer will bust ass to try and get this stuff done early to accommodate a 6 a.m. launch I will wait until quite honestly the last minute and be late that way I have the most up-to-date possible drivers and software and BIOS and all that stuff so there you go guys that is why you don't have a rise into video from me on launch I guess technically you do but as you can see all the hardware works fine it was corsair that killed me this time i was all ready to take my notes i was all ready to do my testing so this is a good opportunity now for me to reach out to you guys because something else i screwed up on was I was gonna take my 1600 X and compare it to the 2600 X and the 1700 X compared to the 2700 X seeing how resin one versus risin two generational improvements came about we checked our inventory and saw the yo we the 1600 X the problem is we never updated the inventory and I used that 1600 X and my daughter's build so I have a 1700 X and no 1600 X so now I've got to buy that which means now I can do my side to side comparison board I want you guys to help me with this what kind of testing do you think we should do what I planned on doing was testing things like Cinebench Geekbench doing blender stuff like that to compare old gen and new jet if I just give you a new gen number doesn't really give you anything to compare I mean obviously if you want to buy a new CPU and stuff go with the latest and greatest if if you can afford it but I wanted I wanted to kind of talk to people who are considering upgrading from rising 1 to risin to kind of like the old Phenom 1 and phenom 2 era where people were really concerned of whether or not they should update so I was kind of wanting to go that route of course has a new game testing check for things like bottlenecking extreme high FPS 1080p gaming on like 200 hertz panels which exist now to see if we actually are getting any bottleneck improvements or any any sort of improvements in total max FPS so that's why I need you guys to chime in tell me what you want to see and now I have time to hopefully do that so I'm gonna get started now reinstalling this OS and all the drivers and all the updates and all the games and stuff and that's gonna really suck so don't take pity on me I don't I mean this is this is my own doing I guess it still sucks though alright guys we're gonna go thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next onewhat's up guys do you see sense here I bet you were expecting a video this morning about rise and second generation and I was expecting to have a video ready to go for you guys to watch this morning as you can see I have all my testing stuff out here here's my 2600 X my 2700 X multiple multiple motherboards old gen new gen but in typical fashion of when a new launch happens I am having problems not a problem with AMD and not a problem with Asus but a problem that reared its ugly head out of nowhere that completely obliterated my ability of getting a video out for you with results on time I think you guys should expect that by now ms:i brings ultra-thin gaming to life at their new GS 65 stealth the four point nine millimeter bezel 144 Hertz 1080p panel nvidia graphics and 8th gen intel cpus make the new GS 65 self a true powerhouse with a small footprint find out more and how to preorder by following the link in the description below series why I'm making this video rather than just powering forward is because when I explain to you the problem and I show you what's happening here you'll understand why I wasn't able to get these results out on time and I owe it to AMD with all of their hard work going into the Rison platform since last year to give them a review that is reminiscent of what the view the buyer is gonna actually get so I first have to show you the problem so here is what we're experiencing right here here's my test bench it's setup it's got the 2700 X in there it's got a GTX Titan X Peaks I want to try and see if bottlenecking is a thing obviously the RAM they sent the motherboard and my RM 850 X power supply from Corsair so when it powered on do you see how it instantly turned off now that is typically indicative of a circuit protect it's built into the power supply to keep you from killing your stuff that immediately triggered a red flag in my mind like oh crap it could be a bad motherboard could be a bad CPU could be a bad power supply knowing I've used this power supply and other builds I didn't start there so here is what I basically did so as you can see when I push power now nothing happens it's in a protected state although we are still getting power to the motherboard 12 volt is not actually going so the only way you can get it back is to power cycle it and then wait for the power to turn off as you can see turn it back on test it again and same exact result you can see the fan spins for a second lights up so on what I would normally do in this case is start removing things from the system removing USB seeing if that solves anything wait for the light power to turn off because until the power actually drains out of the caps the board will not reset powers went off to the power supply now for like 10 seconds that's how much power these caps actually retain there we go so now I can turn it back on check it again same exact result process of elimination I would move over here to the mother or the mrs. Anton motherboard this is a graphics card so now I'm gonna go ahead and wait for this to turn off I need even if I push the power button it doesn't drain the caps because the power button does nothing when it's in this state take out the graphics card power back up give it power same result so now this is where I typically would go crap we're drilling down to just the CPU now starting to get really worried going crap please don't tell me I got a bad CPU don't don't tell me that because if I say I got a bad CPU from AMD everyone's gonna say AMD J says AMD sucks jeiza Intel shill and that's not the case here I want to give you guys a true video about the performance of these parts so the next thing I did was I went ahead and unplugged my 12 volt power from the CPU kind of like when I did that video about my where I accidentally blew up my dad's computer unplugging the 12 volt power and having the computer then power on tells me that the CPU was bad or at least the power delivery to the CPU and that was what we experienced in the other video in fact I'll put a link here you guys can go and check it out so I check this out without the CPU plugged in same exact result so that immediately told me we weren't dealing with a bad CPU now I'd already swapped out the motherboard I have two of these motherboards I was sent one by Asus and sent one with the AMD package the same unboxing you guys saw the other guys do have all the same parts so now I went okay what the heck could it possibly be switched out the motherboard it made no difference whatsoever check this out you ready unplug the SATA cable from my SSD power it back on and check that out ok alright so now the power of deduction or deducing or whatever we want to call it would probably tell you that this SATA cable could possibly be bad so I swapped the SATA cable over to this one here and we actually ended up with the same result with this plugged into the SSD let me demonstrate and there we go thinking that it was now the power I unplug the power cable plug this back in wait for this to reset also knowing it wasn't my graphics card I'm gonna go ahead and plug that back in now give it some power because now we want some video right we want to make sure we're actually getting video this is all the kind of stuff you go through when you're troubleshooting any sort of system that gives you this sort of a failed boot now I get a lot of people arriving email saying my computer will click on for a split second and click off and as you can see it could be many different things ok so thinking is probably a bad SATA cable we went ahead and plug everything back in thinking we're up and running and there's the same problem here is now where things got really interesting so the SSD is not actually fully operational unless both of these are plugged in you can plug in your SATA data connector or you can plug in your SATA power independently but it doesn't really do anything as long as both are not plugged in so I'm going to show you right now is with this unplugged how we're actually going to get a video signal oh you know what helps when we actually plug in VGA cables how's that and there it is what we're doing here is this a process of elimination so obviously we've drilled past the CPU we drilled past well normally I would try the memory as well but I didn't obviously so we went drill past the CPU we drove past the GPU we started unplugging things we unplugged all of our USBs and as you can see we are now sitting here currently inside of the BIOS check this out you ready you got both of those in frame Nick yeah Oh what just happened there so now and I know that there was power going through the SSD cuz it's warm it's actually a little bit warm right now this Drive is now dead which is why you don't have a video today because what we determined is this power cable with no phrase anywhere no loose pins anywhere no pinched wires all of the connectors are perfectly intact as you can see none of these wires have any terrible bends on them like that been bent over really badly everything looks perfectly fine there is no damage anywhere on this cable so now if I switch over to another power cable here and this is where I start to get concerns that maybe my power supply was going bad so my next step was actually gonna be to try a different power supply but I'm glad I didn't because the power supply is actually fine as I will demonstrate right now there we go so you can see new power cable plugged in SATA data cable still plugged in and we are now currently booting and we will make it to the BIOS this like I said killed my drive so if I take this drive right here which is my my 500 gigabyte evo 850 or 850 Evo it works fine it will detect however my 250 gigabyte Drive oh no keyboard detected geez so if I go over here to boot check it out see how my boot options and my boot priorities and boot override is completely grayed out this drive does not detect any longer so if I plug in my other drive now you will see that this Drive will indeed detect showing that both the power cable and the SATA data cable are perfectly fine so what that actually did was it took this this drive right here is a risin OS install this is the drive we use we do Rison testing because we don't want to be overlapping intel drivers and Rison drivers and chipset drivers and stacking that stuff when we go back and forth between systems because that can cause all sorts of weird funky problems that's not fair to either manufac sure when it comes to doing performance testing I don't have a backup Rison OS drive and considering the fact that I would have to then reinstall all my games of stuff because I'm an idiot that put all the draw at the games on the same install as this because again the game installs you know based on the OS and I want to keep everything simple I never cloned this drive again or party or did an image of it so now that means I have to reinstall windows 10 have to reinstall the two major updates have to reinstall all the security patches have to reinstall all the games all the drivers and there's no way in heck that that was gonna actually be done in time so you can see right here how it's saying reboot and select pop proper boot device that is because this drive has no OS on it so if we reboot you'll see this Evo drive shows up see there it is right there Samsung SSD Evo 500g so this Drive unfortunately now is about as good as a doorstop and it's even too short for that so it's good for nothing now unfortunately this course there power supply cable killed it I'm lucky didn't killed that drive because I did try a boot with this one but I think the repeated testing eventually just took its toll on the SSD but the reason why I don't test this stuff way in advance because I've been doing this for almost six years now and I have learned that there are always last-second UEFI updates BIOS updates I think there's even a AMD storage update that had to go live at the last second and in fact one of the tools that was sent over by AMD that's part of Rison - and some of the stuff that's built for that was updated yesterday yesterday meaning a lot of the testing we would have done up until now would have to be redone so I no longer will bust ass to try and get this stuff done early to accommodate a 6 a.m. launch I will wait until quite honestly the last minute and be late that way I have the most up-to-date possible drivers and software and BIOS and all that stuff so there you go guys that is why you don't have a rise into video from me on launch I guess technically you do but as you can see all the hardware works fine it was corsair that killed me this time i was all ready to take my notes i was all ready to do my testing so this is a good opportunity now for me to reach out to you guys because something else i screwed up on was I was gonna take my 1600 X and compare it to the 2600 X and the 1700 X compared to the 2700 X seeing how resin one versus risin two generational improvements came about we checked our inventory and saw the yo we the 1600 X the problem is we never updated the inventory and I used that 1600 X and my daughter's build so I have a 1700 X and no 1600 X so now I've got to buy that which means now I can do my side to side comparison board I want you guys to help me with this what kind of testing do you think we should do what I planned on doing was testing things like Cinebench Geekbench doing blender stuff like that to compare old gen and new jet if I just give you a new gen number doesn't really give you anything to compare I mean obviously if you want to buy a new CPU and stuff go with the latest and greatest if if you can afford it but I wanted I wanted to kind of talk to people who are considering upgrading from rising 1 to risin to kind of like the old Phenom 1 and phenom 2 era where people were really concerned of whether or not they should update so I was kind of wanting to go that route of course has a new game testing check for things like bottlenecking extreme high FPS 1080p gaming on like 200 hertz panels which exist now to see if we actually are getting any bottleneck improvements or any any sort of improvements in total max FPS so that's why I need you guys to chime in tell me what you want to see and now I have time to hopefully do that so I'm gonna get started now reinstalling this OS and all the drivers and all the updates and all the games and stuff and that's gonna really suck so don't take pity on me I don't I mean this is this is my own doing I guess it still sucks though alright guys we're gonna go thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one\n"