Ryzen + X370 Gaming X - My Experience

 I am NOT the enthusiast type that constantly switches parts/platform or is regularly building. By no means am I a tech or overclocking pro and usually do simple tweaking. By all means insight or info welcomed with open arms. 

 The board I picked up ( asrock x370 fatality gaming x ) I purchased through ebay from newegg. It is my second asrock experience, the other board was bought long ago for an amd phenom and worked perfect. So I did have good expectations.

If interested this was a budget oriented build, I simply don't need a top of the line system.

CPU r5 1500x - $129 ebay

CPU cooler wraith prism (explained later) - $29 ebay

GPU reference r9 290x sapphire 4gb - $140 ebay

Mobo X370 gaming x - $129 ebay (neweggs)

Ram DDR4 hyper furyx 2400 2x4gb - $95 ebay (neweggs)

SSD 240gb team group l5 3d - $55$ ebay (neweggs)

Case cougar panzer mid tower - 87$ ebay (neweggs)

PSU corsair rm650x  refurbished - $62 ebay (neweggs) 

5x apevia 120mm fan pack - $27 amazon

MX-4 thermal paste - 6$ ebay

Total = $759usd. I did opt for the more expensive cougar panzer for possibly trying a custom loop finally.

**Onto my experience.

 Setup and included materials were great. Installation was mostly smooth with this board, I did have very minor issues. 

 Cooler mounting back plate, first install of the wraith spire was enough to devastate the plates sticky backing and the metal material is substantially softer than the coolers mounting screws. User error or not I did not really trust this. Cleaned board of metal flakes that came from the threads, re-installed tension mounting brackets and ordered a wraith prism somebody didn't want. 

 Ram dimm slot 3 was the only other issue the board threw me. Dimm 1 was fine, for some reason dimm 3 did not want to correctly seat. Unlike the first dimm, I had to put a scary amount of force on the non latching side for this slot. I found this problem only after experiencing a crash, bad seating was hardly noticeable. 

 Overall compatibility issue which may of mostly been ryzen was random crash and BSOD watchdog. I had 2 problems with the build, between bsod watchdog and random crash I had around 10minutes between crashes. Looking online many fingers were pointed at peoples hardware, this was not my case. I set all fans in bios to performance, disabled cool and quiet. That somehow helped reduce crashes enough to update windows 10 to creators edition and once that was done all issues were resolved. 

**Onto OVERCLOCKING and the lack of load line calibration.. ( LLC ) No LLC due to components used?

 Although I was very sad to see this is not an option after getting the board set up, my overclocking results were actually just fine but if anyone reading happens to have a tip please do tell.

 I actually did not need LLC to get 3.95ghz stable and am doing so at 1.35v. That's it. At 1.375v 4ghz would not boot or cycle. Unsure of the answer to get 4ghz on this board, did not push further yet. While no LLC leaves me confused and wondering, I think this is a decent clock and I am still using air cooling anyways. I believe either the "upgraded components" are doing something beneficial or maybe it's a good chip, not sure. Will continue to look into things. 

 DDR4 2400 hyper furyx overclocking. This ram and this motherboard get along just fine. Ran 2666 without changing anything! Went up to 2966 at 1.35v and by changing cycle time from 35 to 36, that's that! I'm sure it would go farther but playing that card safe. I'd rather upgrade a CPU than replace the ram. 

My closing thoughts. I think even if you are a complete beginner this is a fine board at a fine price and the only issues from the board itself were very minor and could easily be figured out. However for myself, I wanted an x370 board for overclocking and future upgrades and in that aspect it did leave me let down because of lacking LLC on purpose and it gets confusing weather this "upgraded" vrm is worth the trade off. Just very confused by that and wish I knew. However I may keep tweaking things and have fun exploring with it.