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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

This does not fill me with much hope. What am I even ought to buy at this point then, I wonder. I have a ~13 years old Intel CPU which lacks AVX2 (and I need it by now) and I thought of buying a new desktop (items separately, of course), but that is crazy to me that it freezes because of the CPU going idle. It was never an issue in my case. I guess I can only hope it is not going to be a problem once I completed building my PC. :|

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?

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Just buy an AMD CPU. One person’s experience isn’t the world. Nobody in my circle has had an issue with any chip from AMD in recent time (10 years).

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

This is funny because recently my AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D died and I've decided that my next CPU will be Intel

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043269

This Intel?

https://youtu.be/OVdmK1UGzGs

https://youtu.be/oAE4NWoyMZk

That's been year ago, my AMD CPU died very recently

that's a pretty bad decision $/perf wise I'd wager. AMD decidedly owns the desktop space, and deserves so.

wdym?

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html

CPUs like Intel Core Ultra 7 265K are pretty close to top Ryzens

Intel CPUs are decidedly better value when multicore performance is a concern. At the top end they trade blows.

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.

That is what I thought, thanks.

I agree that Intel is bad at the moment (especially with the 13th and 14th gen self-destruct issues). But unfortunately I also know plenty of people with issues with AMD systems.

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.

All of my friends who are on AMD have had issues over the past three years.

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.

I went further and got an AMD system on chip machine with an integrated gpu. It’s fine for gaming and borderline for LLM inference (I should have put 64GB in instead of 32GB).

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.

Any details if the whole rig is below 2k USD (or even around 1k USD)?

I wouldn't be so hopeless. Intel and AMD CPUs are used in millions of builds and most of them just work.

However, the vast majority of PCs out there are not hobbyist builds but Dell/Lenovo/HP/etc. [1] with far fewer possible configurations (and much more testing as a byproduct). I am not saying these machines never have issues, but a high failure rate would not be acceptable to their business customers.

[1] Well, most non-servers are probably laptops today, but the same reasoning applies.

If you value your time a dell laptop with extended warranty and accidental damage where they replace shit and send people out to fix shit is well worth it. It costs but you can be a dumb user and call "IT" when you need a fix and thats a nice feeling IMO!

Indeed. I feel so weird reading this discussion section.

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).

It's either bad luck, bad power quality from the mains, or something in the air in that particular area. I know plenty of people running AM5 builds, have done so myself for the last couple of years, and there were no problems with any of them apart from the usual amdgpu bugs in latest kernels (which are "normal" since I'm running mainline kernels — it's easy to solve by just sticking to lts, and it has seemingly improved anyway since 6.15).

I have a really specific Xorg config with my own kernel boot line in GRUB for amdgpu, it seems to work for me. I have not experienced any bugs with amdgpu so far. The GPU and HDD / SSD would stay anyway, I would only have to get everything else.

> I thought of AMD Ryzen 7 5700

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.

I have a lower-end Radeon GPU (Navi 24 [Radeon RX 6400]). Which CPU would you suggest with it? I only ever want to use the GPU though, not the CPU's integrated one. I kind of want to get a motherboard that is compatible with the latest AM socket, which is AM5, right? So if I want a CPU with AM5, what would you suggest for the CPU?

But see, this is why it is so difficult. I would have never guessed. I would have to research this A LOT, which I am fine with, but you know.

3 of my last 4 machines have been AMD x NVDA and I have been very happy. The intel x NVDA machine has been my least stable one.

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