I Am Giving Up on Intel and Have Bought an Amd Ryzen 9950x3d

Intel is just bad at the moment and not even worth touching.

Definetly not that one if you plan to pair with a dedicated GPU! The 5700X has twice the L3 cache. All Ryzen 5000 with a GPU have only 16MB, 5700 has the GPU deactivated.

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 within acceptable tolerances, but it requires hours and hours of tinkering and stability testing.

Most users just set automatic overclocking, have their motherboards push voltages to insane levels, and then act surprised when their CPUs start bugging out within a couple of years.

Shocking!

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

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.

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.

But if your UPS (or just the electrical outlet you're plugged into) can't cope - dunno if I'd describe that as cratering your CPU.

You said the right words but with the wrong meaning! On Gigabyte mobo you want to increase the "CPU Vcore Loadline Calibration" and the "PWM Phase Control" settings, [see screenshot here](https://forum.level1techs.com/t/ddr4-ram-load-line-calibrati...).

When I first got my Ryzen 3900X cpu and X570 mobo in 2019, I had many issues for a long time (freezes at idle, not waking from sleep, bios loops, etc). Eventually I found that bumping up those settings to ~High (maybe even Extreme) was what was required, and things worked for 2 years or so until I got a 5950X on clearance last year.

I slotted that in to the same mobo and it worked fine, but when I was looking at HWMon etc, I noticed some strange things with the power/voltage. After some mucking about and theorising with ChatGPT (it's way quicker than googling for uncommon problems), it became apparent that the ~High LLC/power settings I was still using were no good. ChatGPT explained that my 3900X was probably a bit "crude" in relative quality, and so it needed the "stronger" power settings to keep itself in order. Then when I've swapped to 5950X, it happens to be more "refined" and thus doesn't need to be "manhandled" — and in fact, didn't like being manhandled at all!

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.

This anecdote perfectly describes my few generation old Intel laptop too. The fans turn on maybe once a month. I dont think its as power efficient as an M-series Apple CPU, but total system power is definitely under 10W during normal usage (including screen, wifi, etc).

This isn't really true. On the same process node the difference is negligible. It's just that Intel's process in particular has efficiency problems and Apple buys out the early capacity for TSMC's new process nodes. Then when you compare e.g. the first chips to use 3nm to existing chips which are still using 4 or 5nm, the newer process has somewhat better efficiency. But even then the difference isn't very large.

And the processors made on the same node often make for inconvenient comparisons, e.g. the M4 uses TSMC N3E but the only x86 processor currently using that is Epyc. And then you're obviously not comparing like with like, but as a ballpark estimate, the M4 Pro has a TDP of ~3.2W/core whereas Epyc 9845 is ~2.4W/core. The M4 can mitigate this by having somewhat better performance per core but this is nothing like an unambiguous victory for Apple; it's basically a tie.

> 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 stuff like browsing and using apps doesn’t even get it warm.

One of the reasons for this is that Apple has always been willing to run components right up to their temperature spec before turning on the fan. And then even though that's technically in spec, it's right on the line, which is bad for longevity.

In consumer devices it usually doesn't matter because most people rarely put any real load on their machines anyway, but it's something to be aware of if you actually intend to, e.g. there used to be a Mac Mini Server product and then people would put significant load on them and then they would eat the internal hard drives because the fan controller was tuned for acoustics over operating temperature.

My modern CPU problems are DDR5 and the pre-boot timing thing never completing. So a build of a 9700x that I did that WAS supposed to be located remotely from me has to sit in my office and have its hand held thru every reboot cuz you never know quite know when its doing to decide it needs to retime and randomly never come back. Requires pulling the plug from the back and waiting a few minutes then powering back, then waiting 30 minutes for 64gb of ddr5 to do its timing thing.

A common approach is to go into the BIOS/UEFI settings and check that c6 is disabled. To verify and/or temporarily turn c6 off, see https://github.com/r4m0n/ZenStates-Linux

I have always run B series because I've never needed the overclocking or additional peripherals. In my server builds I usually disable peripherals in the UEFI like Bluetooth and audio as well.

I've never overclocked anything and I've never felt I've missed out in any way. I really can't imagine spending even one minute trying to squeeze 5% or whatnot tweaking voltages and dealing with plumbing and roaring fans. I want to use the machine, not hotrod it.

I would rather Intel et al. leave a few percent "on the table" and sell things that work, for years on end without failure and without a lot of care and feeding. Lately it looks like a crapshoot trying to identify components that don't kill themselves.

If anyone thinks competition isn't good for the market or that also-rans don't have enough of an effect, just take note. Intel is a cautionary tale. I do agree we would have gotten where we are faster with more viable competitors.

M4 is neat. I won't be shocked if x86 finally gives up the ghost as Intel decides playing in Risc V or ARM space is their only hope to get back into an up-cycle. AMD has wanted to do heterogeneous stuff for years. Risc V might be the way.

One thing I'm finding is that compilers are actually leaving a ton on the table for AMD chips, so I think this is an area where AMD and all of the users, from SMEs on down, can benefit tremendously from cooperatively financing the necessary software to make it happen.

It is actually 2.9999, precisely.

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.

Threadripper is built for this. But I am talking about the consumer options if you are on a budget. Intel has significantly more memory bandwidth than AMD in the consumer end. I don't have the numbers on hand, but someone at /r/localllama did a comparison a while ago.

Smartphones have no active cooling and are fully dependent on thermal throttling for survival, but they can start throttling at as low as 50C easily. Laptops with underspecced cooling systems generally try their best to avoid crossing into triple digits - a lot of them max out at 85C to 95C, even under extreme loads.

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.