I decided to check on the health of my 7950X (which I got on day one of release) again today, now that it has been running 24/7 for 20 months (or the best part of two years).
There is nobody in the Tech Media, or any Tech YouTuber, who can match my results at my temps with normal 360 rad AIO, non-delidded, cooling (yes I am speaking to you Buildzoid, Der8auer, Wendel or Steve from Gamers Nexus) because for five years (since the first chiplet based Ryzen CPU came out) all of them have been too lazy to actually find the fundamental flaw in the architecture and work a way around it.
I will put my results down below, and none of the so-called "Techs" in the media or YouTube can match them, simply because they haven't yet discovered that AMD Ryzen CPUs are not Intel CPUs and that trying to configure them both the same way is a recipe for failure.
Well now, as it turns out, configuring an Intel CPU as if it were an Intel CPU is also a recipe for failure.
In both cases though, the mantra "Moar powa, moar gud" seems to have been the dominant paradigm over the past five years. This of course just makes things worse, and not better ("Is it crashing? Just add more voltage").
The laziness has been universally excused as, "We are just reviewing the out-of-the box performance", ignoring the fact that blamestorming vendors will just blame other vendors when things go wrong (ASUS and the 7800X3D). Just FYI, ASUS has learned bugger all, and on a recent ProArt B650 Creator board I helped someone configure with a 7800X3D (with the latest BIOS installed) I double-checked the SOC voltage after applying EXPO, and it was set to a CPU destroying 1.315 Volts instead of a maximum of 1.25 Volts.
Over the 20 months of 24/7 usage there has been zero degradation with regard to my 7950X, and the results below are from my GigaByte X670 AORUS Elite AX motherboard, which I also bought on the day of release with my 7950X.
To be clear, when you buy any Ryzen CPU (aside from an X3D) and run it at stock, then you are degrading it from day one. Brian from Tech Yes City made a video entitled "This is why Ryzen 5 3600s are failing", he was however a bit late to the party considering that I had posted a prediction of why Ryzen CPUs would fail over four and a half years ago on the AMD Red Team forum - needless to say he also got the reason for the failures wrong.
AMD makes the cynical calculation that their CPUs only need to last three years and only need to stay above the base frequency (because if you look you will see that this is the only thing that AMD guarantees) and after that, when the CPU dies, it sucks to be you, and you are SOL.
It is time for the Tech Media/YouTubers to realize that they are talking to people who don't get their stuff for free, and if they care about their audience, then they should start acting like it.
If you have a 7950X, then at a maximum of 1.2 Volts of Vcore you should be able to at least run it at 5.4 GHz on CCD0 and 5.35 GHz on CCD1 (CCD1 will never clock as high as CCD0 on a dual chiplet Ryzen CPU). If you cannot do this, then you have a degraded CPU. It only takes a few weeks of running your Ryzen CPU at stock for the degradation to set in.
The big difference between me and others is that I benchmark to configure, I don't configure to benchmark.
The reason why I go out of my way to help people is that I remember back in the day when I first started off with PCs (around the end of 1983) I was a clueless numpty, and couldn't understand what was written in tech journals because I lacked the basics. I was lucky that there were people who took me under their wing and with patience introduced me to what has became my passion - namely being a techie.
They are now either dead or I have lost contact with them, and I cannot pay them back, but I feel obligated by their kindness to pay that help forward to others.
But now, on with the results.
I will start off with a Ryzen Master screenshot of my system at idle. The fans of my AIO, an Arctic Liquid Freezer III, (Phanteks T30) are running at 2000 RPM and the reason why the idle temp is as high as it is, is because I have had two spine operations and have spinal arthritis and need to keep my room temp between 28-30 degrees Celsius:
Here is the CineBench R23 result after running it for 10 minutes:
Here are my memory settings:
And finally, here is the Ryzen Master screenshot of my temperature and CPU readings after my cooling solution has reached homeostasis running CineBench R23 on a loop:
The CineBench R23 result you see above is not the maximum I can achieve with my CPU, it is just the maximum that I can achieve which will not degrade my CPU.
I mentioned earlier the fundamental flaw in the Ryzen architecture and that is, that AMD bastardized the architecture for single core boost (or as I like to call it, boast) performance.
What this means is that the voltage has been raised to achieve the single core clock speed, and it is impossible for the CPU to adjust the voltage down again to be commensurate with optimal multicore performance without hard crashing the system.
For anyone who doubts this, they can contact me on Discord under the name "michaelnager" and I will show them (and yes, it will hard crash my system, so I am not just going to do it on a whim).
So how did I manage to run my 7950X 24/7 for 20 months without degrading it?
I have written a guide on how to optimally configure any 3rd/4th/5th Gen Ryzen (and the guide will probably be good for 6th Gen as well, but I will update it if it is not) on any compatible motherboard. You don't have to be a member of the exclusive high-end motherboard/cooling elite to get the best results. If you have problems then you are welcome to contact me on Discord.
Here is the link to my guide:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ryzen/comments/tntrif/definitive_guide_to_configuring_3rd4th_gen_ryzen/
I have also written a guide on how to configure the Ryzen 7800X3D:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ryzen/comments/137i5f5/how_to_optimally_configure_the_ryzen_7800x3d/
