I’m considering upgrading to a Ryzen 5 5600, they’ve finally come down to $100 locally (tray version sans cooler).

currently, I have a 1600AF (lower binned 2600, so Zen+) on a B450 board. the upgrade should be straightforward, my board supports it (latest BIOS) and it has the same power rating, so my cheap-ass PSU and stock cooler don’t need upgrading.

reason I want to upgrade is I have a number of issues with it under linux so I’d like to check if someone runs a similar setup.

first, I have Cool & Quiet and C-states disabled and Power Idle Control to “Typical Current Idle”; otherwise the machine freezes when waking from suspend after a short while. the second issue is, I have 3600 MT/s Kingston Hyper-X modules that I have to run at 2400 because both XMP profiles (XMP1-3000 and XMP2-3600) are unstable and cause apps to crash (the latter sometimes won’t boot at all, can’t unlock LUKS).

supposedly, both those issues are fixed in newer gens; old Zen/Zen+ had issues with faster RAM, and the C-state handling is also better in Zen3. also, I can use the new amd-pstate driver.

my PC is plenty fast as is, I’m only considering upgrading to fix them two issues. if it’s the same on the other side of the fence, I’d rather skip it.

anyone had first-hand experiences with this?

edit: thanks everyone who took the time to share their setup, I’m way more optimistic about making the jump!

  • I have a 5900x (zen3), and apparently I got a bit unlucky with the silicon and ended up with a CPU that’s slightly unstable at its stock voltages and stock boost clock. The system would freeze and reboot randomly, and the bios would report an MCE error. This crash could be reproduced with near 100% success by doing sha1 hashing specifically for some odd reason. This is not a Linux issue, it’s a hardware defect.

    It may be an Asus motherboard specific thing, but I found a workaround by going to the bios settings, precision boost overdrive, and increasing the voltage scalar to like 7. Now it’s been two years and I have only ever had it happen once since I changed that, so I’m happy.

    • xep
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      fedilink
      27 months ago

      You should’ve RMAed. Maybe you still can?

    • x3i
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      fedilink
      17 months ago

      Sorry to hear that! Can confirm that I experience none of these issues on Arch with my 5900X and an Aorus pro wifi (mini ITX), so definitely specific to your combination.