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Intel says CPU stability problems caused by motherboard makers (igorslab.de)
10 points by skilled on May 1, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


The problem is Intel has allowed what the motherboard manufacturers are doing to be in spec. So long as the board is not changing the clock speed of the CPU but rather adjusting the allowed power delivery and turbo time it is in spec. This is a problem of Intel's creation.

Frankly it's downright annoying that motherboards come set to 4096 Amps and infinite turbo times as it means thermal throttling and a lot of noise for marginal performance gains. It also seems instability in a lot of cases as well. What they are doing however is in spec, thus Intel is to blame for this mess however they may try to pass the buck to the motherboard manufacturers.



May be unrelated or maybe not. I believe my Gigabyte motherboard for AMD 5950X to be the cause of instability.


I've had constant issues with the 5000 series Ryzen. I've RMA'd twice a 5500. The original purchase showed severe I/O buffering/latency issues once the CPU got any heavy load. First RMA came back unable to work properly with my M.2 NVMe drive. Second RMA will just randomly lock up. All of these were tested across multiple motherboards, and every time, the problem has stopped when I put in a 2000 or 3000 series Ryzen. All of the motherboards are updated on UEFI/BIOS and support the processor (I'm not using anything lower than a B450M chipset on any motherboard.)


I encourage people to read the whole article before commenting since it's more nuanced than the headline.


Why don't CPU makers sell reference motherboards, like how Nvidia sells reference GPUs, so that companies are incentivized to build something better?


Intel used to, I think they stopped around the time of the cc820 debacle.


That's the problem: enthusiast motherboards are faster than reference designs. They're so fast that they aren't stable. Nobody is going to compete to make a slower motherboard.




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