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

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.

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.

    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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So if your CPU is drawing "more than 200W" you're pretty much at the limits of your cooler.

[1] https://www.bequiet.com/en/cpucooler/5110

But I agree this should not be a problem in the first place.

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.

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.

Chips are happy to run at high temperatures, that's not an issue. It's just a tradeoff of expense and performance.

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.