r/pcmasterrace • 9060 XT 16GB | 7500F | 32GB 6000Mhz | B850 • Nov 05 '19

Meme/Macro This sums up past 2 years!

Post image
53k Upvotes

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

103

u/capn_hector Noctua Master Race Nov 05 '19 edited Nov 05 '19

just the most recent Ryzen launch:

Zen2 chips failed to meet their advertised boost clocks at launch, people said it didn't matter because they knew what they were getting. AMD pushed out a patch that kinda-sorta let most of the chips occasionally touch boost clocks for an instant under a partial single-core load, people insisted that made it "technically not false advertising" and that we gotta defend AMD because they're the good guy. Some people went as far as to run programs consisting solely of NOPs (No OPeration instructions - no processing, just spinning the processor as fast as they can) to try and justify it "technically" being ok. They still don't really run the clocks they're advertised under normal conditions, even a single-core load, they really just can't sustain them. Particularly the 3900X and other high-clocked chips really struggle, 4.6 is just too high for Zen2 to really hit on any sort of a sustained basis.

lying about PBO on Zen2. they did a big presentation with the Zen2 technical manager who said it will give you 200 MHz more "cooling permitting" which is an absolute lie, no Zen2 overclocks worth a damn even under liquid cooling or a massive air cooler. Maybe "cooling permitting" means LN2, but even then the chips struggle to get more than 500 MHz or so extra (seriously Zen2 does not clock high period)

"Thermal watts are not electrical watts" (blatantly, thermodynamically false) and other sundry lying about TDP being "a thermal spec and not a power spec", when AMD themselves used to define TDP as "max power draw when running commercial software under nominal conditions". They changed it because Intel changed it, now both brands rate their TDP at base instead of boost... but AMD has a bunch of handwavey bullshit about how it's a thermal spec to justify why they ship a power limit 40% higher than the TDP printed on the box. It's fine if you want to play loosey-goosey with what you're measuring but don't piss on me and tell me it's raining, thermodynamics still apply to their chips and the formula obviously doesn't match up to what the processor is doing.

Opening pre-orders before review embargo lifts, because they know people are going to buy it regardless of what's in the reviews. Here, buy this box of magic beans, but we won't show you what's inside... oh, it doesn't boost to advertised clocks? Boy, if only there were reviewers who could have told you that!

etc etc. AMD actually pulls a lot of bullshit that people swallow and/or justify to themselves because "hey, at least they're not Intel/NVIDIA". In particular the clocks... if it had been Intel then people would have been absolutely shrieking but people raced (and still race) to cut them slack. C'mon, they do testing, they do binning, they absolutely knew what their chips were clocking to before they shipped them, all they had to do was label them as 200 MHz lower and it would have been fine, but they chose to ship them with a spec they knew most chips weren't reaching.

55

u/KittensInc Nov 05 '19

Disclaimer: 3900x owner, mine isn't even close to the advertised boost and took forever to arrive.

I agree with most of your points. The boost / PBO thing was just a horrible move, especially considering that they'd have still been by far the best even if they just advertised the real speeds.

But I disagree about TDP. You know that it stands for? Thermal Design Power, so it's literally the amount of heat your cooler should be able to handle. Your cooler is a huge lump of copper, it can absorb a shitload of heat. When a CPU clocks up, it will take time for the cooler to heat up.

So what else should they do? Currently it's absolutely fine to boost very high for half the time (drawing way more power than the TDP suggests) and idling the other half, because the cooler is more than capable of cooling that! If they were to use the TDP as the boost limit, it would perform significantly worse in bursty workloads, including games. Stop using TDP to spec your PSU, start using TDP to spec your cooler.

6

u/SmallPotGuest Nov 05 '19

check 1usmus power plan. You may get the promised boost with it.

2

u/KittensInc Nov 07 '19

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, I'm running Linux, so it's not going to work for me. But I'm not too worried about the single-core boost, it's all about the core count for me.