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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

#111

Post by bell-cot »

bob1029 wrote: post #101
microtonal wrote: post #2

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 the…

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 ligh…

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.

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

#112

Post by fmajid »

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...

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

#113

Post by techpression »

williamDafoe wrote: post #98
techpression wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :/

The 7000 series of CPUs is NOT known for running cool, unlike the AMD 5000 series (which are basically server CPUs repurposed for desktop usage). In the 7000 series, AMD decided to just increase the power of each CPU and that's where most of the performance gains are coming from - but power consumption is 40-50% higher than with similar 5000-series CPUs.

I specifically singled out the 7800X3D though, it runs incredibly cool and at a very low power draw for the performance you get.

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

#114

Post by techpression »

izacus wrote: post #91
techpression wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did what exactly? All the ASUS and Gigabytes I've seen had PBO (which I guess you're talking about) disabled by default.

Reset all the settings with BIOS updates

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

#115

Post by api »

microtonal wrote: post #2

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 the…

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.

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

#116

Post by bell-cot »

perching_aix wrote: post #79
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.

> Expecting a CPU to be stable at 100C is just asking for problems. No. High performance gaming laptops will routinely do this for hours on end for years. If it can't take it, it shouldn't allow it.

I've not looked at the specifics here - but "stable at X degrees, Y% duty cycle, for Z" years is just another engineering spec.

Intel's basic 285K spec's - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241060/... - say "Max Operating Temperature 105 °C".

So, yes - running the CPU that close to its maximum is really not asking for stability, nor longevity.

No reason to doubt your assertion about gaming laptops - but chip binning is a thing, and the manufacturers of those laptops have every reason to pay Intel a premium for CPU's which test to better values of X, Y, and Z.

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

#117

Post by dezgeg »

ACCount37 wrote: post #83
formerly_proven wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

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

#118

Post by etempleton »

microtonal wrote: post #2

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 the…

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.

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

#119

Post by enronmusk »

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?

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

#120

Post by immibis »

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 saw a corrected memory error logged every few hours when my current machine was new. It seems to have gone away now, so either some burn-in effect, or ECC accidentally got switched off and all my data is now corrupted. Threadripper 7000 series, 4x64GB DDR5.

Edit: it's probably because I switched it to "energy efficiency mode" instead of "performance mode" because it would occasionally lock up in performance mode. Presumably with the same root cause.

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