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

michael.stapelberg.ch

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

#81

Post by c0l0 »

dijit wrote: post #73
c0l0 wrote: post #65

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 yea…

> only a minority of them enables ECC support in their firmware, so always check for that before buying! This is the annoying part. That AMD permits ECC is a truly fantastic situation, but if it's supported by the motherboard is often unlikely and worse: it's not advertised even when it's available. I have an ASUS PRIME TRX40 PRO and the tech specs say that it can run ECC and non-ECC but not if ECC will be available…

Usually, if a vendor's spec sheet for a (SOHO/consumer-grade) motherboard mentions ECC-UDIMM explicitly in its memory compatibility section, and (but this is a more recent development afaict) DOES NOT specify something like "operating in non-ECC mode only" at the same time, then you will have proper ECC (and therefore EDAC and RAS) support in Linux, if the kernel version you have can already deal with ECC on your platform in general.

I would assume your particular motherboard to operate with proper SECDED+-level ECC if you have capable, compatible DIMM, enable ECC mode in the firmware, and boot an OS kernel that can make sense of it all.

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

#82

Post by em-bee »

nl wrote: post #44
trueismywork wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is an impossibility in most of the world today and it will be even more like that going forward.

Much of the world (for better or worse) uses airconditioning in places they commonly use desktop computers.

no they don't. in some countries in europe (maybe in all of them?), installing airconditioning is frowned upon because it is considered a waste of energy. if you want government subsidies for replacing your heating system with a more energy efficient one you are not allowed to have airconditioning. and in the rest of the world only people/countries well of, that don't consider their energy usage, do it. airconditioning is luxury.

using to much airconditioning is also not comfortable. i used to live in singapore. we used to joke that singapore has two seasons: indoors and outdoors. because the airconditioning is powered so high that you had to bring jacket to wear inside. i'd frequently freeze after entering a building. i don't know why they do it, because it doesn't make sense. when i did turn on airconditioning at home i'd go barely below 30. just a few degrees cooler than the outside so it feels more comfortable without making the transition to hard.

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

#83

Post by ACCount37 »

formerly_proven wrote: post #42
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #40

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.

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).

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.

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

#85

Post by c0l0 »

consp wrote: post #78
c0l0 wrote: post #65

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 yea…

Isn't it mostly an ease of mind thing? I've never seen a ECC error on my home server which has plenty of memory in use and runs longer than my desktop. Maybe it's more common with higher clocked, near the limit, desktop PC's. Also: DDR5 has some false ecc marketing due to the memory standard having an error correction scheme build in. Don't fall for it.

I see a particular ECC error at least weekly on my home desktop system, because one of my DIMMs doesn't like the (out of spec) clock rate that I make it operate at. Looks like this:

    94 2025-08-26 01:49:40 +0200 error: Corrected error, no action required., CPU 2, bank Unified Memory Controller (bank=18), mcg mcgstatus=0, mci CECC, memory_channel=1,csrow=0, mcgcap=0x0000011c, status=0x9c2040000000011b, addr=0x36e701dc0, misc=0xd01a000101000000, walltime=0x68aea758, cpuid=0x00a50f00, bank=0x00000012
    95 2025-09-01 09:41:50 +0200 error: Corrected error, no action required., CPU 2, bank Unified Memory Controller (bank=18), mcg mcgstatus=0, mci CECC, memory_channel=1,csrow=0, mcgcap=0x0000011c, status=0x9c2040000000011b, addr=0x36e701dc0, misc=0xd01a000101000000, walltime=0x68b80667, cpuid=0x00a50f00, bank=0x00000012
(this is `sudo ras-mc-ctl --errors` output)

It's always the same address, and always a Corrected Error (obviously, otherwise my kernel would panic). However, operating my system's memory at this clock and latency boosts x265 encoding performance (just one of the benchmarks I picked when trying to figure out how to handle this particular tradeoff) by about 12%. That is an improvement I am willing to stomach the extra risk of effectively overclocking the memory module beyond its comformt zone for, given that I can fully mitigate it by virtue of properly working ECC.

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

#86

Post by giveita »

microtonal wrote: post #52
ahofmann wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so hopeless. Intel and AMD CPUs are used in millions of builds and most of them just work.

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.

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!

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

#87

Post by smallpipe »

willtemperley wrote: post #54

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…

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.

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

#88

Post by techpression »

claudex wrote: post #51
encom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>And my stupid MSI board resets everything (every single BIOS setting) to MSI defaults when you upgrade its BIOS. I had the same issue with my MSI board, next one won't be a MSI.

My ASUS and Gigabyte did the same too. I think vendors are being lazy and don’t want to write migration code

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

#89

Post by techpression »

whyoh wrote: post #3

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.

The 7800X3D is amazing here, runs extremely cool and stable, you can push it far above its defaults and it still won’t get to 80C even with air cooling. Mine was running between 60-70 under load with PBO set to high. Unfortunately it seems its successor is not that great :/

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

#90

Post by izacus »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #60
Jolter wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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, i…

I somehow doubt that, are you looking at the same temperature? I haven't seen a laptop that would have thermal stop under 95 for a long time and any gaming laptop will run at 95 under load for package temps.
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