Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

michael.stapelberg.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 370 posts

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

#51

Post by claudex »

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…

>And my stupid MSI board resets everything (every single BIOS setting) to MSI defaults when you upgrade its BIOS.

I had the same issue with my MSI board, next one won't be a MSI.

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

#52

Post by microtonal »

ahofmann wrote: post #18
johnisgood wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not fill me with much hope. What am I even ought to buy at this point then, I wonder. I have a ~13 years old Intel CPU which lacks AVX2 (and I need it by now) and I thought of buying a new desktop (items separately, of course), but that is crazy to me that it freezes because of the CPU going idle. It was never an issue in my case. I guess I can only hope it is not going to be a problem once I completed buil…

I wouldn't be so hopeless. Intel and AMD CPUs are used in millions of builds and most of them just work.

However, the vast majority of PCs out there are not hobbyist builds but Dell/Lenovo/HP/etc. [1] with far fewer possible configurations (and much more testing as a byproduct). I am not saying these machines never have issues, but a high failure rate would not be acceptable to their business customers.

[1] Well, most non-servers are probably laptops today, but the same reasoning applies.

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

#53

Post by microtonal »

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…

Yea, but unfortunately it comes attached to a Mac.

Yeah. If Asahi worked on newer Macs and Apple Silicon Macs supported eGPU (yes I know, big ifs), the choice would be simple. I had NixOS on my Mac Studio M1 Ultra for a while and it was pretty glorious.

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

#54

Post by willtemperley »

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 to look OK on benchmarks will not help.

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

#55

Post by swinglock »

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.

The text clearly explains all of this.

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

#56

Post by KronisLV »

> 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 for a week non-stop if you well damn please. If you can't, then the value has been chosen wrong by the manufacturers. If the CPU can't handle that, the clock rates should just be dialed back accordingly to maintain stability.

It's odd to hear about Core Ultra CPUs failing like that, though - I thought that they were supposed to be more power efficient than the 13th and 14th gen, all while not having their stability issues.

That said, I currently have a Ryzen 7 5800X, OCed with PBO to hit 5 GHz with negative CO offsets per core set. There's also an AIO with two fans and the side panel is off because the case I have is horrible. While gaming the temps usually don't reach past like 82C but Prime95 or anything else that's computationally intensive can make the CPU hit and flatten out at 90C. So odd to have modern desktop class CPUs still bump into thermal limits like that. That's with a pretty decent ambient temperature between 21C to 26C (summer).

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

#57

Post by ahartmetz »

homebrewer wrote: post #47
encom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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…

Since you mention EXPO/XMP, which are about RAM overclocking: RAM has the least trouble with overvoltage. Raising some of the various CPU voltages is a problem, which RAM overclocking may also do.

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

#58

Post by makeitdouble »

bell-cot wrote: post #23
stavros wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good, isn't it? I don't want the factory leaving performance on the table.

Depends on your priorities. That "performance on the table" might also be called "engineering safety factor for stability".

TBF using more conservative energy profiles will bring stability and safety. To that effect in Windows the default profile effectively debuffs the CPU and most people will be fine that way.

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

#59

Post by microtonal »

homebrewer wrote: post #47
encom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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 degrees Celsius cooler. Single core is 8% slower, multicore 4.9%. Well worth the trade-off for me.

(Yes, I know that there are exceptions.)

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

#60

Post by FeepingCreature »

Jolter wrote: post #49
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.

I would expect the CPU to start throttling at high temperatures in order to avoid damage. Allegedly, it never did, and instead died. Do you think that’s acceptable in 2025?

No but it's also important to realize that this CPU was running at an insane temperature that should never happen in normal operation. I have a laptop with an undersized fan and if I max out all my cores with full load, I barely cross 80. 100 is mental. It doesn't matter if the manufacturer set the peak temperature wrong, a computer whose cpu reaches 100 degrees celsius is simply built incorrectly.

If nothing else, it very clearly indicates that you can boost your performance significantly by sorting out your cooling because your cpu will be stuck permanently emergency throttling.

Post reply on HN