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?
I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
181–190 of 370 posts
Re: I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
#182I 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.
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…
Check dmesg after the driver crashes and restarts. If the crash is something about a ringbuffer timeout, use dmidecode to see what the ram is actually clocked at.
Make sure it matches the min of the actual spec of the ram that you bought and what the CPU can do.
I used to get crashes like you are describing on a similar machine. The crashes are in the GPU firmware, making debugging a bit of a crap shoot. If you can run windows with the crashing workload on it, you’ll probably find it crashes the same ways as Linux.
For me, it was a bios bug that underclocked the ram. Memory tests, etc passed.
I suspect there are hard performance deadlines in the GPU stack, and the underclocked memory was causing it to miss them, and assume a hang.
If the ram frequency looks OK, check all the hardware configuration knobs you can think of. Something probably auto-detected wrong.
Re: I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
#183Why 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.
I had an 8th-gen i7 sitting at the thermal limit (~100C) in a laptop for half a decade 24/7 with no problem. As sibling comments have noted, modern CPUs are designed to run "flat-out against the governor".
Voltage-dependent electromigration is the biggest problem and what lead to the failures in Intel CPUs not long ago, perhaps ironically caused by cooling that was "too good" --- the CPU finds that there's still plenty of thermal headroom, so it boosts frequency and accompanying voltage to reach the limit, and went too far with the voltage. If it had hit the thermal limit it would've backed off on the voltage and frequency.
Re: I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I’ve had multiple systems that crash or corrupt data when underclocked, so running at 90% might not be what you want. You can always play with the CPU governor / disable high power states. That should be well-tested.
It sounds like you are conflating undervolting for underclocking. Undervolting runs it out of spec, while underclocking simply runs it slower
Re: I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
#185I 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…
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.
Re: I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
X86 isn’t CISC, sure, but it isn’t a RISC architecture either.
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…
MIPS is as close to a "real RISC" CPU as one can be, and it's "everywhere you don't look", but for reasons entirely unrelated to performance --- it's the choice of SoCs which are too cheap for ARM. I suspect RISC-V is going to become more popular in that market, although it's one which is already filled with various Chinese MIPS/RISC-ish cores that are entirely unimpressive.
Re: I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That was disproved 11 years ago:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-sho...
The CISC decoder is like a "decompressor" that saves memory bandwidth and cache usage.
Re: I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
#188I 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…
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
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.
Re: I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
#189I 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.
Crash on idle, interesting. Must be some timing issue related to down clocking, or maybe a voltage issue related to shutting off a core.
Re: I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think you've found a particularly weak memory cell, I would start thinking about replacing that module. The consistent memory_channel=1, csrow=0 pattern confirms it's the same physical location failing predictably.