For example, various brands of motherboards are / were known to basically blow up AMD CPUs when using AMP/XMP, with the root cause being that they jacked an uncore rail way up. Many people claimed they did this to improve stability, but overclockers now that that rail has a sweet spot for stability and they went way beyond it (so much so that the actual silicon failed and burned a hole in itself with some low-ish probability).
https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/amd-ryzen-79...
Actually almost everything what you wrote is not true, and commenter above already sent you some links.
7800X3D is the GOAT, very power efficient and cool.
And even if could push it higher, they run very hot compared to other CPUs at the same power usage as a combination of AMD's very thick IHS, the compute chiplets being small/power dense and 7000 series X3D cache being on top of the compute chiplet unlike 9000 series that has it on the bottom.
The 9800x3d limited in the same way will be both mildly more power efficient from faster cores and run cooler because of the cache location. The only reason it's hotter is that it's allowed to use significantly more power, usually up to 150w stock, for which you'd have to remove the IHS on the 7800X3D if you didn't want to see magic smoke
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.
An ideal ambient (room) temperature for running a computer is 15-25 celcius (60-77 Fahrenheit)
Source: https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/ambie...
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0: +40.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0: +38.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1: +39.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Maybe today's CPUs would not be able to handle it, I am not sure. One would expect these things to only improve, but seems like this is not the case.
Edit: I misread it, oops! Disregard this comment.
using to much airconditioning is also not comfortable. i used to live in singapore. we used to joke that singapore has two seasons: indoors and outdoors. because the airconditioning is powered so high that you had to bring jacket to wear inside. i'd frequently freeze after entering a building. i don't know why they do it, because it doesn't make sense. when i did turn on airconditioning at home i'd go barely below 30. just a few degrees cooler than the outside so it feels more comfortable without making the transition to hard.
It is actually 2.9999, precisely.
Nuc 9 averaged 65-70W power usage, while the m4 is averaging 6.6W.
The Mac is vastly more performant.
The hardware is impressive - tiny, metal box, always silent, basic speaker built-in and it can be left always on with minimal power consumption.
Drive size for basic models is limited (512gb) - I solved it by moving photos to NAS. I don't use it for gaming, except Hello Kitty Island Adventure. I would say it's a very competitive choice for a desktop PC in 2025 overall.
Pass -fuse=mold when building.
Don't know about transcoding though.
Yet I also use a 7840U in a gaming handheld running Windows, and haven't had any issues there at all. So I think this is related to AMD Linux drivers and/or Wayland. In contrast, my old laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and Xorg has given me zero issues for about a decade now.
So I've decided to just avoid AMD on Linux on my next machine. Intel's upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake CPUs seem promising, and their integrated graphics have consistently been improving. I don't think AMD's dominance will continue for much longer.
Besides AMD CPUs of the early 2000s going up in smokes without working cooling, they all throttle before they become temporarily or permanently unstable. Otherwise they are bad.
I've never had a desktop part fail due to max temperatures, but I don't think I've owned one that advertises nor allows itself to reach or remain at 100c or higher.
If someone sells a CPU that's specified to work at 100 or 110 degrees and it doesn't then it's either defective or fraudulent, no excuses.
Max Operating Temperature: 105 °C
14900k: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236773/...
Max Operating Temperature: 100 °C
Different CPUs, different specs.
And any CPU from the last decade will just throttle down if it gets too hot. That's how the entire "Turbo" thing works: go as fast as we can until it gets too hot, after which it throttles down.
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.
That said, there's a difference between a laptop cpu turbo boosting to 90 for a few minutes and a desktop cpu, which are usually cooler anyway, running at 100 sustained for three hours.
On desktop PCs, thermal throttling is often set up as "just a safety feature" to this very day. Which means: the system does NOT expect to stay at the edge of its thermal limit. I would not trust thermal throttling with keeping a system running safely at a continuous 100C on die.
100C is already a "danger zone", with elevated error rates and faster circuit degradation - and there are only this many thermal sensors a die has. Some under-sensored hotspots may be running a few degrees higher than that. Which may not be enough to kill the die outright - but more than enough to put those hotspots into a "fuck around" zone of increased instability and massively accelerated degradation.
If you're relying on thermal throttling to balance your system's performance, as laptops and smartphones often do, then you seriously need to dial in better temperature thresholds. 100C is way too spicy.
> I also double-checked if the CPU temperature of about 100 degrees celsius is too high, but no: [..] Intel specifies a maximum of 110 degrees. So, running at “only” 100 degrees for a few hours should be fine.
Secondly, the article reads:
> Tom’s Hardware recently reported that “Intel Raptor Lake crashes are increasing with rising temperatures in record European heat wave”, which prompted some folks to blame Europe’s general lack of Air Conditioning.
> But in this case, I actually did air-condition the room about half-way through the job (at about 16:00), when I noticed the room was getting hot. Here’s the temperature graph:
> [GRAPH]
> I would say that 25 to 28 degrees celsius are normal temperatures for computers.
So apparently a Tom's Hardware article connected a recent heat wave with crashing computers containing Intel CPUs. They brought that up to rule it out by presenting a graph showing reasonable room temperatures.
I hope this helps.
No. High performance gaming laptops will routinely do this for hours on end for years.
If it can't take it, it shouldn't allow it.
Intel's basic 285K spec's - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241060/... - say "Max Operating Temperature 105 °C".
So, yes - running the CPU that close to its maximum is really not asking for stability, nor longevity.
No reason to doubt your assertion about gaming laptops - but chip binning is a thing, and the manufacturers of those laptops have every reason to pay Intel a premium for CPU's which test to better values of X, Y, and Z.
> After switching my PC from Intel to AMD, I end up at 10-11 kWh per day.
It's kind of impressive to increase household electricity consumption by 10% by just switching one CPU.
A RISC architecture was actually one with simple control flow and a CISC architecture was one with complex control flow, usually with microcode. This distinction isn't applicable to CPUs past the year 1996 or so, because it doesn't make sense to speak of a CPU having global control flow.
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 elegant in principle, but works out rather less well in practice.
Theoretically that’s likely true. But is there any empirical evidence?
Even underclocked Intel desktop chips are massively faster.
Yes, ARM is certainly competitive. But I don’t know how much is that down to Apple being good at making chips instead of the architecture itself.
Qualcomm of course makes decent chips but it’s not like they are that much ahead of x86 on laptops.
Even in Apple’s case, if you only care about raw CPU power instead of performance per watt M series is not that great compared to AMD/Intel.
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).
Servers and running things at scale are way different from consumer use cases and the cooling solutions you'll find in the typical desktop tower, esp. considering the average budget and tolerance for noise. Regardless, on a desktop chip, even if you hit tJMax, it shouldn't lead to instability as in the post above, nor should the chips fail.
If they do, then that value was chosen wrong by the manufacturer. The chips should also be clocking back to maintain safe operating temps. Essentially, squeeze out whatever performance is available with a given cooling solution: be it passive (I have some low TDP AM4 chips with passive Alpine radiator blocks), air coolers or AIOs or a custom liquid loop.
> What Intel is doing and what they are recommending is the act of a desperate corporation incapable of designing energy-efficient CPUs, incapable of progressing their performance in MIPS per Watt of power.
I don't disagree with this entirely, but the story is increasingly similar with AMD as well - most consumer chip manufacturers are pushing the chips harder and harder out of the factory, so they can compete on benchmarks. That's why you hear about people limiting the power envelope to 80-90% of stock and dropping close to 10 degrees C in temperatures, similarly you hear about the difficulties of pushing chips all that far past stock in overclocking, because they're already pushed harder than the prior generations.
To sum up: Intel should be less delusional in how far they can push the silicon, take the L and compete against AMD on the pricing, instead of charging an arm and a leg for chips that will burn up. What they were doing with the Arc GPUs compared to the competitors was actually a step in the right direction.
Chips are happy to run at high temperatures, that's not an issue. It's just a tradeoff of expense and performance.
I've been chasing flimsy but very annoying stability problems (some, of course, due to overclocking during my younger years, when it still had a tangible payoff) enough times on systems I had built that taking this one BIG potential cause out of the equation is worth the few dozens of extra bucks I have to spend on ECC-capable gear many times over.
Trying to validate an ECC-less platform's stability is surprisingly hard, because memtest and friends just aren't very reliably detecting more subtle problems. PRIME95, y-cruncher and linpack (in increasing order of effectiveness) are better than specialzied memory testing software in my experience, but they are not perfect, either.
Most AMD CPUs (but not their APUs with potent iGPUs - there, you will have to buy the "PRO" variants) these days have full support for ECC UDIMMs. If your mainboard vendor also plays ball - annoyingly, only a minority of them enables ECC support in their firmware, so always check for that before buying! - there's not much that can prevent you from having that stability enhancement and reassuring peace of mind.
Quoth DJB (around the very start of this millenium): https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html :)
I wish AMD would make ECC a properly advertised feature with clear motherboard support. At least DDR5 has some level of ECC.
That is mostly to assist manufacturers in selling marginal chips with a few bad bits scattered around. It's really a step backwards in reliability.
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 to the operating system, merely that the DIMMS will work.
It's much more hit and miss in reality than it should be, though this motherboard was a pricey one: one can't use price as a proxy for features.
I would assume your particular motherboard to operate with proper SECDED+-level ECC if you have capable, compatible DIMM, enable ECC mode in the firmware, and boot an OS kernel that can make sense of it all.
Also: DDR5 has some false ecc marketing due to the memory standard having an error correction scheme build in. Don't fall for it.
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, misc=0xd01a000101000000, walltime=0x68aea758, cpuid=0x00a50f00, bank=0x00000012
95 2025-09-01 09:41:50 +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, misc=0xd01a000101000000, walltime=0x68b80667, cpuid=0x00a50f00, bank=0x00000012
It's always the same address, and always a Corrected Error (obviously, otherwise my kernel would panic). However, operating my system's memory at this clock and latency boosts x265 encoding performance (just one of the benchmarks I picked when trying to figure out how to handle this particular tradeoff) by about 12%. That is an improvement I am willing to stomach the extra risk of effectively overclocking the memory module beyond its comformt zone for, given that I can fully mitigate it by virtue of properly working ECC.
Also: Could you not have just bought slightly faste RAM, given the premium for ECC?
And no, as ECC UDIMM for the speed (3600MHz) I run mine at simply does not exist - it is outside of what JEDEC ratified for the DDR4 spec.
DDR4-1600 (PC4-12800)
DDR4-1866 (PC4-14900)
DDR4-2133 (PC4-17000)
DDR4-2400 (PC4-19200)
DDR4-2666 (PC4-21300)
DDR4-2933 (PC4-23466)
DDR4-3200 (PC4-25600) (the highest supported in the DDR4 generation)
What's *NOT* supported are some enthusiast ones that typically require more than 1.2v for example: 3600 MT/s, 4000 MT/s & 4266 MT/s
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 ECC consumer desktop build. So it would be nice to know some specific product combinations that really work.
Edit: it's probably because I switched it to "energy efficiency mode" instead of "performance mode" because it would occasionally lock up in performance mode. Presumably with the same root cause.
Some vendors use hamming codes with “holes” in them, and you need the CPU to also run ECC (or at least error detection) between ram and the cache hierarchy.
Those things are optional in the spec, because we can’t have nice things.
Sufficient cooler, with sufficient airflow is always needed.
The 13900k draws more than 200W initially and thermal throttles after a minute at most, even in an air conditioned room.
I don't think that thermal problems should be pushed to end user to this degree.
But I agree this should not be a problem in the first place.
So if your CPU is drawing "more than 200W" you're pretty much at the limits of your cooler.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/amd_ryzen_twice_fails...
I have followed his blog for years and hold him in high respect so I am surprised he has done that and expected stability at 100C regardless of what Intel claim is okay.
Not to mention that you rapidly hit diminishing returns pass 200W with current gen Intel CPUs, although he mentions caring able idle power usage. Why go from 150W to 300W for a 20% performance increase?
danieldk•19h ago
When you do not have a bunch of components ready to swap out it is also really hard to debug these issues. Sometimes it’s something completely different like the PSU. After the last issues, I decided to buy a prebuilt (ThinkStation) with on-site service. The cooling is a bit worse, etc., but if issues come up, I don’t have to spend a lot of time debugging them.
Random other comment: when comparing CPUs, a sad observation was that even a passively cooled M4 is faster than a lot of desktop CPUs (typically single-threaded, sometimes also multi-threaded).
johnisgood•18h ago
On what metric am I ought to buy a CPU these days? Should I care about reviews? I am fine with a middle-end CPU, for what it is worth, and I thought of AMD Ryzen 7 5700 or AMD Ryzen 5 5600GT or anything with a similar price tag. They might even be lower-end by now?
hhh•18h ago
Intel is just bad at the moment and not even worth touching.
tester756•18h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043269
homebrewer•18h ago
https://youtu.be/OVdmK1UGzGs
https://youtu.be/oAE4NWoyMZk
tester756•3h ago
_zoltan_•18h ago
tester756•3h ago
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html
CPUs like Intel Core Ultra 7 265K are pretty close to top Ryzens
Panzer04•1h ago
If your workload is pointer-chasing intel's new CPUs aren't great though, and the X3D chips are possibly a good pick (if the workload fits in cache) which is why they get a lot of hype from reviewers who benchmark games and judge the score 90% based on that performance.
johnisgood•18h ago
danieldk•18h ago
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 recent issue with ASRock mainboards destroying Ryzen 9000-series GPUs: https://www.techspot.com/news/108120-asrock-confirms-ryzen-9... Anyone who uses Linux and has dealt with bad ACPI bugs, etc. knows that a lot of these mainboards probably have crap firmware.
I should also say that I had a Ryzen 3700X and 5900X many years back and two laptops with a Ryzen CPU and they have been awesome.
ahofmann•18h ago
danieldk•18h ago
[1] Well, most non-servers are probably laptops today, but the same reasoning applies.
giveita•17h ago
PartiallyTyped•18h ago
homebrewer•18h ago
scns•15h ago
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.
encom•18h ago
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 single BIOS setting) to MSI defaults when you upgrade its BIOS.
homebrewer•18h ago
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!
electroglyph•18h ago
ahartmetz•17h ago
eptcyka•17h ago
danieldk•17h ago
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.)
mschuster91•13h ago
It turned out during the shitcoin craze and then AI craze that hardcore gamers, aka boomers with a lot of time and retirement money on their hands and early millennials working in big tech building giant-ass man caves, are a sizeable demographic with very deep pockets.
The wide masses however, they gotta live with the scraps that remain after the AI bros and hardcore gamers have had their pick.
hedora•7m ago
You can always play with the CPU governor / disable high power states. That should be well-tested.
danieldk•17h ago
https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2024/08/02/puget-systems-p...
to;dr: they heavily customize BIOS settings, since many BIOSes run CPUs out-of-spec by default. With these customizations there was not much of a difference in failure rate between AMD and Intel at that point in time (even when including Intel 13th and 14th gen).
claudex•18h ago
I had the same issue with my MSI board, next one won't be a MSI.
techpression•17h ago
izacus•16h ago
techpression•15h ago
danieldk•17h ago
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.
philistine•12h ago
timmytokyo•11h ago
bob1029•16h ago
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 lights on the same circuit begin to flicker very perceptibly. It also creates audible PWM noise in the PC which is crazy to me because up til recently I've only ever heard that from a heavily loaded GPU.
bell-cot•15h ago
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.
heelix•13h ago
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.
486sx33•2h ago
api•15h ago
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.
I’ve read people here and there arguing that instruction sets don’t matter, that it’s all the same past the decoder anyway. I don’t buy it. The superior energy efficiency of ARM chips is so obvious I find it impossible to believe it’s not due to the ISA since not much else is that different and now they’re often made on the same TSMC fabs.
adithyassekhar•13h ago
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.
ac29•11h ago
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).
dagmx•3h ago
etempleton•14h ago
seec•6h ago
And if we are talking about a passively cooled M4 (MacBook Air basically) it will quite heavily throttle relatively quickly, you lose at the very least 30%.
So, let's not misrepresent things, Apple CPUs are very power efficient but they are not magic, if you hit them hard, they still need good cooling. Plenty of people have had the experience with their M4 Max, discovering that actually, if they did use the laptop as a workstation, it will generate a good amount of fan noise, there is no other way around.
Apple stuff is good because most people actually have bursty workload (especially graphic design, video editing and some audio stuff) but if you hammer it for hours on end, it's not that good and the power efficiency point becomes a bit moot.
protocolture•2h ago
I also have this issue.
c0balt•1h ago
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
hedora•10m ago
kristopolous•1h ago
Twice the memory bandwidth, twice the CPU core count... It's really wacky how they've decided to name things