Why I switched back to Intel...

so now that Skunk Works is done um I've been asked a lot already both on social media and emails and stuff like Jay why did you switch from the 7950 x3d back to an Intel based system so I figured I'd make a talking head video right now kind of talking about how the last 8 to 10 months have been what is it February was when I was done with it yeah February to November Now using the x3d what it's been like and ultimately what led to my changes you guys have kind of one place to go for these answers instead of having to dig through all the build log to figure out the little Snippets of information I've out over time you know actually do this the right way EK water blocks Quantum torque fittings for PC liquid cooling includes static extenders rotary adapters offsets double rotary fittings and micro series for all small form factor systems with a wide variety of fittings your Loop building experience becomes much easier quicker and more streamlined and all torque fittings come in four major finish options that will blend in with any setup the standard nickel plated versions the special matte black satin titanium and fittings plated with real gold with replaceable locking Rings available in multiple colors and aesthetic color rings only available from Ek the customization options are almost endless to see the full lineup of EK water block torque fittings follow the link in the description below so it's kind of funny this isn't the first time I've had to make this video like this um way back when I started my channel back in 2012 I had an 8120 FX system that I updated to an 8350 system and then eventually ended up moving over to uh z67 3770k IV Bridge um so I had to make a video back then about why I had switched in fact maybe go and watch that video I'll try and Link it down below where um I don't know maybe the reasons are somewhat similar anyway moving on um the 7950 X 3D CPU obviously built upon the 3D vcash design that we had seen with the 5800 X 3D um and it was anticipated to be the best gaming CPU ever to exist in in gaming CPUs first and foremost here I am fighting through a cold it's not Co I took two tests okay but anyway I'm fighting through a cold and some brain fog and I'm having to deal with all the nomenclature and numbers and stuff of these CPUs I'm going to do my best there'll probably be some misspeaks hopefully Phil will do corrections on screen if I say anything wrong moving forward the 7950 x3d it is a cc dual CCD system so what that means is it's got its IO controller it's got CCD Z and ccd1 one of the ccds is basically taken right out of 7950 X non 3D and plopped right on the uh the substrate right right there right on the on the fabric the other one is a 3D vcash which has the you know the whole point of being an x3d which is the 3D vcash you've got stacked cash more of it and it's faster and games love it the problem is the 3D vcash is extremely sensitive to temperature so what that meant is to keep everything under control lower clock speeds and lower voltages and lower power draw which sounds like a great thing but an overall cost of lower frequency so the sacrifice of a MD made there was more cash a little bit slower speed but because more things are running through cash rather than going to system memory better frame rates the problem is you needed something to tell the CPU like hey this is a game and this is a is a work intensive task so when you're gaming it would park the CCD that did not have the 3dv cache on it and try and Run the game entirely on half the CPU power on the v3d cache or 3D V cache CCD to give you better frame rates the thing is it used Xbox game bar to do that and it wasn't always right so I noticed when over the last 10 months of having the system I would always monitor what was happening with the the ccds and I even had a a sensor panel so I could see what the usage was and stuff and every now and then I would notice certain games especially like indie games and I play a lot of indie games um would actually Park the wrong CCD it would park the 3db cache and it would run the standard uh CCD that's not really a problem it just what sucks is they took basically one of the chiplets right off of a 7950 X non-3d and plopped it on the the fabric and then the other one is the 3D bcache now if you're running AAA titles like cyberpunk or Battlefield or main titles that were very welldeveloped and and spoke to the game bar nicely it had no problem divvying up the uh the workload and now if you were to run a title something that had CPU usage in the background that was not gaming like I say you were live streaming or maybe got some video encoding going in the background or something and you're multitasking it had a problem determining sometimes which course to park in which not so sometimes it would completely turn off the 3D vcash die or CCD and put everything onto the non uh 3D vcash CCD so I felt like there's still a lot of work to be done on AMD when it comes to recognizing the tasks at hand and parking the correct cores and and with the affinity and windows moving things around where they needed to be now at the end of the day when it comes to gaming and stuff it wasn't really all that noticeable what was noticeable though was the fact that the frequencies would drop significantly so already because of the uh sensitivity of temperature when it comes to the 3D vcash die you'll notice there's a lower clock frequency lower power draw lower voltage the whole deal just because of the sensitivity of that cach is stacked so you got a lot of heat kind of going in a z-axis through the die prior to getting to the C the CPU Cooler so temperatures were sensitive and even had a lower I think 85 de C is where the TJ Maxx was on that versus 95° C on the non x3d CPU so I found myself as time going on going man I almost wish I had just gone with the 7950 X non-3d for an overall more rounded user experience when it comes to the CPU which in my opinion the 7950 X is a is still an amazing CPU um especially if you're doing multitasking and such and I would take that few per hit in gaming performance performance rather than getting the few per increase in gaming performance and then at the at the sacrifice of the overall rounded CPU experience on my system at home you I had to ask myself what am I doing with this well I'm doing a lot of gaming on it but I'm also doing a lot of um like thumbnail creation and Photoshop and just general like messing around on my system so I found that I wasn't getting the full benefit of the x3d I wasn't playing a lot of AAA titles I I just that aside it wasn't that big of a deal to stay with the x3d the biggest problem I had was memory stability now you guys will probably remember in the beginning of this of owning the x3d CPU and using it in my system over here uh the one that is half torn apart right now I was using um hyperx 6000 MHz AMD Expo Ram so AMD Expo is basically what they called their am5 ddr5 docp um kind of like memory timings that are sort of tailored to AMD and we recognize it's an AMD CPU so it was supposed to just kind of tune the memory to overall compatibility and stability with AMD the problem was it didn't really seem to do that so I was never able to boot my system with 6,000 MHz Ram stable and it didn't matter what revision bios I was on uh and and you guys know with am5 and a and AMD motherboards bios revisions were were literally just popping out like crazy I mean there there was new bios updates like every month every single one said more RAM stability and every single one was like better CPU stability and better voltage time uh regulation and it it just didn't seem to be the case it almost seemed like every time I updated my BIOS I lost stability now you can't really overclock an x3d CPU because of the reasons I already said temperature stab uh and voltage limitations um you could go in and you could do like a curve Optimizer in like ryzen Master which gained me a little bit of performance now that little bit of performance really wasn't that noticeable we were we were talking like a minus 30 offset uh which was not that much what it allowed me to really do with PBO and all that was to try and keep those boost clocks as high as possible and because of the fact that I had you know two 360 radiators in there with the CPU block um even though I had 490 in there it it temperatures were good I never hit 85c I would see like 81c but as you know 85c is a TJ Maxx when it came to like the memory timings and the memory stability I found myself running 5800 MHz and it was fine for a week or two and then I would come turn on the system and then it would retrain memory 18 times and it would take 5 minutes to get the system to turn on and I'm like what the hell even though I had it set so that it would just lock the memory timings not retrain every time starting the system I'd get complete lockups on Startup or I'd get blue screens on Startup and then the only way I could get the system stable again is to go in and drop the memory even more 5600 MHz and that would run fine for a while and then drop it down to 5,400 MHz and then that would run fine for a while and then it got to the point to where I was crashing during my live stream in earlier days of my live stream when having the x3d at home you'd see a lot of weird I I'd see people complaining about frame drops or I would just completely drop out entirely and then my system would be running just fine on my end but then OBS would be completely locked up and nothing's happening and I'm like what is a system restart would lead to a blue screen and then I dropped my Ram down to 5,000 MHz and it got to the point to where only way my system would run stable regardless of what bios that I was on even if I was running stock CPU everything the curve Optimizer off everything is just out of the box settings with the x3d CPU I would have to run base timings base frequency on the memory so now I had 6,000 MHz sticks that were running 4800 MHz ddr5 Bas so it was just getting extremely annoying more recently the last couple of weeks I found that if I didn't run my system for a while and my system was always powered on what I mean is power power switch the power supply was on it had power it'd be sitting in that standby off mode I would turn on the system and then the I would sit there and see not memory timing cuz code 15 on an AMD motherboard was basically hey we are training memory right now I wouldn't see code 15 I would just see it hang on other bios codes and then power off power on cycle a few times and then I'd get to Windows so it's one of those things I'm like I am now Factory 100% out of the box there is nothing adjusted add all in the Bios except for maybe the fan curve nothing touched at all with memory nothing touched at all cuz you could because you couldn't do overclocking on the CPU really I never bothered with um the BIOS overclocking at all not even the AI features or any of that cuz none of that really worked with the x3d once I noticed I wasn't even enabling Expo I was just running Factory Ram settings with the latest bios and I was dealing with these constant crashes or lockups or needing to power cycle this the power supply off and then back on I figured 10 months of these kinds of problems with AMD although I gave it a real shot I don't feel like these would have existed on the 7950 X and that's where my my regret went I should have just gone with the 7950 X because of the uh Revival of skunkworks and skunkworks always existing on an Intel system I took the opportunity to say okay now it's time for me to see how things are going on the Intel side even though I've been running an Intel 13900 K here at work um until I'm out of the office and at home where I don't have a box a warehouse full of Parts just be like Oh I'm going to swap this Ram or whatever to see how things are running getting my system at home and using in a real world use case which in my instance is Twitch streaming games and going on there and and and doing you know my my tax documents and just regular workflow type stuff a regular user at home would have that gives me the true indication of what a system is like with the 14900 K I'm already feeling a little bit of regret only because of the fact that the 14900 K that I have is not some sort of a golden sample it's running hotter than I think it should I don't know if maybe this water block is not making the tightest of contact on the CPU because of all the things it's contacting like the SSD and it's contacting the vrms and it's contacting the chokes and the CPU I just don't know at this point if I'm getting the tightest fit possible because even going in there and doing the best voltage tuning that I can uh it's still running like 86 to 90c depending on the load the CPU is overclocked I am running 5.7 GHz on all core and I have upped the ecores up to 4.6 so I have pushed those quite a bit even with Aus 75 or 75 molt offset reduction on the voltage only running about 1.26 volts it's still hitting all the way up to about 90c on the flip side I have a 13900 K in my work system that is a golden sample I can run that CPU at 1.2 volts overclock the 13900 K up to 5.8 GHz all core and I'm getting the same score as I am on the 1400 K if not a little bit higher I've got at 42,000 in C a bench R23 and it does it at 75c so I'm like damn I should have just taken that CPU and put it in this system and said screw 14th gen um but I had the CPU and I threw it in there and now I wish I had gone with maybe the 1300k cuz there was no reason to throw a 14 gen in there at all but remember skunk rcks is all about Overkill and stupid if you go back and watch the old Skunk Works Vlogs I remember those days of like I'm putting three Titan X Maxwells in here there is no reason to do three titanex Maxwells except for like time spy at the time there was no Port Royal or anything but time spy fire strike it was fun and it was Overkill and it was fun to do that kind of system here again um so I'm stuck in this position now where it's like I'm struggling with practicality like I'm trying to be more practical with stuff these days especially to be a little bit more in tune with like regular buyers and stuff but for Skunk Works it was always about being crazy and over the top like I should have put another 490 in there just as an encoder GPU for for no reason other than that to stay with the within the spirit of Skunk Works but obviously that would have been like a $2,000 waste there's no reason to do that whatsoever but anyway those are the main reasons it it honestly came down to the memory the memory timing and the memory stability itself was just enough is enough but the amount of people that I've also had send me emails just sort of validating my own experience through theirs saying Jay everything you've said about AMD I'm experiencing it too I'm getting memory re crashes I'm getting constant blue screens I've got stock settings I've don't know what the hell is happening it's unfortunate to see that many people with that same kind of experience cuz I really was sort of hoping mine was more of a oneoff but there's too many people telling me the same story so I feel like AMD is on the right track with the x3d stuff and obviously the 76 or the 5600 x3d being probably a great CPU for am4 single I feel like the x3d stuff on a single CCD is the best way to go for that cuz I feel like this REM honestly this reminds me of the early thread Ripper days when thread Ripper had to completely disable one of the CCX and they were called CCX on thread Ripper and ccds on mainstream but there were four CCX and it would disable one of them or two of them the early thread rippers were two but anyway it would disable one of them entirely whenever it would go into gaming mode but then it still had to run memory through that CCX back to the other CCX which actually LED um to some latency issues my point is it feels a lot like the early thread Ripper days with stability and just overall crashes and things like Phil wouldn't he edited on thread Ripper for us for many years and it wasn't until we got to like a 3,000 series thread Ripper that he felt confident like this is a solid system so it's kind of unfortunate but um I mean it is what it is but at the end of the day there's one main reason why it's my system and I can do with it what I want and I can experiment with what I want just as you guys should just like if you got someone nagging your ear like why'd you go Intel you're such a shill you should have gone AMD be like you know what good for you go AMD you have Choice that's awesome back in the day you only had one real Choice intel if you wanted performance or AMD if you didn't have a lot of money and that's not the case anymore so at the end of the day I wanted to I wanted to try it I want to experience it now and see what Intel is like at home I have not used Intel at home uh in a while since 10th gen I mean there we're 14 13.5 gen so I want to see what it's like and you know what that's the best part about it being my system is it's my system so what is your system what's your choice are you using an x3d CPU has a been good has it been bad I would say my my experience has overall been neutral I've had some bad AMD experiences and these experiences here are not bad they're annoying and if you're one of those people that emailed me about your system just being a complete nightmare when it comes to AMD yeah I I would just honestly stay on top of the BIOS maybe do a lot of forum reading try to find what sort of Base configurations are the most stable unfortunately I feel like when it comes to AMD right now with the x3d stuff this is exclusive to x3d the non-x has been very solid as far as I'm concerned when we use it in various situations the x3d stuff still has a lot of Kinks to be worked out this is only second generation x3d and the first generation of doing it with multiple ccds so it's going to take time all right guys thanks for watching and as always we'll see you in the next one

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 679,570

Keywords: Intel, AMD, Why I switched to Intel, Why I left AMD, 7950x, 7950X3D, 13900k, 14900k

Id: JZGiBOZkI5w

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 05 2023