Upgrade from 5820K to 3900X.

You can always "re-activate" a copy of windows by calling the toll free number that pops up when you try to active it.
You simply call Microsoft and talk with a machine. Keying in some numbers from the OS and get 18 or so numbers back,
which you need to input in windows. Then it's registered to your current build (mobo).
I have done that numerous times when changing mobo. Even with Office. But you can buy a win10 license from ebay for as little as 2 or 3$.

 

This will depend on how you've activated windows. if you've tied it to a microsoft account, you'll wan't to take these following steps:-

Go onto https://account.microsoft.com then, go to "All Devices" - here you'll see a list of devices tied to your account. Find your current computer and click "manage", then at the top of the page, where your computer is shown in a blue band, click "more actions" followed by "Remove PC" this will unlink your product key from your account with that PC. After that, install Windows 10 on your new machine and input your Win7 or Win8 key either during installation or after once everything is setup (after logging into your account).

The alternative method, particularly if you haven't bound the key to a Microsoft account (so, the old school method which will work on Windows Vista upto Win10) is to quite simply "deactivate" windows.
Open a cmd prompt as admin and type in

Code:

slmgr.vbs /upk

and that's it, you've freed up the licence ready to use on a new system. (If you don't do this first, it could mean having to telephoning microsoft to reauthorise the key). I would actually recommend doing this method first and then remove the pc from your microsoft account to ensure you can seamlessly use your key again.

I'm still using the same Windows 7 product key I originally got for my E2180 dual core system, which then transferred to a Q6600 system, then to a 4690k system to my now 3700X system!

 

Your windows 8 key can be used to install 10

 

Thanks guys, good to hear! Now I just need to make a USB stick with Windows 10 on it and I'm good to go.

 

Finally got around building the new toy, took me like half a day to get the old stuff out, clean everything, get the Ryzen rig in etc.

Aaaanyway, I still have a lot of tweaking to do, however a more pressing matter is regarding the damn Windows installation on the m.2 drive. Somehow, Windows Boot manager is still on the old sata SSD (which I formated), and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to change it to my new m.2 drive.

If I disable the boot manager on the old ssd in boot order, I can't start Windows, is there any fix to this, or what's up?

BTW - the deactivation - reactivation worked like a charm, so big thumbs up for that!

 

Did you re-partition the drive or just format it ? Because that may explain why
Can't you simply change it in BIOS ? Usually you can select which drive to boot from.

Edit
There is also something called Dual boot repair.
https://www.boyans.net/dual-boot-repair-windows-10.html
Which is a GUI for BCDEDIT

 

Got the Windows stuff fixed, but damn I hate 1903, had to go trough so much useless crap to get it the way I want it to.

Back to the actual rig, it's all on auto with XMP (3600 cl18) enabled. The only tweaking I did was on the Smart Fan panel, since I populated all my motherboard fan headers and some where waaay too loud on default fan curve.

So, from what I played/tested so far in both games (like bfv, ac oddyssey) and stress tests (like cpu-z/prime95), it seems that my 3900x sits with all my cores at 4226 MHz all the time, even in idle (actually it "drops" to like 4199 in idle) and I again, it's all on auto. Is this how it's supposed to be? I thought clocks drop a lot in idle and single thread it should go beyond 4.2. I actually saw 4550 max on two cores in HWmonitor twice, but I don't know how to reproduce it.

Highest temp I had was 74 degrees Celsius after 15 minutes of prime95.

 

You'll want to use Ryzen Master to see actual low state clocks, windows and many other CPU speed reporting applications are unable to get the actual figure and some CPU monitoring software polls the state too often which causes the CPU to think it's a workload and clocks up in response (though this had supposedly been fixed or mitigated in latest bioses). Here's an example of the difference between for example windows reporting of clocks and Ryzen master:-

 

Windows has been wrong with Ryzen clock speeds since Gen 1.

 

Nice, got the Ryzen Master installed, cores go at around the same 4200 mark in load there too, but idle clocks are definitely reasonable now.

Can't wait to try out more games, but in BFV the difference is night and day, and I'm not exaggerating. It's so damn smooth, I'm sure FPS are higher too. AC Odyssey is way smother too, I specifically remember having micro stutters in it, visible in the benchmark too.

 

I hear ya regarding BF V!

I was previously using an i7 920. Now with the 3800x, very smooth gameplay

 

Finally took a deep breath (or several) and done a BIOS flash. And man was it worth it, I can get up to 4603 MHz on one core now, whereas before it would stop at 4226. Granted, temps and volts are a bit higher too, but almost all benchmark scores got a boost.

I might play around with voltage at some point, as 1.49 seems a bit high to me, but for the time, I'll stick to auto + xmp (well and custom fan profiles, as on stock my case sounds like a jet engine).

 

Would be good if you could post up some game benchmarks please I have a 5930k running at 4.6ghz on all cores on a x99 too, and a 2080ti, want to know if its worth upgrading to your specs too?

 

Hi, it's a bit hard to do now, as I didn't do any recent testing on the old one, other than my Time Spy CPU score more than doubled (even GPU score went up by 500 points). However, even if FPS wise, things have not gone up dramatically, the responsiveness, "smoothness" I now have in games that I was actively playing on my x99 build is definitely not just placebo. I come again with the BFV example, where the game would stutter like crazy before, and now it's completely gone away and even the FPS have went up by at least 15-20 on average (or at least it feels like it did). Same, but to a lesser extent with games like AC:Odyssey, GTA V, Kingdome Come Deliverance.

Also, hardware wise, temps and noise have gone down significantly. I only seen 75-78 max load in things like prime95 on my 3900x, whereas with my 5820K I couldn't even dare run that, as I would push high 80s easily even only in 2-3 hours of BFV (and this with a measly 4GHz OC). Now you have a 4.6GHz 6-core, it's a bit different than my case. I don't know if it was bios overvolting, bad silicone lottery or just plain degradation, but I just couldn't push my 5820k more than 4GHz (it could do 4.3 when I got it in 2015), so yeah... if you can still do 4.6GHz and have no issues, you might want to stick with that a bit more.

But I'm telling you, the "smoothness" I experience on this new Ryzen build ...is beautiful.

 

Ok thanks for that review, still not sure whether to upgrade to 3900x ior not now lol? might just see if the 3950x bring anything new to the table ot Intel bring anything faster soon?
thanks

 

3950x will bring 4 more cores, probably about the same clocks. Intel wise, I don't know, unless you go for 9900K which still has the edge in gaming, the upcoming Cascade Lake X is meh at best, imo.