Posted by secure 6 days ago
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).
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.
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.
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.
Nuc 9 averaged 65-70W power usage, while the m4 is averaging 6.6W.
The Mac is vastly more performant.
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?