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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

#321

Post by J_Shelby_J »

microtonal wrote: post #50
hhh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just buy an AMD CPU. One person’s experience isn’t the world. Nobody in my circle has had an issue with any chip from AMD in recent time (10 years). Intel is just bad at the moment and not even worth touching.

I agree that Intel is bad at the moment (especially with the 13th and 14th gen self-destruct issues). But unfortunately I also know plenty of people with issues with AMD systems. And it's no bad power quality on mains as someone suggested (it's excellent here) or 'in the air' (whatever that means) if it happens very quickly after buying. I would guess that a lot of it comes from bad firmware/mainboards, etc. like the…

All of my friends who are on AMD have had issues over the past three years.

My belief is that it is in the memory controllers and the XMP profiles provided with RAM. It’s very easy for the XMP profiles to be overly optimistic or for the RAM to degrade overtime and fall out of spec.

Meanwhile, my intel systems are solid. Even the 9900k hand me down I have to my partner. There is an advantage to using very old tech. And they’re not even slower for gaming: everything is single core bottlenecked anyways. Only in the past year or so that AMD had surpassed in single core performance, but we are talking single digit percentage differences for gaming.

I’m glad AMD has risen, but the dialogue about AMD vs intel in the consumer segment is tainted by people who can’t disconnect their stock ownership from reality.

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

#322

Post by J_Shelby_J »

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.

It’s impossible to find balanced information on the topic because so many people are heavily invested in AMD stock.

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

#323

Post by exceptione »

itvision wrote: post #313
exceptione wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that that some cores are constantly being waked up by something? I mention that since you seem to be on Windows, which itself has a hard time to just shut up, but that is also easily paired with bad drivers, stupid software and bad peripherals.

> I mention that since you seem to be on Windows, which itself has a hard time to just shut up, but that is also easily paired with bad drivers, stupid software and bad peripherals. I happen to be on Fedora Linux 42 and Windows 11 but my primary OS has been Linux for almost 30 years now. Idle power consumption under Windows and Linux is exactly the same. Linux doesn't have any magical tricks to make it lower. Windows…

  > It's kinda hard to be an AMD fan when you live in an alternative reality, huh?
I don't know, as I am not too much intimate with both concepts. I meant to say if both measure idle power but come with different results, are they measuring the same? Could hardware and software differences influence idle power? What values does an "idle power reading" measure actually?

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

#324

Post by J_Shelby_J »

discardable_dan wrote: post #17
eptcyka wrote: post #5

This is rather late, to be quite fair.

My thoughts exactly: he figured out in 2025 what the rest of us knew in 2022.

You figured out in 2022 that AMD would finally catch up to intel single core performance in 2025?

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

#325

Post by vid »

gsibble wrote: post #310
vid wrote: post #306

For the past 30 odd years I've hand picked and built a desktop PC (which also acts as a home server) pretty much every year, selling the "old" one each time. I really enjoy it as a hobby and for the benefits of understanding and optimizing a system at the parts level. Even though there is a lot of nonsense created by all the choices and marketing, I really prefer the parts approach, and am happy with Linux so a Mac i…

I think most parts are geared towards gaming these days. When I've needed a server, I went for multi-CPU setups with older, cheaper CPUs. That being said, for AI, HEDT is the obvious answer. Back in the day, it was much more affordable with my 9980XE only costing $2,000. I just built a Threadripper 9980 system with 192GB of RAM and good lord it was expensive. I will actually benefit from it though and the company pai…

I have looked into the Threadripper, but just can't justify it. The tension between all the options and the cost, power usage, size (EATX) is too much, and I don't think such a system, especially with 2025 era DDR5 in the 6000mt range, will hold its value well. If I were directly earning money with it, sure, but as a hobby/augmentation to my work, I will wait out a generation or lose interest in the pursuit.

Competitors to NVidia really need to figure things out, even for gaming with AI being used more I think a high end APU would be compelling with fast shared memory.

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

#326

Post by wmf »

mr_toad wrote: post #300
jml7c5 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem with ECC for me is that the sticks are so much more expensive. You'd expect ECC UDIMMs to have a price premium of just over 12.5% (because there are 9 chips instead of 8), but it's usually at least 100%. I don't mind paying reasonable premium for ECC, but paying double is too hard to swallow.

Trouble with enterprise is that the people buying care about the technology, but not the cost, while the people that do care about cost don’t understand the technology. Some businesses (and governments) try and unify their purchasing, but this seems to make things worse, with the purchasing department both not understanding technology and being outwitted by vendors.

Enterprise IT is overpriced so you can negotiate a 50% discount. Unfortunately negotiating isn't worth it for something like a pair of DIMMs.

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

#327

Post by vid »

stillsut wrote: post #318
vid wrote: post #306

For the past 30 odd years I've hand picked and built a desktop PC (which also acts as a home server) pretty much every year, selling the "old" one each time. I really enjoy it as a hobby and for the benefits of understanding and optimizing a system at the parts level. Even though there is a lot of nonsense created by all the choices and marketing, I really prefer the parts approach, and am happy with Linux so a Mac i…

At a meta-level, I wonder if there's this un-talked about advantage of poaching ambitious talent out of an established incumbent to work a new product line in a new organization, in this case Apple Silicon disrupting Intel/AMD. And we've also seen SpaceX do this NASA/Boeing, and OpenAI do it to Google's ML departments. It seems like large, unchallenged organizations like Intel (or NASA or Google) collect all the top…

I'm not sure it really takes that kind of breakthrough approach. Apple chips are more energy efficient, but x86 can be much faster on CPU or GPU tasks, and it's much more versatile. A main "bug and feature" issue is the PC industry relies on common denominator standards and components, whereas Apple has gone vertical with very limited core expansion. This is particularly important when it comes to memory speed, where the standards are developed and factories upgraded over years at huge cost.

I gather it's very difficult and expensive to make a board that supports more channels of RAM, so that seems worth targeting at the platform level. Eight channel RAM using common RAM DIMMs would transform PCs for many tasks, however for now gamers are a main force and they don't really care about memory speed.

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

#328

Post by yndoendo »

moffkalast wrote: post #263
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…

Do you live at a very high altitude with a significant amount of solar radiation, or at an underfunded radiology lab or perhaps near a uranium deposit or a melted down nuclear reactor? Because the average machine should never see a memory bit flip error at all during its entire lifetime.

Bit flipping can be the byproduct of bow the system components harmonize. Role hammer RAM also has the same affect. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

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

#329

Post by vid »

827a wrote: post #316
vid wrote: post #306

For the past 30 odd years I've hand picked and built a desktop PC (which also acts as a home server) pretty much every year, selling the "old" one each time. I really enjoy it as a hobby and for the benefits of understanding and optimizing a system at the parts level. Even though there is a lot of nonsense created by all the choices and marketing, I really prefer the parts approach, and am happy with Linux so a Mac i…

To be honest, much of the sense that Apple is ridiculously far ahead when it comes to unified memory SoC architectures comes from people who aren't actually invested in any kind of non-Nvidia local AI development to the degree where you'd actually notice a difference (either the AMD AI Max platform or Apple Silicon Ultra). Because if you were, you'd realize that the grass isn't greener on these unified memory platfor…

People are running GPT OSS 120b at 46 tokens per second on Strix Halo systems, which is quite usable and a fraction of the cost of a 128GB NVidia or Apple system. Apple's GPU isn't that strong, so real competition to Apple and NVidia can be created.

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

#330

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

Any specific recommendations? I am having random, OS agnostic lockups on my ryzen 1xxx build and thought DDR5 will be enough, but true ECC sounds good.

edit: Looks like a lot of Asus motherboards work, and the thing to look for is "unbuffered" ECC. Kingston has some, I see 32GB module for $190 on Newegg.

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