Hey Giga Forum peeps:
I have built many 100s of systems based around the GIGABYTE B450M DS3H board using Ryzen 3 2200g (have not tried the 3 3200g yet..09/27 Update..I have used many Ryzen 3 3200G now and they are fine) but a fair amount of Ryzen 5 2600 and Ryzen 7 2700 CPUs (including X variants) and I have had all manner of problems. so I thought I would share my findings and workarounds with anyone who comes searching here and has any of the problems I have ran into with the Gigabyte B450M DS3H (and HEY..I still love the board and the Gigabyte product and I am going to keep buying it because I feel like I have a handle on it now).
1) Your rig boots and you install windows and you patch and install drivers but you get a black screen once in a while and it won't wake up when it sits at idle at the desktop?. I have found that doing the chipset driver first (Google search> B450 chipset driver..get it from AMD..install it then >reboot) then do the Adrenaline driver here:
www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-software (and only if you are using a 2200G, 2400G, 3200G CPU w/APU or other AMD type Radeon GPU) next (reboot) usually cures it but in SOME cases I have had to override the ability for the machine to sleep or even turn the monitor off from within Windows. MANY Adrenaline drivers claim to cure this and maybe it is finally cured. I'm not so sure. It keeps popping up for me in spite of all the promises it has been fixed in the Adrenaline driver releases. One problem I still see is a snow on the screen when the monitor wakes up from sleep briefly then the screen comes on. Very odd!
2) Computer occasionally (1 out of 3 times?) boots but the screen remains black, not even the BIOS POST screen, computer looks like it's on, fans are spinning? The fix has been head into UEFI BIOS and tell it to use the built in video card first (IGP) if you are using a APU type CPU like the Ryzen 3 2200G (take it off auto) if you use an external video card than set it the other way...tell it to check PCIe X16 Slot 1 first (take it off auto). When that doesn't fix it...swap out the monitor for a new modern model using HDMI. I have found that same of the older HDMI monitors just won't work 100%. They work for a bit then they quit working for no reason. New monitor...fixed it every time with the above BIOS change.
3) I have had a ton of stability problems when I use Corsair Vengeance RAM beyond 2133MHz (I tired different part numbers, sorry Corsair) so I switched to Kingston 2666MHz 8GB kits and they work great (I know I was surprised too). There are promises that the 3rd gen Ryzen will be better with RAM compatibility . We shall see. The part numbers of the Kingston ram is HX426C15FBK2/8 then it was replaced by HX426C16FB3K2/8. Both work great. Zero problems at 2666MHz when I use XMP profile. This is on many many builds. I usually buy a dozen boards/cpu/ram kits at a time. Lately...even XMP is giving trouble so I have to go to the memory frequency settings and where it says "Auto" I have to hold the the left shift key and use the + and - keys to get it off of auto the adjust the multiplier down to 2133MHz or 2400MHz for stability. It really seems to matter where the actual chips on the RAM stick come from. Quality is all over the place. Oh and when you are having RAM problems...you will have no choice but to unplug the PSU, pop the CMOS coin battery out, hold down the power on button for 10 seconds to drain any power, than finally put the CMOS battery back in and start. Be patient ...full BIOS resets make the machine start very slowly and I have been fooled more than once thinking I had a problem...I just didn't wait long enough. The black screen for 1 minute seems like an eternity!.
4) I had a machine that would boot to the UEFI BIOS screen even though it had worked for many months running Windows 10. A quick peek in BIOS to see what's happening. The WD NVMe 500GB Black SSD WDS500G2X0C boot drive was missing from the boot list. It turned out to be a bad USB keyboard (I kid you not!). Replaced that and it never happened again. (By the way the only reason I knew to do that is because this same situation happened before on a old Dell and it was a USB keyboard that went bad and knocked the drive out). Replacing the USB keyboard fixed that one too. So crazy!
5) Your rig boots from cold and you see the Windows 10 splash screen but the swirly loading animation never quits. You punch reset and it boots every time (well , nearly, even that fails from time to time). It has been the NVMe 500GB Black SSD WDS500G2X0C I have been using (and this has been more than once guys). Even though it is on the compatibility list I get the occasional B450M DS3H board where it is a problem. I dupe everything over to a Samsung Evo SSD and it works perfectly. Maybe there are others out there with NVMe drive issues. Samsung makes great drives and data migration software. I should just build using those drives but I love the 3400MB transfer rate of those WD Blacks, when they work. I usually just use the WD black in the next board and it usually works fine in a different B450M DS3H board. I don't know what it is from board to board but the problem has cropped up more than once for me.
Before anyone thinks of it. Yes I updated BIOS. I would install the App Centre and the @bios and layer those BIOS updates on in the order they had to be ...F31 before F40 and F40 before F50. I never had problems with the old AMD CPU build like I do with Ryzen but you gotta love the performance of Ryzen (amazing!).
Happy building!
Kshipper
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