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).
That sounds terrible.
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.
Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Both Intel and AMD (resp. their board partners) had issues in recent times stemming from the increasingly aggressive push to the limit for those last few %.
This is about sane, stable defaults. If you want the extra performance far beyond the CPUs sweet-spot it should be made explicit you're forfeiting the stability headrooms.
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.
Seattle was like this a couple of decades ago when I moved there. People sneered at me when I talked about having air conditioning installed at my house. Having moved from a warmer part of the country, I ignored their smug comments and did it anyway. The next few years I basked in the comfort of my climate-controlled home while my coworkers complained about not being able to sleep due to the heat.
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.
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.
But I'll play around with this and the timings, and check if there's a BIOS update that addresses this. Though I still think that AMD's drivers and firmware should be robust enough to support any RAM configuration (within reason), so it would be a problem for them to resolve regardless.
Thanks for the suggestion!
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.
I can't see how that supports your conclusion.
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.
Maybe the pci bus is eating power, or maybe it’s the drives?
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.
I had an 8th-gen i7 sitting at the thermal limit (~100C) in a laptop for half a decade 24/7 with no problem. As sibling comments have noted, modern CPUs are designed to run "flat-out against the governor".
Voltage-dependent electromigration is the biggest problem and what lead to the failures in Intel CPUs not long ago, perhaps ironically caused by cooling that was "too good" --- the CPU finds that there's still plenty of thermal headroom, so it boosts frequency and accompanying voltage to reach the limit, and went too far with the voltage. If it had hit the thermal limit it would've backed off on the voltage and frequency.
> 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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_countries_by_electric...
For a time I ran it 24/7 without suspend. It's a big system, lots of disks, expansion cards, etc. If it doesn't suspend, and doesn't do anything remarkable, it uses about ~5kWh per day. Needless to say, it suspends after 60 minutes now (my daily energy usage went from ~9 to ~4 kWh).
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.
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.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-sho...
The CISC decoder is like a "decompressor" that saves memory bandwidth and cache usage.
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.
Both the 8700G and the 8700G PRO are readily available in the EU, and the PRO SKU is about 50% more expensive (EUR 120 in absolute numbers): https://geizhals.eu/?cmp=3096260&cmp=3096300&cmp=3200470&act...
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.
EDAC MC0: Giving out device to module amd64_edac
See my blog post about it (it was top of HN): https://sunshowers.io/posts/am5-ryzen-7000-ecc-ram/
EDAC MC0: Giving out device to module igen6_edac controller Intel_client_SoC MC#0: DEV 0000:00:00.0 (INTERRUPT)
EDAC MC1: Giving out device to module igen6_edac controller Intel_client_SoC MC#1: DEV 0000:00:00.0 (INTERRUPT)
Error Correction Type: None
Error Information Handle: Not ProvidedWhat does
find /sys/devices/system/edac/mc/mc0/csrow* -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec grep --color . {} +
I am writing this message on such an ASUS MB with a Ryzen CPU and working ECC memory. You must check that you actually have a recent enough OS to know your Threadripper CPU and that you have installed any software package required for this (e.g. on Linux "edac-utils" or something with a similar name).
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.
- ASRock B450 Pro4
- ASRock B550M-ITX/ac
- ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac
- Gigabyte MC12-LE0
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.)
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.
This was running at like, 1866 or something. It's a pretty barebones 8th gen i3 with a beefier chipset, but ECC still came in clutch. I won't buy hardware for server purposes without it.
A computer with 64 GB of memory is 4 times more likely to encounter memory errors than one with 16 GB of memory.
When DIMMs are new, at the usual amounts of memory for desktops, you will see at most a few errors per year, sometimes only an error after a few years. With old DIMMs, some of them will start to have frequent errors (such modules presumably had a borderline bad fabrication quality and now have become worn out, e.g. due to increased leakage leading to storing a lower amount of charge on the memory cell capacitors).
For such bad DIMMs, the frequency of errors will increase, and it may become of several errors per day, or even per hour.
For me, a very important advantage of ECC has been the ability to detect such bad memory modules (in computers that have been used for 5 years or more) and replace them before corrupting any precious data.
I also had a case with a HP laptop with ECC, where memory errors had become frequent after being stored for a long time (more than a year) in a rather humid place, which might have caused some oxidation of the SODIMM socket contacts, because removing the SODIMMs, scrubbing the sockets and reinserting the SODIMMs made disappear the errors.
Last winter I was helping someone put together a new gaming machine... it was so frustrating running into the fake ecc marketing for DDR5 that you mention. The motherboard situation for whether they support it or not, or whether a bios update added support or then removed it or added it back or not, was also really sad. And even worse IMO is that you can't actually max out 4 slots on the top tier mobos unless you're willing to accept a huge drop in RAM speed. Leads to ugly 48 GB sized sticks and limiting to two of them... In the end we didn't go with ECC for that someone, but I was pretty disappointed about it. I'm hoping the next gen will be better, for my own setup running ZFS and such I'm not going to give up ECC.
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.
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.
something like that?
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.
I've been building my own gaming and productivity rigs for 20 years and I don't think memory has ever been a problem. Maybe survivorship bias, but surely even budget parts aren't THIS bad.
Assuming you can tell, and assuming you don't end up silently corrupting your data before then.
Without knowing how to fix that error you've lost 200 revisions of work. You can go back and find which revision had the problem, go before that, and upgrade it to the latest blender, but all your 200 revisions were made on other versions that you can't backport.
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 also ruins it for small/medium businesses as well, at least those with dedicated internal IT departments who do care about both the technology and the cost. We are left with unreliable consumer-grade hardware, or prohibitively expensive enterprise hardware.
There's very little in between. This market is also underserved with software/SaaS as well with the SSO Tax and whatnot. There's a huge gap between "I'm taking the owner's CC down to best buy" and "Enterprise" that gets screwed over.
In my experience, it's generally unwise to push the platform you're on to the outermost of its spec'd limits. At work, we bought several 5950X-based Zen3 workstations with 128GB of 3200MT/s ECC UDIMM, and two of these boxes will only ever POST when you manually downclock memory to 3000MT/s. Past a certain point, it's silicon lottery deciding if you can make reality live up to the datasheets' promises.
You’re right that tools like memtest often miss the subtle problems, and even stress tests like Prime95 or y-cruncher don’t catch everything. That’s why having ECC as a built-in safeguard feels so valuable. With most modern AMD CPUs supporting ECC UDIMMs, the main variable really is whether the motherboard firmware enables it, which makes it important to double-check before buying. For me, the added stability and peace of mind have been well worth the small premium.
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.
This affects the laptop with other issues, like severe thermal throttling both in CPU and GPU.
A utility like throttlestop allows me to place maximums on power usage so I don't hit the tjMax during regular use. That is around 65-70W for the CPU - which can burst to 200+W in its allowed "Performance" mode. Absolutely nuts.
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?
Given the motherboard and RAM will also generate quite some heat, if the case fan profile was conservative (he does mention he likes low noise), could be the insides got quite toasty.
Back when I got my 2080 Ti, I had this issue when gaming. The internal temps would get so hot due to the blanket effect of the padding I couldn't touch the components after a gaming session. Had to significantly tweak my fan profiles. His CPU at peak would generate about the same amount of heat as my 2080 Ti + CPU I had then, and I had the non-Compact case with two case fans.
[1]: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-05-15-my-2025-high-...
I also have a fractal define case with anti noise padding material and dust filters, but my temperatures are great and the computer is almost inaudible even when compiling code for hours with -j $(nproc). And my fans and cooler are much cheaper than his.
That should of course be sound padding...
Intel specifies a max operating temperature of 105°C for the 285K [1]. Also modern CPUs aren't supposed to die when run with inadequate cooling, but instead clock down to stay within their thermal envelope.
[1]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241060/...
Because CPUs can get much hotter in specific spots at specific pins no? Just because you're reading 100, doesn't mean there aren't spots that are way hotter.
My understanding is that modern Intel CPUs have a temp sensor per core + one at package level, but which one is being reported?
Anyway, OP's cooler should be able to cool down 250W CPUs below 100C. He must have done something wrong for this to not happen. That's my point -- the motherboard likely overclocked the CPU and he failed to properly cool it down or set a power limit (PL1/PL2). He could have easily avoided all this trouble.
And yeah, having Arrow Lake running at its defaults is just a waste of energy. Even halving your TDP just loses you roughly 15% performance in highly MT scenarios...
I did not overclock this CPU. I pay attention to what I change in the BIOS/UEFI firmware, and I never select any overclocking options.
Also, I have applied thermal paste properly: Noctua-supplied paste, following Noctua’s instructions for this CPU socket.
ah if only they had incremented that number by one… a new 286 even just in name would be sooo funny… not as funny as bringing back the number 8088 of course
I had differences of like 20 or more between different cores... i.e. one core might work fine at -20, the other maybe only at +5.
And while all core CO might not be optimal, based on personal experience and what I've seen across multiple enthusiast communities, more often than not you can get an worthwhile improvement to temps/perf with an all core CO.
That being said, there are certainly ways to find and set the best CO values per core, but it will certainly take more effort, stress testing and time.
I got an i5 13600KF last black friday (with a long haul to Hong Kong for about 2 weeks) from Amazon, with initially a budget motherboard that I thought would be fine, and it turns out the system would keep turning off at one point and reboot again with a huge drop in voltage (it was about 10 months later that I learned this is a brownout).
It was for my company computer, but I bought it personally, so the ownership is still mine. I then bought a new SF750 PSU at home and swapped the CPU for 13100 salvaged from a computer someone donated, so now the 13600KF would be my personal gaming rig.
I made sure it gets a platform that sustain enough power and appropriate headroom for thermals, and it was all fine until 6 months ago, it starts to BSOD all over the place, when gaming; programming; or even just resume from suspend. I have to refund two games because of this, one is accepted and the other isn't. And also turn over to cloud machine for development because BSOD in the middle of debugging is really nasty.
So I decided to say "fuck it, I'm going back to AMD". I actually still use my 3700X gig a year ago but I figured the 5 year old system is now becoming an old dog. I just can't run most modern game at even 80FPS, so I swapped to the 13600KF as an intermediate replacement until it glitched up, so I need another replacement again.
Coincidentally I bought a 7945HX engineering sample ITX motherboard originally for the intent of running Kubernetes homelab (now that I think about it, a big waste of money indeed, yikes). Then I have a eureka moment: why don't I just use that 7945HX plus the 96GB DDR5 that I bought?
So after a painful assemble-reassemble process, I'm back to AMD once again -- it was almost perfect, scoring almost exactly as a 5950X, but only at around 100W TDP for the total package, with almost double the CPU cache, plus it is not the Zen 5/Zen 5c design which complicates CPU scheduling, I have been able to solve the gaming-productivity dilemma at the same time -- and the MoDT motherboard itself is just shy of ~1800HKD in total, which is less than the 5950X CPU alone plus I have a huge TDP headroom for the 9070XT I purchased also in June -- almost complete silent platform with Noctua, too.
The original 13600KF has been redelivered back to my company with a new 800W PSU and a new case specifically bought to fit the wood aesthetic, and another AMD GPU I salvaged from my NUC (6600XT Challenger, but single fan), but this time it runs surprisingly fine -- no kernel panic or PSU brownout just yet.
After all this in a short span of 10 months, I guess I just reached my own "metastability" now -- Intel CPU for office work, AMD for gaming and workstation.
The old 3700X system is being repurposed again for running cheap Kubernetes homelab and I guess this time too it is worth the right place. I don't think I ever need to have a new purchase again for the coming few years, hopefully.
The only problem would be that I'm using an engineering sample rather than the normal version of 7945HX -- the normal one can reach up to 5.4GHz boost but mine only got 5.2GHz boost, at a cost of 600HKD difference, I would say it is not worth it to upgrade to the normal version, no?
The problem is, it's a huge effort to get there. You really have to tune PBO curves for each core individually, as they can vary so much between cores.
Now the test itself is mostly automatic with tools like OCCT, but of course you have to change the settings in the BIOS between each test and you cannot use the computer during that time, so there's a huge opportunity cost. I'm talking about weeks, not days.
To cut a long story short, I sold the system and just bought a M4 Max Mac Studio now. Apple Silicon might not have the top performance of AMD or Intel, but it comes with much less headaches and opportunity cost. Which in the end probably equalizes the difference in purchase cost.
For both the cooler and the motherboard, AMD have too much control to look the other way. The chip can measure its own temperature and the conceit of undermining partners by moving things on chip and controlling more of the ecosystem is that things perform better. They should at least perform.
I also find that, as performance improvements tolerances get tighter throughout the system, the set of 'things that can screw your build' grows bigger.
Secondly, what BIOS settings should I be using to run safely? Is XMP/whatever the AMD equivalent is safe? If I don't run XMP then my RAM runs at way below spec (for the stick) default speeds.
Anyone know of a good guide for this stuff?
A big surprise for me, having owned both a Ryzen gen 1 & 3 previously, was that this time my system posted without me needing to flash my BIOS or play around with various RAM configurations. Felt like magic.
- cheap ULV chips like N100, N150, N300
- ultrabook ULV chips (I hope Lunar Lake is not a fluke)
- workstation chips that aren't too powerful (mainstream Core CPUs)
- inexpensive GPUs (a surprising niche, but excruciatingly small)
Without a mainstream halo product Intel has been forced to compete on price, which is not something they can afford. They have to make a product that leapfrogs either AMD or Nvidia and successfully (and meaningfully) iterate on it. The last time they tried something like that was in 2021 with the launch of Alder Lake, but AMD overtook them with 3D V-Cache in 2022.
I use Arch, btw ;)
I recently hit this testing pre-release kernels on my gaming PC, a 9900X3D: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250623083408.jTiJiC6_@linutro...
A pile of older Skylake machines was never able to reproduce that bug one single time in 100+ hours of running the same workload. The fast new AMD chips would almost always hit it in a few hours.
> I get the general impression that the AMD CPU has higher power consumption in all regards: the baseline is higher, the spikes are higher (peak consumption) and it spikes more often / for longer.
> Looking at my energy meter statistics, I usually ended up at about 9.x kWh per day for a two-person household, cooking with induction.
> After switching my PC from Intel to AMD, I end up at 10-11 kWh per day.
It's been the bane of desktop AMD CPUs since Zen 1. Hopefully AMD will address this in Zen 6 but I don't have too much hope.
Zen APUs have no such issue.
My 7840HS idles at 3W when plugged in and around 0.5W when running on battery power.
The IOD (die) is extremely inefficient for all desktop Zen CPUs as it never truly idles.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/1brs42g/amd_please_tac...
I don't bloody care that AMD CPUs seem to be more power efficient than Intel's. For most people their CPUs are completely idle most of the time and Zen CPUs on average idle at 25W or MORE.
Many Zen 4 and Zen 5 owners report that their desktop CPUs idle at 40W or more even without the 3D cache.
I have reasons to believe you're making this up.
Not a single user has seen such low idle power consumption for desktop Zen AMD CPUs.
Guess someone doesn't want to be embarrassed.
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 has more services running in background but they don't meaningfully affect idle power consumption at all.
The entire Reddit topic confirms my statement, multiple over hundreds of reviews confirm what I said, yet it's
> paired with bad drivers, stupid software and bad peripherals.
It's kinda hard to be an AMD fan when you live in an alternative reality, huh?
> It's kinda hard to be an AMD fan when you live in an alternative reality, huh?
But I just can't bring myself to upgrade this year. I dabble in local AI, where it's clear fast memory is important, but the PC approach is just not keeping up without going to "workstation" or "server" parts that cost too much.
There are glimmers of hope with MR-DIMMs CU-DIMM, and other approaches, but really boards and CPUs need to support more memory channels. Intel has a small advantage over AMD, but it's nothing compared to the memory speed of a Mac Pro or higher. "Strix Halo" offers some hope with four memory channel support, but it's meant for notebooks so isn't really expandable (which would enable à la carte hybrid AI; fast GPUs with reasonably fast shared system RAM).
I wish I could fast forward to a better time, but it's likely fully integrated systems will dominate if the size and relatively weak performance for some tasks makes the parts industry pointless. It is a glaring deficiency in the x86 parts concept and will result in PC parts being more and more niche, exotic and inaccessible.
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 paid for it.
That being said, there is a glaring gap between "consumer" hardware meant for gaming and "workstation" hardware meant for real performance.
Have you looked into a 9960 Threadripper build? The CPU isn't TOO expensive, although the memory will be. But you'll get a significantly faster and better machine than something like a 9950X.
I also think besides the new Threadripper chips, there isn't much new out this year anyways to warrant upgrading.
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.
It seems like large, unchallenged organizations like Intel (or NASA or Google) collect all the top talent out of school. But changing budgets, changing business objectives, frozen product strategies make it difficult for emerging talent to really work on next-generation technology (those projects have already been assigned to mid-career people who "paid their dues").
Then someone like Apple Silicon with M-chip or SpaceX with Falcon-9 comes along and poaches the people most likely to work "hardcore" (not optimizing for work/life balance) while also giving the new product a high degree of risk tolerance and autonomy. Within a few years, the smaller upstart organization has opened up in un-closeable performance gap with behemoth incumbent.
Has anyone written about this pattern (beyond Innovator's Dilemma)? Does anyone have other good examples of this?
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.
How do you sell your systems when their time comes?
TSMC (AMD's fab), is heavily based in Taiwan, which has its own implications regarding long-term sustainability and monopoly.
With only two real choices for x86, and the complexity of the global supply chain, it hardly seems like a fair comparison.
danieldk•1d 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•1d 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•1d ago
Intel is just bad at the moment and not even worth touching.
tester756•1d ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043269
homebrewer•1d ago
https://youtu.be/OVdmK1UGzGs
https://youtu.be/oAE4NWoyMZk
tester756•17h ago
_zoltan_•1d ago
tester756•17h ago
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html
CPUs like Intel Core Ultra 7 265K are pretty close to top Ryzens
Panzer04•16h 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•1d ago
danieldk•1d 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.
J_Shelby_J•2h ago
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.
hedora•14h ago
The only issues are with an intel Bluetooth chipset, and bios auto detection bugs. Under Linux, the hardware is bug for bug compatible with Windows, and I’m down to zero known issues after doing a bit of hardware debugging.
ahofmann•1d ago
danieldk•1d ago
[1] Well, most non-servers are probably laptops today, but the same reasoning applies.
giveita•1d ago
dahcryn•9h ago
My home server is on a 5600G. I turned it on, installed home assistant and jellyfin etc... , and since it has not been off. It's been chugging along completely unattended, no worries.
Yes, it's in a basement where temperature is never above 21C, and it's almost never pushed to 100%, and certainly never for extended periods of time.
But it's the stock cooler, cheap motherboard, cheap RAM and cheap SSD (with expensive NAS grade mechanical hard drives).
PartiallyTyped•1d ago
homebrewer•1d ago
scns•1d 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•1d 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•1d 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•1d ago
ahartmetz•1d ago
eptcyka•1d ago
danieldk•1d 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•1d 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•14h ago
You can always play with the CPU governor / disable high power states. That should be well-tested.
anonymars•14h ago
danieldk•11h ago
I think you are confusing with undervolting.
danieldk•1d 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•1d ago
I had the same issue with my MSI board, next one won't be a MSI.
techpression•1d ago
izacus•1d ago
techpression•1d ago
danieldk•1d 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•1d ago
timmytokyo•1d ago
esseph•11h ago
bob1029•1d 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•1d 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•1d 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•17h ago
esseph•11h ago
neRok•11h ago
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!
shrubble•10h ago
bob1029•6h ago
api•1d 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•1d 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.
hedora•14h ago
There is one exception: If I run an idle Windows 11 ARM edition VM on the mac, then the fans run pretty much all the time. Idle Linux ARM VMs don’t cause this issue on the mac.
I’ve never used windows 11 for x86. It’s probably also an energy hog.
ac29•1d 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•17h ago
AnthonyMouse•13h ago
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.
etempleton•1d ago
naasking•13h ago
InMice•8h ago
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.
seec•20h 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•17h ago
I also have this issue.
c0balt•16h 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•14h ago
InMice•8h ago
kristopolous•16h ago
Twice the memory bandwidth, twice the CPU core count... It's really wacky how they've decided to name things
bee_rider•13h ago
dwood_dev•13h ago
The Ultra is a pair of Max chips. While the core counts didn't increase from M3 to M4 Max, overall performance is in the neighborhood of 5-25% better. Which still puts the M3 Ultra as Apple's top end chip, and the M5 Max might not dethrone it either.
The uplift in IPC and core counts means that my M1 Max MBP has a similar amount of CPU performance as my M3 iPad Air.
bee_rider•2h ago
Of course, each generation has some single-core improvements and eventually that could catch up, but it can take a while to catch up to… twice as much silicon.
sunmag•14h ago
cptskippy•3h ago
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.
66fm472tjy7•11h ago
My system would randomly freeze for ~5 seconds, usually while gaming and having a video in the browser running a the same time. Then, it would reliably happen in Titanfall 2 and I noticed there were always AHCI errors in the Windows logs at the same time so I switched to an NVMe drive.
The system would also shut down occasionally (~ once every few hours) in certain games only. Then, I managed to reproduce it 100% of the time by casting lightning magic in Oblivion Remastered. I had to switch out my PSU, the old one probably couldn't handle some transient load spike, even though it was a Seasonic Prime Ultra Titanium.
Dennip•7h ago
IAmGraydon•6h ago
ozgrakkurt•4h ago
It is cheaper and more stable. Performance difference doesn’t matter that much too