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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 issu

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
    That is what I thought, thanks.
  - microtonal 1y ago
    I agree that Intel is bad at the moment (especially with the 13th and 14th gen self-destruct issues). But unfortunately I also know plenty of people with issues with AMD systems. And it's no bad power quality on mains as someone suggested (it's excellent here) or 'in the air' (whatever that means) if it happens very quickly after buying. I would guess that a lot of it comes from bad firmware/mainboards, etc. like the recent issue with ASRock mainboards destroying Ryzen 9000-series GPUs: https://www.techspot.com/news/108120-asrock-confirms-ryzen-9000-failures-caused-bios-settings.html https://www.techspot.com/news/108120-asrock-confirms-ryzen-9... Anyone who uses Linux and has dealt with bad ACPI bugs, etc. knows that a lot of these mainboards probably have crap firmware. I should also say that I had a Ryzen 3700X and 5900X many years back and two laptops with a Ryzen CPU and they have been awesome.
    - J_Shelby_J 1y ago
      All of my friends who are on AMD have had issues over the past three years. My belief is that it is in the memory controllers and the XMP profiles provided with RAM. It’s very easy for the XMP profiles to be overly optimistic or for the RAM to degrade overtime and fall out of spec. Meanwhile, my intel systems are solid. Even the 9900k hand me down I have to my partner. There is an advantage to using very old tech. And they’re not even slower for gaming: everything is single core bottlenecked anyways. Only in the past year or so that AMD had surpassed in single core performance, but we are talking single digit percentage differences for gaming. I’m glad AMD has risen, but the dialogue about AMD vs intel in the consumer segment is tainted by people who can’t disconnect their stock ownership from reality.
  - hedora 1y ago
    I went further and got an AMD system on chip machine with an integrated gpu. It’s fine for gaming and borderline for LLM inference (I should have put 64GB in instead of 32GB). The only issues are with an intel Bluetooth chipset, and bios auto detection bugs. Under Linux, the hardware is bug for bug compatible with Windows, and I’m down to zero known issues after doing a bit of hardware debugging.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      Any details if the whole rig is below 2k USD (or even around 1k USD)?
- 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

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
  That is what I thought, thanks.
- microtonal 1y ago
  I agree that Intel is bad at the moment (especially with the 13th and 14th gen self-destruct issues). But unfortunately I also know plenty of people with issues with AMD systems. And it's no bad power quality on mains as someone suggested (it's excellent here) or 'in the air' (whatever that means) if it happens very quickly after buying. I would guess that a lot of it comes from bad firmware/mainboards, etc. like the recent issue with ASRock mainboards destroying Ryzen 9000-series GPUs: https://www.techspot.com/news/108120-asrock-confirms-ryzen-9000-failures-caused-bios-settings.html https://www.techspot.com/news/108120-asrock-confirms-ryzen-9... Anyone who uses Linux and has dealt with bad ACPI bugs, etc. knows that a lot of these mainboards probably have crap firmware. I should also say that I had a Ryzen 3700X and 5900X many years back and two laptops with a Ryzen CPU and they have been awesome.
  - J_Shelby_J 1y ago
    All of my friends who are on AMD have had issues over the past three years. My belief is that it is in the memory controllers and the XMP profiles provided with RAM. It’s very easy for the XMP profiles to be overly optimistic or for the RAM to degrade overtime and fall out of spec. Meanwhile, my intel systems are solid. Even the 9900k hand me down I have to my partner. There is an advantage to using very old tech. And they’re not even slower for gaming: everything is single core bottlenecked anyways. Only in the past year or so that AMD had surpassed in single core performance, but we are talking single digit percentage differences for gaming. I’m glad AMD has risen, but the dialogue about AMD vs intel in the consumer segment is tainted by people who can’t disconnect their stock ownership from reality.
- hedora 1y ago
  I went further and got an AMD system on chip machine with an integrated gpu. It’s fine for gaming and borderline for LLM inference (I should have put 64GB in instead of 32GB). The only issues are with an intel Bluetooth chipset, and bios auto detection bugs. Under Linux, the hardware is bug for bug compatible with Windows, and I’m down to zero known issues after doing a bit of hardware debugging.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    Any details if the whole rig is below 2k USD (or even around 1k USD)?
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