Since when did ASRock/AMD/AMI start to suck£

Might as well start documenting this somewhere, so people can be informed.

I purchased an X870SL motherboard, a Ryzen 9 7900X, and ASRock SL 850W power-supply and some Patriot Viper memory (PVVR564G600C36K).

First issue is that the power-supply doesn't support legacy SATA 3.5" hard-drives. Apparently, there is some new SSD spec. change that one of the power lines on the SATA power-cable keeps the legacy hard-drive in a powered-down/sleep state. I had to cut the outside wire from the power supply to the 3.5" hard-drive, and after that, the BIOS (and the rest of the system) discovered the legacy SATA 3.5" hard-drives. However, the drives were very unstable and even though they were rated for 6.0 Gbps, I had to throttle them to 3.0 Gbps to keep from getting hard-drive device errors.

That took about a week of research...you're welcome :-) !

But that wasn't even the worst, not by a long shot: the system resets. Magically. By itself. Not under any load. Nothing really running, CPU mostly at rest.

This spontaneous and unprovoked reset acts identically as if I had pressed the 'reset' button on the computer case, except that I didn't press it. This reset happens at random intervals averaging from 2 - 4 days. Once it ran for 6 days without a random reset, but that was the longest.

ASRock tech. support is completely useless. I called them, had a discussion, and I tried a new 870SL board with a new AMD Ryzen 9. Four days later, it reset. I opened a case with ASRock tech. support, got the usual:

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Dear Customer,

Please DO NOT reply to this automatic mail. It is just a confirmation that we have received your email. We will have technical support personnel to contact you soon.'
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email. Haven't heard anything since.

For this reset issue, I don't mean "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD), nor kernel OOPS and hang...no, just straight-up board-level reset. And neither AMD (who I also called) nor ASRock want to divulge the location of the last-reset-reason register (it's mostly public knowledge on older CPU's anyway, and it will get leaked eventually). Yes, I'm a former BIOS engineer from Intel and used to build these systems and provided support for them, and supported AMI with memory reference code, but I'm just a peon now and they all get to piss all over me and tell me that it is raining. If AMI was worth half-a-sh!t, they'd have the last-reset-reason register decoded and available via a BIOS setup page diagnostic utility. But no, AMD, AMI, and ASRock all have this cover-your-corporate-AS...Rock mentality, and once they have your money, you are on your own.

So thanks for nothing. I'll be returning each of the components I purchased and upgrading to an abacus. At least that won't reset in the middle of doing nothing.