Processors

[soupladel]

I just received a 5950x a couple of days ago and installed it to my Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero motherboard, paired with a Noctua DH-15 cooler.

I have spent a couple of days trying to dial in the PBO settings and the performance just wasnt quite there and regardless of what i did with PBO settings, nothing improved too much. coupled with that i have been running Prime 95 to ensure stability and Cores 0 and 2 are contually throwing up errors, the general consensus is that these two cores are not stable and are therefore faulty.

I have tried re-seating the chip, repasting the cooler, running the chip completely at stock after clearing CMOS and no joy, is there anything else i can try or am i looking to RMA the chip to the retailer? i should point out that these cores 0 & 2 are noted in Ryzen Master as being the favoured cores on CCD0

[Gwillakers]

Careful, most MB vendors ship their MB 'stock" with PBO turned on.

PBO Is overclocking and thus not really supported.

Your dashboard,  are there many dials in the Red or Yellow?

Turn off Core Performance boost and then PBO boost.

At this setting all your cores will/should run up to Base but no further.

These settings will drastically lower the CPU temp.

Run with this for a while, when all is well proceed to the next step where you will set a static clock 

on a per CCD basis.   Then there are MANY other things you can do, but at this time you want to get in the ballpark

Luck.

[soupladel]

I dont have any problems with power limits or thermals, i have confirmed via Hwinfo64 that i am not being thermal or power throttled.  I do have a 1000watt platinum rated PSU and exceptional power deliver on the Crosshair VIII motherboard.  I am also running with a Notcua DH-15 which is pretty effective at taming the 5950x and the 3900x prior to that.

Even with all forms of enhanced (sorry, this is what i meant by "stock") turned off, i still get the errors on cores 0 & 2 in Prime 95, i have researched the error code and there are stories which suggest it is either an unstable core or a problem with memory or another part of the system.  However in such cases the errors get thrown up inconsistently and generally not always on the same cores.  I should point out the rest of my system has been running previously with a 3900x without issue for a year including prime95 runs which gives me confidence that there are no issues beyond what has been inntroduced as new into the system i.e the 5950x.

I did discover a workaround of sort that involves adding a positive valuea gainst those cores in curve optimiser and several runs of prime 95 confirmed this to be working. however this does, as you might expect impact on the boosting behaviour and also increases the thermals.  This is to say nothing of the fact i am having to (in effect) over-volt a core on a brand new CPU just to get it stable as it should be out of the box which isnt acceptable in my book.

I have processed an RMA for it and hopefully will have the replacement by the end of the week as the retailer has a "replaced within 48 hours" policy and they appear to also have stock currently.