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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

#201

Post by sunshowers »

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…

If you're on Linux, dmesg containing

  EDAC MC0: Giving out device to module amd64_edac
is a pretty reliable indication that ECC is working.

See my blog post about it (it was top of HN): https://sunshowers.io/posts/am5-ryzen-7000-ecc-ram/

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

#202

Post by hungmung »

rendaw wrote: post #198
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…

So I'm trying to learn more about this stuff, but aren't there multiple ECC flavors and the AMD consumer CPUs only support one of them (not the one you'd have on servers?) Does anyone maintain a list with de-facto support of amd chips and mainboards? That partlist site only shows official support IIRC, so it won't give you any results.

Seconding this. I'm looking for a fanless industrial mini PC with out of band ECC and I'm having a hell of a time.

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

#203

Post by remexre »

arp242 wrote: post #148
uncircle wrote: post #110

Earlier 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…

> Maybe RISC-V?

RISC-V is specified as a RISC (and allows very space-/power-efficient lower-end designs with the classic RISC design), but designed with macro-op fusion in mind, which gets you closer to a CISC decoder and EUs.

It's a nice place to be in tooling-wise, but it seems too early to say definitively what extensions will need to be added to get 12900K/9950X/M4 -tier performance-per-core.

In either case though, a bunch of the tricks that make modern CPUs fast are ISA-independent; stuff like branch prediction or [0] don't depend on the ISA, and can "work around" needing more instructions to do certain tasks, for one side or the other.

[0]: https://tavianator.com/2025/shlx.html

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

#204

Post by tverbeure »

wallopinski wrote: post #196

Funny and depressing that the AMD/Intel culture war still exists. I remember arguing about it in 1990. Their marketing departments severely brainwashed generations of nerds.

I didn't see anything CPU culture war related in the blog post.

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

#205

Post by adrian_b »

rendaw wrote: post #198
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…

So I'm trying to learn more about this stuff, but aren't there multiple ECC flavors and the AMD consumer CPUs only support one of them (not the one you'd have on servers?) Does anyone maintain a list with de-facto support of amd chips and mainboards? That partlist site only shows official support IIRC, so it won't give you any results.

The difference between the "unbuffered" ECC DIMMs (ECC UDIMMs), which you must use in desktop motherboards (and in some of those advertised as "workstation" MBs) and the "registered" ECC DIMMs (ECC RDIMMs), which you must use in server motherboards (and in some of the "workstation" MBs), has existed for decades.

However in the past there have existed very few CPU models and MBs that supported either kind of DIMMs, while today this has become completely impossible, as the mechanical and electrical differences between them have increased.

In any case, today, like also 20 years ago, when searching for ECC DIMMs you must always search only the correct type, e.g. unbuffered ECC DIMMs for desktop CPUs.

In general, registered ECC DIMMs are easier to find, because wherever "server memory" is advertised, that is what is meant. For desktop ECC memory, you must be careful to see both "ECC" and "unbuffered" mentioned in the module description.

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

#206

Post by adrian_b »

hungmung wrote: post #202
rendaw wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm trying to learn more about this stuff, but aren't there multiple ECC flavors and the AMD consumer CPUs only support one of them (not the one you'd have on servers?) Does anyone maintain a list with de-facto support of amd chips and mainboards? That partlist site only shows official support IIRC, so it won't give you any results.

Seconding this. I'm looking for a fanless industrial mini PC with out of band ECC and I'm having a hell of a time.

Had you been looking for "in-band ECC", the cheap ODROID H4 PLUS ($150) or the cheaper ODROID H4 ($110) would have been fine, or for something more expensive some of the variants of Asus NUC 13 Rugged support in-band ECC.

For out-of-band ECC, e.g. with standard ECC SODIMMs, all the embedded SBCs that I have seen used only CPUs that are very obsolete nowadays, i.e. ancient versions of Intel Xeon or old AMD industrial Ryzen CPUs (AMD's series of industrial Ryzen CPUs are typically at least one or two generations behind their laptop/desktop CPUs).

Moreover all such industrial SBCs with ECC SODIMMs were rather large, i.e. either in the 3.5" form factor or in the NanoITX form factor (120 mm x 120 mm), and it might have been necessary to replace their original coolers with bigger heatsinks for fanless operation.

In-band ECC causes a significant decrease of the performance, but for most applications of such mini-PCs the performance is completely acceptable.

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

#207

Post by nicman23 »

hungmung wrote: post #202
rendaw wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm trying to learn more about this stuff, but aren't there multiple ECC flavors and the AMD consumer CPUs only support one of them (not the one you'd have on servers?) Does anyone maintain a list with de-facto support of amd chips and mainboards? That partlist site only shows official support IIRC, so it won't give you any results.

Seconding this. I'm looking for a fanless industrial mini PC with out of band ECC and I'm having a hell of a time.

https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/iBOX-V2000V

something like that?

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

#208

Post by esseph »

heelix wrote: post #128
bob1029 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a 5700X with an AIO water cooler and it runs 65C under load. Never seems to crash. Been like this for years.

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

#209

Post by esseph »

encom wrote: post #19
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…

>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…

I don't think I've ever had a BIOS that didn't reset things to default after a firmware upgrade.

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

#210

Post by c0l0 »

kderbe wrote: post #142
c0l0 wrote: 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…

I would loosen the memory timings a bit and see if that resolves the ECC errors. x265 performance shouldn't fall since it generally benefits more from memory clock rate than latency. Also, could you share some relevant info about your processor, mainboard, and UEFI? I see many internet commenters question whether their ECC is working (or ask if a particular setup would work), and far fewer that report a successful EC…

I've been on AM4 for most of the past decade (and still am, in fact), and the mainboards I've personally had in use with working ECC support were:

  - ASRock B450 Pro4
  - ASRock B550M-ITX/ac
  - ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac
  - Gigabyte MC12-LE0
There's probably many others with proper ECC support. Vendor spec sheets usually hint at properly working ECC in their firmware if they mention "ECC UDIMM" support specifically.

As for CPUs, that is even easier for AM4: Everything that's not based on a APU core (there are some SKUs marketed without iGPU that just have the iGPU part of the APU disabled, such as the Ryzen 5 5500) cannot support ECC. An exception to that rule are "PRO"-series APUs, such as the Ryzen 5 PRO 5650G et al., which have an iGPU, but also support ECC. Main differences (apart from the integrated graphics) between CPU and APU SKUs is that the latter do not support PCIe 4.0 (APUs are limited to PCIe 3.0), and have a few Watts lower idle power consumption.

When I originally built the desktop PC that I still use (after a number of in-place upgrades, such as swapping out the CPU/GPU combo for an APU), I blogged about it (in German) here: https://johannes.truschnigg.info/blog/2020-03-23#0033-2020-0...

If I were to build an AM5 system today, I would look into mainboards from ASUS for proper ECC support - they seem to have it pretty much universally supported on their gear. (Actual out-of-band ECC with EDAC support on Linux, not the DDR5 "on-DIE" stuff.)

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