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

michael.stapelberg.ch

121–130 of 370 posts

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

#121

> 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 f…

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…

> 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.

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

#122
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Running your RAM so far out of spec that it breaks down regularly, where do you take the confidence that ECC will still work correctly? Also: Could you not have just bought slightly faste RAM, given the premium for ECC?

"Breaks down" is a strong choice of words for a single, corrected bit error. ECC works as designed, and demonstrates that it does by detecting this re-occurring error. I take the confidence mostly from experience ;)

And no, as ECC UDIMM for the speed (3600MHz) I run mine at simply does not exist - it is outside of what JEDEC ratified for the DDR4 spec.

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

#123

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.

100C will trigger PROCHOT state in Intel leading to CPU throttling. The CPU will eventually shutdown.

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

#124
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running your RAM so far out of spec that it breaks down regularly, where do you take the confidence that ECC will still work correctly? Also: Could you not have just bought slightly faste RAM, given the premium for ECC?

"Breaks down" is a strong choice of words for a single, corrected bit error. ECC works as designed, and demonstrates that it does by detecting this re-occurring error. I take the confidence mostly from experience ;) And no, as ECC UDIMM for the speed (3600MHz) I run mine at simply does not exist - it is outside of what JEDEC ratified for the DDR4 spec.

JEDEC rated DDR4 at only 2400mhz right? And anything higher is technically over clocking?

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 withi…

Unfortunately, some separately purchasable hardware components seem to be optimized completely for gamers these days (overclocking mainboards, RGB on GPUs, etc.). I'd rather run everything at 90% and get very big power savings and still have pretty stellar performance. I do this with my ThinkStation with Core Ultra 265K now - I set the P-State maximum performance percentage to 90%. Under load it runs almost 20 degree…

> Unfortunately, some separately purchasable hardware components seem to be optimized completely for gamers these days

It turned out during the shitcoin craze and then AI craze that hardcore gamers, aka boomers with a lot of time and retirement money on their hands and early millennials working in big tech building giant-ass man caves, are a sizeable demographic with very deep pockets.

The wide masses however, they gotta live with the scraps that remain after the AI bros and hardcore gamers have had their pick.

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

#126
post #115

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 st…

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.

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

#127
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Breaks down" is a strong choice of words for a single, corrected bit error. ECC works as designed, and demonstrates that it does by detecting this re-occurring error. I take the confidence mostly from experience ;) And no, as ECC UDIMM for the speed (3600MHz) I run mine at simply does not exist - it is outside of what JEDEC ratified for the DDR4 spec.

JEDEC rated DDR4 at only 2400mhz right? And anything higher is technically over clocking?

JEDEC specifies rates up to 3200MT/s, what's officially referred to as DDR4-3200 (PC4-25600).

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

#128

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 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.

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

#129

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.

You’re contradicting yourself. The whole reason x86 burns more power is that the CISC front end can’t be avoided.

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

#130

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…

> Clearly games are able to run well on RISC architectures

Theoretically that’s likely true. But is there any empirical evidence?

Even underclocked Intel desktop chips are massively faster.

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