10 ms·

I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D

• microtonal 1y ago
  I feel like both Intel and AMD are not doing great in the desktop CPU stability department. I made a machine with a Ryzen 9900X a while back and it had the issue that it would freeze when idling. A few years before I had a 5950X that would regularly crash under load (luckily it was a prebuilt, so it was ultimately fixed). When you do not have a bunch of components ready to swap out it is also really hard to debug these issues. Sometimes it’s something completely different like the PSU. After the last issues, I decided to buy a prebuilt (ThinkStation) with on-site service. The cooling is a bit worse, etc., but if issues come up, I don’t have to spend a lot of time debugging them. Random other comment: when comparing CPUs, a sad observation was that even a passively cooled M4 is faster than a lot of desktop CPUs (typically single-threaded, sometimes also multi-threaded).
  • johnisgood 1y ago
    This does not fill me with much hope. What am I even ought to buy at this point then, I wonder. I have a ~13 years old Intel CPU which lacks AVX2 (and I need it by now) and I thought of buying a new desktop (items separately, of course), but that is crazy to me that it freezes because of the CPU going idle. It was never an issue in my case. I guess I can only hope it is not going to be a problem once I completed building my PC. :| On what metric am I ought to buy a CPU these days? Should I care about reviews? I am fine with a middle-end CPU, for what it is worth, and I thought of AMD Ryzen 7 5700 or AMD Ryzen 5 5600GT or anything with a similar price tag. They might even be lower-end by now?
    • hhh 1y ago
      Just buy an AMD CPU. One person’s experience isn’t the world. Nobody in my circle has had an issue with any chip from AMD in recent time (10 years). Intel is just bad at the moment and not even worth touching.
      • tester756 1y ago
        This is funny because recently my AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D died and I've decided that my next CPU will be Intel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043269
        • homebrewer 1y ago
          This Intel? https://youtu.be/OVdmK1UGzGs https://youtu.be/OVdmK1UGzGs https://youtu.be/oAE4NWoyMZk https://youtu.be/oAE4NWoyMZk
          • tester756 1y ago
            That's been year ago, my AMD CPU died very recently
        • _zoltan_ 1y ago
          that's a pretty bad decision $/perf wise I'd wager. AMD decidedly owns the desktop space, and deserves so.
          • tester756 1y ago
            wdym? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html CPUs like Intel Core Ultra 7 265K are pretty close to top Ryzens
            • Panzer04 1y ago
              Intel CPUs are decidedly better value when multicore performance is a concern. At the top end they trade blows. If your workload is pointer-chasing intel's new CPUs aren't great though, and the X3D chips are possibly a good pick (if the workload fits in cache) which is why they get a lot of hype from reviewers who benchmark games and judge the score 90% based on that performance.
      • johnisgood 1y ago
    • ahofmann 1y ago
      I wouldn't be so hopeless. Intel and AMD CPUs are used in millions of builds and most of them just work.
      • microtonal 1y ago
        However, the vast majority of PCs out there are not hobbyist builds but Dell/Lenovo/HP/etc. [1] with far fewer possible configurations (and much more testing as a byproduct). I am not saying these machines never have issues, but a high failure rate would not be acceptable to their business customers. [1] Well, most non-servers are probably laptops today, but the same reasoning applies.
        • giveita 1y ago
          If you value your time a dell laptop with extended warranty and accidental damage where they replace shit and send people out to fix shit is well worth it. It costs but you can be a dumb user and call "IT" when you need a fix and thats a nice feeling IMO!
      • dahcryn 1y ago
        Indeed. I feel so weird reading this discussion section. My home server is on a 5600G. I turned it on, installed home assistant and jellyfin etc... , and since it has not been off. It's been chugging along completely unattended, no worries. Yes, it's in a basement where temperature is never above 21C, and it's almost never pushed to 100%, and certainly never for extended periods of time. But it's the stock cooler, cheap motherboard, cheap RAM and cheap SSD (with expensive NAS grade mechanical hard drives).
    • PartiallyTyped 1y ago
      3 of my last 4 machines have been AMD x NVDA and I have been very happy. The intel x NVDA machine has been my least stable one.
    • homebrewer 1y ago
      It's either bad luck, bad power quality from the mains, or something in the air in that particular area. I know plenty of people running AM5 builds, have done so myself for the last couple of years, and there were no problems with any of them apart from the usual amdgpu bugs in latest kernels (which are "normal" since I'm running mainline kernels — it's easy to solve by just sticking to lts, and it has seemingly improved anyway since 6.15).
      • johnisgood 1y ago
        I have a really specific Xorg config with my own kernel boot line in GRUB for amdgpu, it seems to work for me. I have not experienced any bugs with amdgpu so far. The GPU and HDD / SSD would stay anyway, I would only have to get everything else.
    • scns 1y ago
      > I thought of AMD Ryzen 7 5700 Definetly not that one if you plan to pair with a dedicated GPU! The 5700X has twice the L3 cache. All Ryzen 5000 with a GPU have only 16MB, 5700 has the GPU deactivated.
      • johnisgood 1y ago
        I have a lower-end Radeon GPU (Navi 24 [Radeon RX 6400]). Which CPU would you suggest with it? I only ever want to use the GPU though, not the CPU's integrated one. I kind of want to get a motherboard that is compatible with the latest AM socket, which is AM5, right? So if I want a CPU with AM5, what would you suggest for the CPU? But see, this is why it is so difficult. I would have never guessed. I would have to research this A LOT, which I am fine with, but you know.
  • encom 1y ago
    >M4 is faster than a lot of desktop CPUs Yea, but unfortunately it comes attached to a Mac. An issue I've encountered often with motherboards, is that they have brain damaged default settings, that run CPU's out of spec. You really have to go through it all with a fine toothed comb and make sure everything is set to conservative stock manufacturer recommended settings. And my stupid MSI board resets everything (every single BIOS setting) to MSI defaults when you upgrade its BIOS.
    • homebrewer 1y ago
      Also be careful with overclocking, because the usual advice of "just running EXPO/XMP" often results in motherboards setting voltages on very sensitive components to more than 30% over their stock values, and this is somehow considered normal. It looks completely bonkers to me. I overclocked my system to ~95% of what it is able to do with almost default voltages, using bumps of 1-3% over stock, which (AFAIK) is within acceptable tolerances, but it requires hours and hours of tinkering and stability testing. Most users just set automatic overclocking, have their motherboards push voltages to insane levels, and then act surprised when their CPUs start bugging out within a couple of years. Shocking!
      • electroglyph 1y ago
        yah, the default overclocking stuff is pretty aggressive these days
      • ahartmetz 1y ago
        Since you mention EXPO/XMP, which are about RAM overclocking: RAM has the least trouble with overvoltage. Raising some of the various CPU voltages is a problem, which RAM overclocking may also do.
        • eptcyka 1y ago
          The heat is starting to become an issue for DDR5 with higher voltage.
      • microtonal 1y ago
  • bob1029 1y ago
    I've got a 5950x that I can reliably crater with a very specific .NET 8 console app when it would otherwise be stable 24/7/365, even under some pretty crazy workloads like Unity. I think a lot of it boils down to load profile and power delivery. My 2500VA double conversion UPS seems to have difficulty keeping up with the volatility in load when running that console app. I can tell because its fans ramp up and my lights on the same circuit begin to flicker very perceptibly. It also creates audible PWM noise in the PC which is crazy to me because up til recently I've only ever heard that from a heavily loaded GPU.
    • bell-cot 1y ago
      I'm sure there are spec's for how fast a PS should be able to ramp up in response to spikes in demand, how a motherboard should handle sudden load changes, etc. But if your UPS (or just the electrical outlet you're plugged into) can't cope - dunno if I'd describe that as cratering your CPU.
    • heelix 1y ago
      I wonder if cooling/power is really the key here. I've got a 5950x that ended up getting the water loop I'd intended for my next threadripper - only to find they were not selling the blasted things to anyone but a few companies. With the cooling sized for almost twice what the 5950x could put out, it has been a very stable machine for some crazy workloads. That old dog will likely keep the setup when a zen 5 TR gets swapped in. For a long time, my Achille's heel was my Bride's vacuum. Her Dyson pulled enough amps that the UPS would start singing and trigger the auto shutdown sequence for the half rack. Took way too long to figure out as I was usually not around when she did it.
      • 486sx33 1y ago
        My 5950 didn’t like liquid cooling and lives very well with air cooling :)
      • esseph 1y ago
        I have a 5700X with an AIO water cooler and it runs 65C under load. Never seems to crash. Been like this for years.
  • api 1y ago
    The M series chips aren’t the absolute fastest in raw speed, though they are toward the top of the list, but they destroy x86 lineage chips on performance per watt. I have an M1 Max, a few revisions old, and the only thing I can do to spin up the fans is run local LLMs or play Minecraft with the kids on a giant ultra wide monitor at full frame rate. Giant Rust builds and similar will barely turn on the fan. Normal stuff like browsing and using apps doesn’t even get it warm. I’ve read people here and there arguing that instruction sets don’t matter, that it’s all the same past the decoder anyway. I don’t buy it. The superior energy efficiency of ARM chips is so obvious I find it impossible to believe it’s not due to the ISA since not much else is that different and now they’re often made on the same TSMC fabs.
    • adithyassekhar 1y ago
      I'd rather it spin the fan all the time to improve longevity but that's just me. One of the many reasons why snapdragon windows laptops failed was both amd and Intel (lunar lake) was able to reach the claimed efficiency of those chips. I still think modern x86 can match arm ones in efficiency if someone bothered to tune the os and scheduler for most common activities. M series was based on their phone chips which were designed from the ground up to run on a battery all these years. AMD/Intel just don't see an incentive to do that nor do Microsoft.
      • hedora 1y ago
        I have a modern AMD system on chip mini desktop that runs Linux (devuan), and have had M1/2/3 laptops. They all seem pretty comparable on power usage, especially at idle. Games and LLM load warm up the desktop and kill the laptop battery. Other than that, power consumption seems fine. There is one exception: If I run an idle Windows 11 ARM edition VM on the mac, then the fans run pretty much all the time. Idle Linux ARM VMs don’t cause this issue on the mac. I’ve never used windows 11 for x86. It’s probably also an energy hog.
    • ac29 1y ago
      > I have an M1 Max, a few revisions old, and the only thing I can do to spin up the fans is run local LLMs or play Minecraft with the kids on a giant ultra wide monitor at full frame rate. Giant Rust builds and similar will barely turn on the fan. Normal stuff like browsing and using apps doesn’t even get it warm. This anecdote perfectly describes my few generation old Intel laptop too. The fans turn on maybe once a month. I dont think its as power efficient as an M-series Apple CPU, but total system power is definitely under 10W during normal usage (including screen, wifi, etc).
  • etempleton 1y ago
    My experience is similar. Modern enthusiast CPUs and hardware compatibility is going backwards. I have a 5900x that randomly crashes on idle, but not under load. My 285K has so far been rock solid and generally feels snappier. I feel like both Intel and AMD are really trying to push the envelope to look good on benchmarks and this is the end result.
    • naasking 1y ago
      Crash on idle, interesting. Must be some timing issue related to down clocking, or maybe a voltage issue related to shutting off a core.
    • InMice 1y ago
      Have you tried using powerprofilesctl to change the power profile to 'performance' instead of 'balanced' or 'power saver'? I think this would prevent the lowest idle states at least. Just a guesss, never had this problem myself. My modern CPU problems are DDR5 and the pre-boot timing thing never completing. So a build of a 9700x that I did that WAS supposed to be located remotely from me has to sit in my office and have its hand held thru every reboot cuz you never know quite know when its doing to decide it needs to retime and randomly never come back. Requires pulling the plug from the back and waiting a few minutes then powering back, then waiting 30 minutes for 64gb of ddr5 to do its timing thing.
  • seec 1y ago
    Your comment about the passively cooled M4 is misleading. Sure, in single thread, it will be definitely faster. In multithread unless you are going for low end or older CPUs it's basically a lie. A 10 Core M4 will score around a 14TH gen mobile i5. It will consume much less power but the argument is on performance, so that's beside the point. And if we are talking about a passively cooled M4 (MacBook Air basically) it will quite heavily throttle relatively quickly, you lose at the very least 30%. So, let's not misrepresent things, Apple CPUs are very power efficient but they are not magic, if you hit them hard, they still need good cooling. Plenty of people have had the experience with their M4 Max, discovering that actually, if they did use the laptop as a workstation, it will generate a good amount of fan noise, there is no other way around. Apple stuff is good because most people actually have bursty workload (especially graphic design, video editing and some audio stuff) but if you hammer it for hours on end, it's not that good and the power efficiency point becomes a bit moot.
  • protocolture 1y ago
    >I made a machine with a Ryzen 9900X a while back and it had the issue that it would freeze when idling I also have this issue.
    • c0balt 1y ago
      If you are on Linux, there are long time known problems with low power cpu states. These states can be entered by your CPU when under low/no load. A common approach is to go into the BIOS/UEFI settings and check that c6 is disabled. To verify and/or temporarily turn c6 off, see https://github.com/r4m0n/ZenStates-Linux https://github.com/r4m0n/ZenStates-Linux
      • hedora 1y ago
        It’s also worth checking all the autodetected stuff that can be overclocked, like ram speed. That stuff can be wrong, and then you get crazy but similar bugs in linux and windows.
    • InMice 1y ago
      You could try using powerprofilesctl to change the mode from 'balanced' or 'power saver' to 'performance' since i think this may prevent the cpu from ever entering the throttled down low idle states that your freezing happens in. they are controlled with powerprofilesctl. You may also be able to add some flugs to grub config file. assuming you are using linux i guess.
      • protocolture 1y ago
        I have set my timings manually in the bios, and disabled most advanced CPU features for stability. If I enable virtualisation, the issue can be replicated within 15 minutes of boot. But with basically half the CPU set to do nothing, and all features disabled its once a week max. Which sucks because I basically live in WSL.
  • kristopolous 1y ago
    M3 ultra is the more capable chip by quite a bit. For instance: 80 GPU cores versus 10 in the m4. Twice the memory bandwidth, twice the CPU core count... It's really wacky how they've decided to name things
    • bee_rider 1y ago
      Is there some tricky edge case here? I thought the “3” and “4” just denoted generations. The Ultra chips are like Apple’s equivalent of a workstation chip, they are always bigger right? It is like comparing the previous generation Xeon to a current gen i5.
      • dwood_dev 1y ago
        Apple has been iterating IPC as well as increasing core count. The Ultra is a pair of Max chips. While the core counts didn't increase from M3 to M4 Max, overall performance is in the neighborhood of 5-25% better. Which still puts the M3 Ultra as Apple's top end chip, and the M5 Max might not dethrone it either. The uplift in IPC and core counts means that my M1 Max MBP has a similar amount of CPU performance as my M3 iPad Air.
        • bee_rider 1y ago
          Yeah, I thought that was it. I was confused because they describe it as “wacky,” haha. The Ultra chips are the result of scaling up a given generation. Of course, each generation has some single-core improvements and eventually that could catch up, but it can take a while to catch up to… twice as much silicon.
  • sunmag 1y ago
    Have had three systems (two 5800x, one 3600x) that reboots/freezes due to WHEA errors. Started after about 3years problem free. One of the 5800xs so frequently it was trashed.
    • cptskippy 1y ago
      I wonder if it's related to the main board... Are you running X or B series chipsets? I've found that less is more when it comes to stability. Vendors always add features to justify the $200-300 price of X series. I have always run B series because I've never needed the overclocking or additional peripherals. In my server builds I usually disable peripherals in the UEFI like Bluetooth and audio as well.
  • 66fm472tjy7 1y ago
    Occasionally occurring issues are so annoying. I lived with these issues for years before becoming able to reliably reproduce them by accident and thus making a good guess on the cause: My system would randomly freeze for ~5 seconds, usually while gaming and having a video in the browser running a the same time. Then, it would reliably happen in Titanfall 2 and I noticed there were always AHCI errors in the Windows logs at the same time so I switched to an NVMe drive. The system would also shut down occasionally (~ once every few hours) in certain games only. Then, I managed to reproduce it 100% of the time by casting lightning magic in Oblivion Remastered. I had to switch out my PSU, the old one probably couldn't handle some transient load spike, even though it was a Seasonic Prime Ultra Titanium.
  • Dennip 1y ago
    I have a 5950X system that will just randomly shut down, I've RMA'd the CPU, tried swapping the RAM, GPU, PSU and the motherboard in different combinations. I cannot track down a specific issue and it just won't be stable. I've given up and decided to discard the PC of theseus and build a new one -_-.
  • IAmGraydon 1y ago
    9900x here and zero crashes since I built it 9 months ago. A lot of the stability comes down to choosing the right RAM with the right timing for Ryzen CPUs.
    • jonbiggums22 1y ago
      I haven't moved on from AM4 yet but the way XMP is advertised you'd think it was guaranteed instead of overclocking that technically voids your warranty.
  • ozgrakkurt 1y ago
    Buying one generation old CPUs seems like the good option now. It is cheaper and more stable. Performance difference doesn’t matter that much too
• whyoh 1y ago
  It's crazy how unreliable CPUs have become in the last 5 years or so, both AMD and Intel. And it seems they're all running at their limit from the factory, whereas 10-20 years ago they usually had ample headroom for overclocking.
  • mrheosuper 1y ago
    we have unstable "code" generator, so unstable CPU would be natural.
  • stavros 1y ago
    That's good, isn't it? I don't want the factory leaving performance on the table.
    • bell-cot 1y ago
      Depends on your priorities. That "performance on the table" might also be called "engineering safety factor for stability".
      • stavros 1y ago
        Given that there used to be plenty of room to overclock the cores while still keeping them stable, I think it was more "performance on the table".
        • formerly_proven 1y ago
          You could also get the idea that vendors sometimes make strange decisions which increase neither performance nor reliability. For example, various brands of motherboards are / were known to basically blow up AMD CPUs when using AMP/XMP, with the root cause being that they jacked an uncore rail way up. Many people claimed they did this to improve stability, but overclockers now that that rail has a sweet spot for stability and they went way beyond it (so much so that the actual silicon failed and burned a hole in itself with some low-ish probability).
      • 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
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• eptcyka 1y ago
  This is rather late, to be quite fair.
  • discardable_dan 1y ago
    My thoughts exactly: he figured out in 2025 what the rest of us knew in 2022.
    • positron26 1y ago
      One of my work computers died and I hadn't checked the CPU market in years. Rode home that night in a taxi with a Ryzen 1700x completely stoked that AMD was back in the game. If anyone thinks competition isn't good for the market or that also-rans don't have enough of an effect, just take note. Intel is a cautionary tale. I do agree we would have gotten where we are faster with more viable competitors. M4 is neat. I won't be shocked if x86 finally gives up the ghost as Intel decides playing in Risc V or ARM space is their only hope to get back into an up-cycle. AMD has wanted to do heterogeneous stuff for years. Risc V might be the way. One thing I'm finding is that compilers are actually leaving a ton on the table for AMD chips, so I think this is an area where AMD and all of the users, from SMEs on down, can benefit tremendously from cooperatively financing the necessary software to make it happen.
    • J_Shelby_J 1y ago
      You figured out in 2022 that AMD would finally catch up to intel single core performance in 2025?
• andsoitis 1y ago
  > I would say that 25 to 28 degrees celsius are normal temperatures for computers. An ideal ambient (room) temperature for running a computer is 15-25 celcius (60-77 Fahrenheit) Source: https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/ambient-temperature https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/ambie...
  • johnisgood 1y ago
    coretemp-isa-0000 Adapter: ISA adapter Package id 0: +40.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 0: +38.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 1: +39.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Are they saying this is bad? This Intel CPU has been at it for over a decade. There was a fan issue for half a year and would go up to 80 C for... half a year. Still works perfectly fine but it is outdated, it lacks instruction sets that I need, and it has two cores only, and 1 thread per core. Maybe today's CPUs would not be able to handle it, I am not sure. One would expect these things to only improve, but seems like this is not the case. Edit: I misread it, oops! Disregard this comment.
    • Rohansi 1y ago
      That is your CPU temperature, not ambient (room) temperature.
      • johnisgood 1y ago
        Oh, I misread. My bad!
        • johnisgood 1y ago
          Just to add, I moved into a house where it is almost always between 27-30 C. It is AWFULLY hot for me. :( Sadly it will not go below this during winter either because they will start up the heating and it cannot be turned off.
  • trueismywork 1y ago
    And that is an impossibility in most of the world today and it will be even more like that going forward.
• crinkly 1y ago
  I’ve given up both.
  • Thorrez 1y ago
    What do you use?
    • aurareturn 1y ago
      I’ve given up on both and use Apple Silicon only. AMD and Intel are simply too power hungry for how slow they are and can’t optimize for power like Apple can.
      • mr_windfrog 1y ago
        That's pretty amazing, I've never heard of that before .-_-!
      • lostlogin 1y ago
        I just replaced a headless nuc 9 with a headless M4. Nuc 9 averaged 65-70W power usage, while the m4 is averaging 6.6W. The Mac is vastly more performant.
      • maciejw 1y ago
        I also switched to cheapest Mac Mini M4 Pro this year (after 20+ years of using Intel CPUs). MacOS has its quirks, but it provides ZSH and it "just works" (unlike manjaro I used in parallel with Windows). I especially like the preview tool - it has useful pdf and photo editing options. The hardware is impressive - tiny, metal box, always silent, basic speaker built-in and it can be left always on with minimal power consumption. Drive size for basic models is limited (512gb) - I solved it by moving photos to NAS. I don't use it for gaming, except Hello Kitty Island Adventure. I would say it's a very competitive choice for a desktop PC in 2025 overall.
      • izacus 1y ago
        [flagged]
    • 1y ago
• mrlonglong 1y ago
  To make linking go quicker, use mold. Pass -fuse=mold when building.
  • positron26 1y ago
    Do beware when doing WASM with mold. I shipped a broken WASM binary that Firefox could run just fine but Chrome would not.
• Jnr 1y ago
  I have not had any issues with Intel or AMD CPUs but I have so many issues with AMD APUs, I would steer clear of them. In my experience with different models, they have many graphics issues, broken video transcoding and overall extremely unstable. If you need decent integrated graphics then Intel is the only real option.
  • sellmesoap 1y ago
    They make a lot of apus for gaming handhelds, I think they do well in that segment. I've had a handful of desktop and laptop apus with no complaints. Even an APU with ecc support, they've all worked without a hitch. I haven't tried transcoding anything on them mind you.
    • Jnr 1y ago
      Yes, I have Steam Deck and it works great. But I also have 2400G and 5700G and both of those have graphics issues (tested with different recommended RAM sets).
  • vkazanov 1y ago
    My laptop's AMD is great (Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 w/ Radeon 880M). Gaming, GPI work, battery, small LLMs - all just work on my Ubuntu. Don't know about transcoding though.
  • imiric 1y ago
    I've had the same experience with an 8600G on Linux. Very frequent graphics driver crashes and KDE/Wayland freezes, on old and new kernels alike. I've been submitting error reports for months, and the issues still persist. The RAM passes MemTest, and the system otherwise works fine, but the graphics issues are very annoying. It's not like I'm gaming or doing anything intensive either; it happens during plain desktop usage. Yet I also use a 7840U in a gaming handheld running Windows, and haven't had any issues there at all. So I think this is related to AMD Linux drivers and/or Wayland. In contrast, my old laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and Xorg has given me zero issues for about a decade now. So I've decided to just avoid AMD on Linux on my next machine. Intel's upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake CPUs seem promising, and their integrated graphics have consistently been improving. I don't think AMD's dominance will continue for much longer.
• ychompinator 1y ago
  No desktop CPU I’ve ever used has remained stable at 100 degrees. My 14900k crashes almost immediately at that temp. 3 hours at 100 degrees is obscene.
  • clait 1y ago
    Yeah, i can’t believe they think it’s fine. I would’ve shutdown my PC and rethought my cooling setup the first time it hit 100C tbh
  • swinglock 1y ago
    Then all your desktop CPUs were defective. Besides AMD CPUs of the early 2000s going up in smokes without working cooling, they all throttle before they become temporarily or permanently unstable. Otherwise they are bad. I've never had a desktop part fail due to max temperatures, but I don't think I've owned one that advertises nor allows itself to reach or remain at 100c or higher. If someone sells a CPU that's specified to work at 100 or 110 degrees and it doesn't then it's either defective or fraudulent, no excuses.
  • sys_64738 1y ago
    100C will trigger PROCHOT state in Intel leading to CPU throttling. The CPU will eventually shutdown.
  • arp242 1y ago
    285k: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241060/intel-core-ultra-9-processor-285k-36m-cache-up-to-5-70-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241060/... Max Operating Temperature: 105 °C 14900k: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236773/intel-core-i9-processor-14900k-36m-cache-up-to-6-00-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236773/... Max Operating Temperature: 100 °C Different CPUs, different specs. And any CPU from the last decade will just throttle down if it gets too hot. That's how the entire "Turbo" thing works: go as fast as we can until it gets too hot, after which it throttles down.
• energy123 1y ago
  I can't comment on the quality question, but for memory bandwidth sensitive use cases, Intel desktop is superior.
  • ttyyzz 1y ago
    I'm not convinced, what would be the use case?
    • energy123 1y ago
      Data science where you need to keep ~50GB of data in RAM and do intensive things with it (e.g. loop over it repeatedly with numba). You can't get use out of more than 4 cores because memory bandwidth is the only limitation. The data is too big for AMD's cache to be a factor. Threadripper is built for this. But I am talking about the consumer options if you are on a budget. Intel has significantly more memory bandwidth than AMD in the consumer end. I don't have the numbers on hand, but someone at /r/localllama did a comparison a while ago.
      • Marsymars 1y ago
        Framework Desktop?
      • exceptione 1y ago
        This? https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ak2f1v/ram_memory_bandwidth_measurement_numbers_for_both/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ak2f1v/ram_mem... I can't see how that supports your conclusion.
        • energy123 1y ago
          There's many red herrings in that table (namely: old DDR4 consumer platforms, server platforms, low bandwidth DDR5 sticks), but surfacing the two relevant numbers (DDR5-6400 consumer heads-up comparison): > AMD 7900X - 68.9 GB/sec > Intel 13900K - 93.4 GB/sec That's 35% better.
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• shmerl 1y ago
  Well, worryingly there were reports of AMD X3D CPUs burning out too. I hope it will be sorted out.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• baobabKoodaa 1y ago
  Why is the author showing a chart of room temperatures? CPU temperature is what matters here. Expecting a CPU to be stable at 100C is just asking for problems. Issue probably could have been avoided by making improvements to case airflow.
  • formerly_proven 1y ago
    Strange, laptop CPUs and their thermal solutions are designed in concert to stay at Tjmax when under sustained load and throttle appropriately to maintain maximum temperature (~ power ~ performance).
    • ACCount37 1y ago
      And those mobile devices have much more conservative limits, and much more aggressive throttling behavior. Smartphones have no active cooling and are fully dependent on thermal throttling for survival, but they can start throttling at as low as 50C easily. Laptops with underspecced cooling systems generally try their best to avoid crossing into triple digits - a lot of them max out at 85C to 95C, even under extreme loads.
      • dezgeg 1y ago
        For handhelds the temperature of the device's case is one factor as well when deciding the thermal limits (so you don't burn the user's hands) - less of a problem on laptops.
  • Jolter 1y ago
    I would expect the CPU to start throttling at high temperatures in order to avoid damage. Allegedly, it never did, and instead died. Do you think that’s acceptable in 2025?
    • FeepingCreature 1y ago
      No but it's also important to realize that this CPU was running at an insane temperature that should never happen in normal operation. I have a laptop with an undersized fan and if I max out all my cores with full load, I barely cross 80. 100 is mental. It doesn't matter if the manufacturer set the peak temperature wrong, a computer whose cpu reaches 100 degrees celsius is simply built incorrectly. If nothing else, it very clearly indicates that you can boost your performance significantly by sorting out your cooling because your cpu will be stuck permanently emergency throttling.
• formerly_proven 1y ago
  > Looking at my energy meter statistics, I usually ended up at about 9.x kWh per day for a two-person household, cooking with induction. > After switching my PC from Intel to AMD, I end up at 10-11 kWh per day. It's kind of impressive to increase household electricity consumption by 10% by just switching one CPU.
  • usr1106 1y ago
    I guess the author runs it at high load for long times, not only for the benchmarks to write this blog post. And less than 10 kWh is a low starting point, many households would be much higher.
    • Dunedan 1y ago
      That vastly depends where you live and what you use electricity for. Most of Europe for example uses much less energy [1], although that will probably change as heat pumps are becoming more and more widespread. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_countries_by_electricity_consumption_per_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_countries_by_electric...
      • formerly_proven 1y ago
        I think this is just consumption divided by population, so very easily influenced by e.g. having little population and many data centers: I doubt the average person in Iceland is spending 10k+ bucks on electricity annually.
  • don-bright 1y ago
    The amount of power this is using is roughly the same as it takes my car to do my short commute to work
  • rubin55 1y ago
    I run a 13900T unlocked (meaning, it runs 35W TDP at idle, 1.1ghz, but is allowed to peak to 210W for up to a minute, with the hugest Noctua D14something I could fit on it). It runs at ~29c idle, peaks to 80ish celsius at 210W (~4.5ghz over all cores - songle core peaking to 5.3ghz). For a time I ran it 24/7 without suspend. It's a big system, lots of disks, expansion cards, etc. If it doesn't suspend, and doesn't do anything remarkable, it uses about ~5kWh per day. Needless to say, it suspends after 60 minutes now (my daily energy usage went from ~9 to ~4 kWh).
• willtemperley 1y ago
  Gaming seems to be the final stronghold of x86 and I imagine that will shrink. Clearly games are able to run well on RISC architectures despite decades of x86 optimisation in game engines. Long term, an architecture that consumes more power and is tightly locked down by licensing looks unsustainable compared to royalty-free RISC alternatives. The instability, presumably because Intel are overclocking their own chips to look OK on benchmarks will not help.
  • smallpipe 1y ago
    x86 hasn't been CISC in 3 decades anywhere but in the frontend. An architecture doesn't consume power, a design does. I'm all for shitting on intel, but getting the facts right wouldn't hurt.
    • uncircle 1y ago
      X86 isn’t CISC, sure, but it isn’t a RISC architecture either.
      • immibis 1y ago
        The traditional CISC and RISC division broke down the moment processors started doing more than one thing at a time. A RISC architecture was actually one with simple control flow and a CISC architecture was one with complex control flow, usually with microcode. This distinction isn't applicable to CPUs past the year 1996 or so, because it doesn't make sense to speak of a CPU having global control flow.
      • arp242 1y ago
        Do RISC architectures still exist? ARM has gained tons of stuff and isn't really "RISC" any more either. Maybe RISC-V? It's right there in the name, but I haven't really looked at it. However, there are no RISC-V chips that have anywhere near the performance x86 or ARM has, so it remains to be seen if RISC-V can be competitive with x86 or ARM for these types of things. RISC is one of those things that sounds nice and elegant in principle, but works out rather less well in practice.
• KronisLV 1y ago
  > I also double-checked if the CPU temperature of about 100 degrees celsius is too high, but no: this Tom’s Hardware article shows even higher temperatures, and Intel specifies a maximum of 110 degrees. So, running at “only” 100 degrees for a few hours should be fine. I'd say that even crashing at max temperatures is still completely unreasonable! You should be able to run at 100C or whatever the max temperature is for a week non-stop if you well damn please. If you can't, then the value has been chosen wrong by the manufacturers. If the CPU can't handle that, the clock rates should just be dialed back accordingly to maintain stability. It's odd to hear about Core Ultra CPUs failing like that, though - I thought that they were supposed to be more power efficient than the 13th and 14th gen, all while not having their stability issues. That said, I currently have a Ryzen 7 5800X, OCed with PBO to hit 5 GHz with negative CO offsets per core set. There's also an AIO with two fans and the side panel is off because the case I have is horrible. While gaming the temps usually don't reach past like 82C but Prime95 or anything else that's computationally intensive can make the CPU hit and flatten out at 90C. So odd to have modern desktop class CPUs still bump into thermal limits like that. That's with a pretty decent ambient temperature between 21C to 26C (summer).
  • williamDafoe 1y ago
    Just FYI Google runs their data centers at 85 degrees F (about 30 degrees C). I think Google probably knows more about how to run Intel CPUs for longest life and lowest cost per CPU cycle. After all they are the #5 computer maker on earth. What Intel is doing and what they are recommending is the act of a desperate corporation incapable of designing energy-efficient CPUs, incapable of progressing their performance in MIPS per Watt of power. This is a sign of a failed corporation.
    • KronisLV 1y ago
      > Just FYI Google runs their data centers at 85 degrees F (about 30 degrees C). I think Google probably knows more about how to run Intel CPUs for longest life and lowest cost per CPU cycle. After all they are the #5 computer maker on earth. Servers and running things at scale are way different from consumer use cases and the cooling solutions you'll find in the typical desktop tower, esp. considering the average budget and tolerance for noise. Regardless, on a desktop chip, even if you hit tJMax, it shouldn't lead to instability as in the post above, nor should the chips fail. If they do, then that value was chosen wrong by the manufacturer. The chips should also be clocking back to maintain safe operating temps. Essentially, squeeze out whatever performance is available with a given cooling solution: be it passive (I have some low TDP AM4 chips with passive Alpine radiator blocks), air coolers or AIOs or a custom liquid loop. > What Intel is doing and what they are recommending is the act of a desperate corporation incapable of designing energy-efficient CPUs, incapable of progressing their performance in MIPS per Watt of power. I don't disagree with this entirely, but the story is increasingly similar with AMD as well - most consumer chip manufacturers are pushing the chips harder and harder out of the factory, so they can compete on benchmarks. That's why you hear about people limiting the power envelope to 80-90% of stock and dropping close to 10 degrees C in temperatures, similarly you hear about the difficulties of pushing chips all that far past stock in overclocking, because they're already pushed harder than the prior generations. To sum up: Intel should be less delusional in how far they can push the silicon, take the L and compete against AMD on the pricing, instead of charging an arm and a leg for chips that will burn up. What they were doing with the Arc GPUs compared to the competitors was actually a step in the right direction.
• c0l0 1y ago
  I realize this has not much to do with CPU choice per se, but I'm still gonna leave this recommendation here for people who like to build PCs to get stuff done with :) Since I've been able to afford it and the market has had them available, I've been buying desktop systems with proper ECC support. I've been chasing flimsy but very annoying stability problems (some, of course, due to overclocking during my younger years, when it still had a tangible payoff) enough times on systems I had built that taking this one BIG potential cause out of the equation is worth the few dozens of extra bucks I have to spend on ECC-capable gear many times over. Trying to validate an ECC-less platform's stability is surprisingly hard, because memtest and friends just aren't very reliably detecting more subtle problems. PRIME95, y-cruncher and linpack (in increasing order of effectiveness) are better than specialzied memory testing software in my experience, but they are not perfect, either. Most AMD CPUs (but not their APUs with potent iGPUs - there, you will have to buy the "PRO" variants) these days have full support for ECC UDIMMs. If your mainboard vendor also plays ball - annoyingly, only a minority of them enables ECC support in their firmware, so always check for that before buying! - there's not much that can prevent you from having that stability enhancement and reassuring peace of mind. Quoth DJB (around the very start of this millenium): https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html :)
  • swinglock 1y ago
    Excellent point. It's a shame and a travesty that data integrity is still mostly locked away inside servers, leaving most other computing devices effectively toys, the early prototype demo thing but then never finished and sold forever at inflated prices. I wish AMD would make ECC a properly advertised feature with clear motherboard support. At least DDR5 has some level of ECC.
    • kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
      > At least DDR5 has some level of ECC. That is mostly to assist manufacturers in selling marginal chips with a few bad bits scattered around. It's really a step backwards in reliability.
    • wpm 1y ago
• Ekaros 1y ago
  Seems like failure in choosing cooling solutions. These high-end chips have obscene cooling needs. My guess would be using something that was not designed for TDP in question. Sufficient cooler, with sufficient airflow is always needed.
  • ttyyzz 1y ago
    Agree. Also, use good thermal paste. 100 °C is not safe or sustainable long term. Unfortunately, I think the manufacturer's specifications regarding the maximum temperature are misleading. With proper cooling, however, you'll be well within that limit.
  • uniqueuid 1y ago
    For what it's worth, I have an i9-13900K paired with the largest air cooler available at the time (a be quiet! Dark Rock 5 IIRC), and it's incapable of sufficiently cooling that CPU. The 13900k draws more than 200W initially and thermal throttles after a minute at most, even in an air conditioned room. I don't think that thermal problems should be pushed to end user to this degree.
    • SomeoneOnTheWeb 1y ago
      This means your system doesn't have enough airflow if it throttles this quickly. But I agree this should not be a problem in the first place.
    • michaelt 1y ago
      The "Dark Rock 5" marketing materials say it provides a 210 W TDP [1] and marketers seldom under-sell their products' capabilities. So if your CPU is drawing "more than 200W" you're pretty much at the limits of your cooler. [1] https://www.bequiet.com/en/cpucooler/5110 https://www.bequiet.com/en/cpucooler/5110
      • lmm 1y ago
        Feels like CPU manufacturers should be at least slapping a big warning on if they're selling a CPU that draws more power than any available cooler can dissipate.
• perching_aix 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • Havoc 1y ago
    It's not some politics thing tom's hardware came up with. It's from the firefox's crash reports: >If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you're in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat. I know because I can literally see which EU countries have been affected by heat waves by looking at the locales of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems. 13th and 14th gen Intel is also showing up in aggregated gaming crash data, though not sure if that's heat related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y >beyond which they default to auto-shutdown. That doesn't preclude the possibility of temperature related instability below 100... Nothing that it's different generations - it's not the core ultras (15th) that are known to have these issues >rotting people's brains ...
    • perching_aix 1y ago
      > That doesn't preclude the possibility of temperature related instability below 100... Does anything do? It could order a Toyota Corolla to my house when it hits 69 °C 420 times if it was programmed so. > Nothing that it's different generations - it's not the core ultras (15th) that are known to have these issues So it is a CPU specific issue then? Not a yuro heatwave issue? Not one he "should have" "mitigated" with a better cooling setup?
• hawshemi 1y ago
  And welcome to USB slow speeds and issues...
  • amelius 1y ago
    USB issues are driving me nuts. Please, someone show me the path to serenity.
• black_puppydog 1y ago
  Layoutparser looks really neat! Glad the author led with this. :D
• fmajid 1y ago
  I generally prefer AMD Zen5 to Intel due to AVX512 not being gimped by crippled E-cores that really don't belong on a desktop system, SMT (hyperthreading) that actually works and using TSMC processes, but they've also had their issues recently: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/amd_ryzen_twice_fails_in/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/amd_ryzen_twice_fails...
• enronmusk 1y ago
  If OP's CPU cooler (Noctua NH-D15 G2) wasn't able to cool down his CPU below 100C, he must have been (intentionally or unintentionally with Asus multi core enhancement) overclocked his CPU. Or he didn't apply thermal paste properly or didn't remove the cooler plastic sticker? I have followed his blog for years and hold him in high respect so I am surprised he has done that and expected stability at 100C regardless of what Intel claim is okay. Not to mention that you rapidly hit diminishing returns pass 200W with current gen Intel CPUs, although he mentions caring able idle power usage. Why go from 150W to 300W for a 20% performance increase?
  • magicalhippo 1y ago
    He did have the Fractal Define 7 Compact case, and the pictures[1] only show a single 140mm case fan. From personal experience the Fractal Define cases are great at sound reduction due to the thermal padding, but those pads also insulates well. Given the motherboard and RAM will also generate quite some heat, if the case fan profile was conservative (he does mention he likes low noise), could be the insides got quite toasty. Back when I got my 2080 Ti, I had this issue when gaming. The internal temps would get so hot due to the blanket effect of the padding I couldn't touch the components after a gaming session. Had to significantly tweak my fan profiles. His CPU at peak would generate about the same amount of heat as my 2080 Ti + CPU I had then, and I had the non-Compact case with two case fans. [1]: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-05-15-my-2025-high-end-linux-pc/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-05-15-my-2025-high-...
    • enronmusk 1y ago
      Excellent point. A single case fan is highly atypical and concerning. I also have a fractal define case with anti noise padding material and dust filters, but my temperatures are great and the computer is almost inaudible even when compiling code for hours with -j $(nproc). And my fans and cooler are much cheaper than his.
    • magicalhippo 1y ago
      > thermal padding That should of course be sound padding...
• rurban 1y ago
  I've burned two of those already, watercooled. The H100 traffic was too much for them
• unsnap_biceps 1y ago
  I also recently swapped to amd and my biggest surprise was how awful their platform is. With intel, getting sensor data just worked without anything special. With amd, it looks like each platform, perhaps model, requires special support. My mobo is a used godlike, and just has zero sensor support.
• protocolture 1y ago
  Hmm arent the top end Ryzens dying too? This could be a funny future blog post.
• scotty79 1y ago
  Last Intel desktop CPU that I bought was Pentium 133Mhz. It was also my first PC. Never again ratio of performance to price in my preferred price range favored Intel.
  • magicalhippo 1y ago
    You skipped the whole Bulldozer generation?
    • scotty79 1y ago
      I've never bought server CPUs. I think I had some Athlon along the way. Some K6, I think. I don't remember all of them. Now I have some Ryzen. For the next build I'm finally eyeing server grade processor and of course it's going to be a Threadripper.
  • Eric_WVGG 1y ago
    my first Intel was a 286 (DX2-66), and I just did a double-take reading this article when I saw “the Intel 285K CPU” ah if only they had incremented that number by one… a new 286 even just in name would be sooo funny… not as funny as bringing back the number 8088 of course
• jeffbee 1y ago
  The idle power consumption on this guy's rig is completely outrageous. Since almost everything else in my rig is the same, but I use the integrated GPU, I can only conclude that the power floor for GPUs is way too high. Or is it Linux that isn't managing the GPU properly?
• wallopinski 1y ago
  Funny and depressing that the AMD/Intel culture war still exists. I remember arguing about it in 1990. Their marketing departments severely brainwashed generations of nerds.
  • tverbeure 1y ago
    I didn't see anything CPU culture war related in the blog post.
  • J_Shelby_J 1y ago
    It’s impossible to find balanced information on the topic because so many people are heavily invested in AMD stock.
• cjpartridge 1y ago
  Try enabling PBO and finding a setting for the curve optimizer that works for you, each CPU is different but -10/-15 is generally achievable - should reduce temperatures across the board and potentially give you some more performance.
  • steve1977 1y ago
    The problem is that stable curve optimizer settings can vary hugely across cores I had differences of like 20 or more between different cores... i.e. one core might work fine at -20, the other maybe only at +5.
    • cjpartridge 1y ago
      Most definitely - you should always do your own stress testing with your specific CPU (and system) to find out what's stable. And while all core CO might not be optimal, based on personal experience and what I've seen across multiple enthusiast communities, more often than not you can get an worthwhile improvement to temps/perf with an all core CO. That being said, there are certainly ways to find and set the best CO values per core, but it will certainly take more effort, stress testing and time.
• Avlin67 1y ago
  get a w790 motherboard with proper xeon. If it says 100° DTS it still not a good idea to run it 100° for 3hours, because it id already throtling.
• stevefan1999 1y ago
  Just a funny anecdote: I got an i5 13600KF last black friday (with a long haul to Hong Kong for about 2 weeks) from Amazon, with initially a budget motherboard that I thought would be fine, and it turns out the system would keep turning off at one point and reboot again with a huge drop in voltage (it was about 10 months later that I learned this is a brownout). It was for my company computer, but I bought it personally, so the ownership is still mine. I then bought a new SF750 PSU at home and swapped the CPU for 13100 salvaged from a computer someone donated, so now the 13600KF would be my personal gaming rig. I made sure it gets a platform that sustain enough power and appropriate headroom for thermals, and it was all fine until 6 months ago, it starts to BSOD all over the place, when gaming; programming; or even just resume from suspend. I have to refund two games because of this, one is accepted and the other isn't. And also turn over to cloud machine for development because BSOD in the middle of debugging is really nasty. So I decided to say "fuck it, I'm going back to AMD". I actually still use my 3700X gig a year ago but I figured the 5 year old system is now becoming an old dog. I just can't run most modern game at even 80FPS, so I swapped to the 13600KF as an intermediate replacement until it glitched up, so I need another replacement again. Coincidentally I bought a 7945HX engineering sample ITX motherboard originally for the intent of running Kubernetes homelab (now that I think about it, a big waste of money indeed, yikes). Then I have a eureka moment: why don't I just use that 7945HX plus the 96GB DDR5 that I bought? So after a painful assemble-reassemble process, I'm back to AMD once again -- it was almost perfect, scoring almost exactly as a 5950X, but only at around 100W TDP for the total package, with almost double the CPU cache, plus it is not the Zen 5/Zen 5c design which complicates CPU scheduling, I have been able to solve the gaming-productivity dilemma at the same time -- and the MoDT motherboard itself is just shy of ~1800HKD in total, which is less than the 5950X CPU alone plus I have a huge TDP headroom for the 9070XT I purchased also in June -- almost complete silent platform with Noctua, too. The original 13600KF has been redelivered back to my company with a new 800W PSU and a new case specifically bought to fit the wood aesthetic, and another AMD GPU I salvaged from my NUC (6600XT Challenger, but single fan), but this time it runs surprisingly fine -- no kernel panic or PSU brownout just yet. After all this in a short span of 10 months, I guess I just reached my own "metastability" now -- Intel CPU for office work, AMD for gaming and workstation. The old 3700X system is being repurposed again for running cheap Kubernetes homelab and I guess this time too it is worth the right place. I don't think I ever need to have a new purchase again for the coming few years, hopefully. The only problem would be that I'm using an engineering sample rather than the normal version of 7945HX -- the normal one can reach up to 5.4GHz boost but mine only got 5.2GHz boost, at a cost of 600HKD difference, I would say it is not worth it to upgrade to the normal version, no?
• Avlin67 1y ago
  sorry, but looking at previous article, you computer cooling seems inadéquate for sustained loads
• steve1977 1y ago
  I tried building and running a 7950X workstation for some time. I managed to get stable settings in a modified "ECO" mode (i.e. maybe about 10% less performance, but much less power usage). The problem is, it's a huge effort to get there. You really have to tune PBO curves for each core individually, as they can vary so much between cores. Now the test itself is mostly automatic with tools like OCCT, but of course you have to change the settings in the BIOS between each test and you cannot use the computer during that time, so there's a huge opportunity cost. I'm talking about weeks, not days. To cut a long story short, I sold the system and just bought a M4 Max Mac Studio now. Apple Silicon might not have the top performance of AMD or Intel, but it comes with much less headaches and opportunity cost. Which in the end probably equalizes the difference in purchase cost.
• neurolesudiste 1y ago
  Will do the same on my next hardware turn-over.
• casenmgreen 1y ago
  Curiously, libgmp reported something similar recently, but with AMD. https://gmplib.org/gmp-zen5 https://gmplib.org/gmp-zen5
  • kd913 1y ago
    General consensus on that case seems to be they picked a budget motherboard and skimped on the cooler.
    • devnullbrain 1y ago
      That ASUS motherboard is far from the cheapest available. If using it makes the user liable for failure, a large part of the market is unsuitable. For both the cooler and the motherboard, AMD have too much control to look the other way. The chip can measure its own temperature and the conceit of undermining partners by moving things on chip and controlling more of the ecosystem is that things perform better. They should at least perform.
      • kd913 1y ago
        The cpu is what a 9950x whilst paired with one of the cheapest asus motherboards with underpowered VRMs according to games nexus, hardware unboxed. The cooler was under the rated tdp of the platform. That and it lasted 6 months and so far seemed the only case of it falling over like it did. Yea am leaning on it being user error.
  • devnullbrain 1y ago
    In my experience building PCs this is not so curious. There are just a lot of duds, from individual SKUs to entire generations, and both manufacturers and retailers will do anything to prevent you RMAing them. I also find that, as performance improvements tolerances get tighter throughout the system, the set of 'things that can screw your build' grows bigger.
• Fr0styMatt88 1y ago
  Alright so two CPUs failing in the same system has gotta be strange; mobo issue? Secondly, what BIOS settings should I be using to run safely? Is XMP/whatever the AMD equivalent is safe? If I don't run XMP then my RAM runs at way below spec (for the stick) default speeds. Anyone know of a good guide for this stuff?
  • jonbiggums22 1y ago
    XMP is technically overclocking, nothing inherently safe about it. I've had new dual channel kits fail memtest at XMP settings on Ryzen, it seemed to depend almost entirely on what the individual CPUs memory controller was capable of. Maybe the situation is better on DDR5 platforms.
• bubblebeard 1y ago
  I have the same CPU in my primary system, and if you can afford it, it’s so choice. A big surprise for me, having owned both a Ryzen gen 1 & 3 previously, was that this time my system posted without me needing to flash my BIOS or play around with various RAM configurations. Felt like magic.
• orthoxerox 1y ago
  It's interesting how Intel has been surviving in smaller and smaller market niches these days: - cheap ULV chips like N100, N150, N300 - ultrabook ULV chips (I hope Lunar Lake is not a fluke) - workstation chips that aren't too powerful (mainstream Core CPUs) - inexpensive GPUs (a surprising niche, but excruciatingly small) AMD has been dominating them in all other submarkets. Without a mainstream halo product Intel has been forced to compete on price, which is not something they can afford. They have to make a product that leapfrogs either AMD or Nvidia and successfully (and meaningfully) iterate on it. The last time they tried something like that was in 2021 with the launch of Alder Lake, but AMD overtook them with 3D V-Cache in 2022.
  • norman784 1y ago
    AFAIK most (if not all) business laptops AKA Dell are intel based? Also I believe they are still big in the server market.
    • noisem4ker 1y ago
      I'm not sure whether a "Dell Pro 16 Plus" is considered a "business laptop" (although I think so), but I'm using one right now and it has an AMD Ryzen AI 5 Pro CPU inside.
    • guardian5x 1y ago
      Dell has been very loyal to Intel all these years, but i guess that is under pressure as well. As more and more customers look for AMD CPUs nowadays. I guess the CPU doesn't matter much in standard office company laptops and price is more important.
• augustl 1y ago
  Happy 9950X user here. Super happy with it, everything is crazy fast. Not a gamer, according to internet and benchmarks the extra cost is only worth it for gaming workloads. I use Arch, btw ;)
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    With AMD I find it’s often quite reasonable to go for their fastest hardware simply because you can. A top of the line AMD PC is $2500, but a Intel/Nvidia one easily runs $5000, though I’ll admit that’s almost all GPU.
• jcalvinowens 1y ago
  I wonder if some of what people interpret as hardware problems are actually software bugs that only trigger on new CPUs... I recently hit this testing pre-release kernels on my gaming PC, a 9900X3D: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250623083408.jTiJiC6_@linutronix.de/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250623083408.jTiJiC6_@linutro... A pile of older Skylake machines was never able to reproduce that bug one single time in 100+ hours of running the same workload. The fast new AMD chips would almost always hit it in a few hours.
• itvision 1y ago
  Yeah, nice: > I get the general impression that the AMD CPU has higher power consumption in all regards: the baseline is higher, the spikes are higher (peak consumption) and it spikes more often / for longer. > Looking at my energy meter statistics, I usually ended up at about 9.x kWh per day for a two-person household, cooking with induction. > After switching my PC from Intel to AMD, I end up at 10-11 kWh per day. It's been the bane of desktop AMD CPUs since Zen 1. Hopefully AMD will address this in Zen 6 but I don't have too much hope.
  • TinkersW 1y ago
    I wonder why the idle power is so high(55 watts), I have measured a beelink mini PC with an 8 core Zen4 when idle, and it was 10 watts.
    • itvision 1y ago
      > I have measured a beelink mini PC with an 8 core Zen4 when idle, and it was 10 watts. Zen APUs have no such issue. My 7840HS idles at 3W when plugged in and around 0.5W when running on battery power.
    • rkrisztian 1y ago
      It's the 3D cache, as I wrote in my other response. It has to be powered on at all times, so it affects even the idle power usage.
      • itvision 1y ago
        It has little to nothing to do with the 3D cache. The IOD (die) is extremely inefficient for all desktop Zen CPUs as it never truly idles.
        • jonbiggums22 1y ago
          Their APUs don't have the problem from the reviews I've seen, but yes the I/O die has been the bane of the Zen platform when it comes to idle power consumption. To make matters worse, the x570 chipset basically runs this I/O die upside down as a chipset and sucks twice as much power at idle as the x470 chipset it replaced. I expected them to replace this hack of a product used for the high end when Asmedia's efforts were delayed but all that platform got was B550. It was pretty clear they weren't chasing this part of the market during AM4's heydey, no real idea where they are at now with chipsets on AM5. But given few people talked about how crappy that chipset was in this respect I guess they might be right it wasn't important to most people.
• vid 1y ago
  For the past 30 odd years I've hand picked and built a desktop PC (which also acts as a home server) pretty much every year, selling the "old" one each time. I really enjoy it as a hobby and for the benefits of understanding and optimizing a system at the parts level. Even though there is a lot of nonsense created by all the choices and marketing, I really prefer the parts approach, and am happy with Linux so a Mac isn't very appealing. A perfectly designed PC can do tasks very well with optimized parts and at a much better price. But I just can't bring myself to upgrade this year. I dabble in local AI, where it's clear fast memory is important, but the PC approach is just not keeping up without going to "workstation" or "server" parts that cost too much. There are glimmers of hope with MR-DIMMs CU-DIMM, and other approaches, but really boards and CPUs need to support more memory channels. Intel has a small advantage over AMD, but it's nothing compared to the memory speed of a Mac Pro or higher. "Strix Halo" offers some hope with four memory channel support, but it's meant for notebooks so isn't really expandable (which would enable à la carte hybrid AI; fast GPUs with reasonably fast shared system RAM). I wish I could fast forward to a better time, but it's likely fully integrated systems will dominate if the size and relatively weak performance for some tasks makes the parts industry pointless. It is a glaring deficiency in the x86 parts concept and will result in PC parts being more and more niche, exotic and inaccessible.
  • gsibble 1y ago
    I think most parts are geared towards gaming these days. When I've needed a server, I went for multi-CPU setups with older, cheaper CPUs. That being said, for AI, HEDT is the obvious answer. Back in the day, it was much more affordable with my 9980XE only costing $2,000. I just built a Threadripper 9980 system with 192GB of RAM and good lord it was expensive. I will actually benefit from it though and the company paid for it. That being said, there is a glaring gap between "consumer" hardware meant for gaming and "workstation" hardware meant for real performance. Have you looked into a 9960 Threadripper build? The CPU isn't TOO expensive, although the memory will be. But you'll get a significantly faster and better machine than something like a 9950X. I also think besides the new Threadripper chips, there isn't much new out this year anyways to warrant upgrading.
    • 1y ago
• whalesalad 1y ago
  OP how are you collecting internal metrics? I see what looks like a grafana dashboard of your workstation usage and I would like to do something similar.
  • secure 1y ago
    I’m using Prometheus for this, with the Prometheus Node Exporter
• austin-cheney 1y ago
  Another reason to switch from Intel to AMD is that Intel is in the top priority segment of the following list while AMD is not on the list at all: https://boycott-israel.org/boycott.html https://boycott-israel.org/boycott.html
  • gradientsrneat 1y ago
    People boycotting an entire company because a fraction of its civilian industry operates in a tiny country that doesn't care about your existence at all, with a high concentration of multiple ethnic minorities who fled from other nearby countries, in an extremely politically unstable region, will never not sound weird to me. TSMC (AMD's fab), is heavily based in Taiwan, which has its own implications regarding long-term sustainability and monopoly. With only two real choices for x86, and the complexity of the global supply chain, it hardly seems like a fair comparison.
    • austin-cheney 1y ago
      Boycotting countries that actively participate in apartheid sounds perfectly reasonable to me. When that apartheid graduates to ethnic cleansing and then genocide it becomes more than reasonable, more than necessary. Israel will not stop murdering people until they are crushed either economically, militarily, or both. Their political leaders have made this clear even to the loud objections of their own military leadership.
• ELIZABETHHILLS 1y ago
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