I recently bought a new motherboard/CPU/RAM for my main PC, the original motherboard had gone faulty, but as is usually the case, changing the motherboard requires a new CPU & RAM as the old memory isn’t compatable with the new board & the same with the CPU. My previous hardware consisted of a I3 4130 CPU an ASRock Z87 pro3 motherboard & 8GB of RAM all bought in 2013.
I’ve always bought Intel but this time after a little research I settled on AMD this time as at the moment you seem to get more bang-per-buck with them. I ended up with a Gigabyte X570 board, 16GB RAM & a Ryzen 3200G CPU.
I reused everything else in the PC, even though I could really use a new case, my GTX680 is far too big for it & the case needed to be “operated on” to allow it to fit.
When building I’d recommend attaching a speaker to the motherboard to assist in troubleshooting. If you haven’t got one, you can buy them for pennies on ebay.
After a new install of Windows 10, the OS was showing the full 16GB, but reporting that 8GB was system reserved. I tracked this down to a BIOS setting. The XMP high frequency support was set to off, I changed that to profile 2 & on reboot the full 16GB was available to Windows.
I also had an issue running a VM of Windows 98 in VMWare workstation which ran without problem on the old board/CPU. This was fixed by booting the VM in safe mode and disabling 32 bit protected mode disk drivers.