My old 4790k finally died, and I need to replace both the CPU & MB. I was wondering if there would be any conflict in having an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU.
I want to use Bazzite on it. I’m running the same distro on my main rig and I’m very happy with it.
Any suggestions?
CPU is pretty much irrelevant to GPU choice.
Personally I wouldn’t buy any recent intel CPU with the dishonesty and major flaws in their products as of late, but that’s up to you to decide - AMD’s most recent CPUs haven’t been amazing either, but don’t have hardware flaws at least.
correct me if I’m wrong, but the performance issues in the new AMD chips were microsofts fault and they work fine on linux.
That is correct.
No, it was AMD knowingly reporting performance from the hidden admin user that noone is supposed to use.
The number of flawed products was very small (only high end 13 and 14 gen) and it is now fixed as Intel has pinned down the root cause.
Don’t base your purchasing choices on that. The media loves to report major screw ups and rarely reports there fixes.
The number was not small. It was 10+ SKUs… which also happened to be most of the most popular ones.
Intel claimed multiple times to have fixed the issue, only for it to have not been fixed. Maybe it really is fixed this time, but who knows?
Also, stuff is often in warehouses for months. You could very easily still get an affected CPU. And intel has been very clear that they will not replace faulty CPUs. If you get a faulty CPU, you’re on your own.
It’s not worth the risk.
This is all on top of Intel having worse CPUs on a worse platform with zero upgrade path even if you ignore a lot of them being faulty, which you obviously shouldn’t.
The problem was caused by a bug in the CPU firmware. the issue is that the CPU requests higher voltages and tries to boost when it really can’t safely boost. The additional power doesn’t get used up and then decades the chip if you are unlucky. It was purely a software bug that caused hardware damage in some cases. New on the shelf units are not affected assuming they have up to date firmware. (Update your firmware always)
Also it only impacts high end 13 and 14 gen CPUs. If you are buying a high end chip that is 13th or 14th gen then just update the microcode. Also there are plenty of CPUs that are totally unaffected like the 12th gen and probably the 15th gen. Even if you have one of the affected CPUs there is only a relatively small chance of having and issue depending on the sillion and workload.
Don’t all flock to a single company. That drives up prices and limits completion. Intel has really done themselves a disservice by not being more transparent.
There were chips that suffered from oxidative flaws during the manufacturing process which Intel didn’t tell anybody about until July of this year. You are correct that they aren’t on sale now but it’s not correct to say this was only a voltage issue.
If anything, Intel’s lack of transparency should speak volumes. They’re hoping to just mostly ignore the problem until it blows over. I still think it’s more severe than they’re letting on, but only time will tell. They’re in full damage control mode right now.
Anyone who gets scared off of buying Intel CPU’s until they see how this plays out is making a sound decision IMO. Consumers shouldn’t accept this kind of behaviour.
On the flip side, this could also make for some potentially good deals on unaffected SKUs.
Hopefully they will recover. I want options and only looking at AMD is very limiting.
I’m sure AMD is not taking any risks these days as they want to keep Intel in the sun.
Agreed. In the long term it’s better for consumers if there is competition, but that also means being an informed consumer, making good buying decisions and not being blindly loyal to any particular brand.
I also think used is a pretty good option. Sure some people might need pots of performance but most people would be fine on a 10 year old CPU.
There was a two-generation long lithography issue that they had not been able to solve. You are grossly understating the technical scope of the problem, as well as the trust issues Intel themselves created with the way they handled the whole debacle.
I’m not ever going to buy a 13/14 gen Intel core unless it’s at absolute bargain basement prices. In a professional IT context, nobody in purchasing departments should be buying the impacted SKUs in the affected date range (and practically, that means “they won’t buy those SKUs, full stop”).
The problem has been fixed. As long as you don’t have a hardware fault you are fine. To be fair I personally wouldn’t buy one of these chips new. That doesn’t matter though as they have moved on to the latest gen. The latest gen has less rare performance but is more efficient and hopefully actually stable.
Intel is learning some multi billion dollar lessons right now. We need strong competition with AMD. Right now they competition is used products.
Also I would totally buy a bunch of defective Intel chips for cheap in hopes of getting one working.
I mean, the issues were present and widely reported for several months before Intel even acknowledged the problems. And it wasn’t just media reporting this, it was also game server hosts who were seeing massive deployments failing at unprecedented rates. Even those customers, who get way better support than the average home user, were largely dismissed by intel for a long time. It then took several more months to ship a fix. The widespread nature of the issues points to a major failure on the companies part to properly QA and ensure their partners were given accurate guidance for motherboard specs. Even so, the patches only prevent further harm to the processor, it doesnt fix any damage that has already been incurred that could amount to years off of its lifespan. Sure they are doing an extended warranty, but thats still a band-aid.
I agree it doesnt mean one should completely dismiss the possibility of buying an Intel chip, but it certinally doesn’t inspire confidence.
Even if this was all an oversight or process failure, it still looks a lot like Intel as a whole deciding to ship chips that had a nice looking set of numbers despite those numbers being achieved through a degraded lifespan.
It is definitely was a dumpster fire. It just annoys me that people are going around spreading fear. It is bad but it isn’t affecting every system. It is bad but not completely panic worthy. You can totally not be affected by the problems even of you do have an affected product.
It isn’t a good look but hopefully this is a sobering experience for Intel
My i5 13600 had this issue. I thought I was safe. It barely boots up now. I wasn’t even running it 24/7. Like maybe 1- hours per day for 3 months.
It shouldn’t be impacted. First update the firmware to the latest version. Next, try switching the kernel power governor to performance.
I would RMA the chip personally as Intel has extending the warranty so you should be covered. They are struggling to replace all the chips but they are at least trying.
I can tell you that its behaviour matches the exact reported behaviour on the higher end chips. I updated the motherboard the moment my manufacturer released it. RMA it to get yet another faulty chip? Considering Intel will charge me shipping and a restocking fee? Nah.
Go AMD.
There is basically 1 reason to go Intel cpu: quicksync video encoding. Amd’s is fine but intel’s is the gold standard.
Otherwise definitely go amd, it rocks Nvidia perfectly.
With AMD supporting their sockets for long periods of time, there’s -1 reasons to buy Intel.
Basically.
I like the E and p cores, mostly because I used to do a lot of core architecture for supercomputer chips and this was one of my ideas I wanted to implement, fully heterogenous cores with Linux support for scheduling.
But no, there’s no reason to pick Intel, I only got it because it was cheap, and I don’t use it for gaming.
I don’t have a good comparison for this since my Intel CPUs are from 2014 or earlier, but I was thoroughly impressed with how well my new AMD laptop did video encoding (compared to the only-as-expected bumps in performance otherwise). Do you have examples of how much better QuickSync is than VCN?
So VCN has caught up some, but QS is still faster, generally has better support and better codecs before VCN. Also has combinations, vainfo gives me something like 20 encoders on intel, 8 on amd, mostly stuff like 444 for each variant of hevc, etc. Also my 7600xt was more picky with which settings it would take, the intel block seems fairly comfortable with more.
My Xe has AV1 encode (at ludicrous speeds, I get 30x sometimes, it changed my flow entirely, I stream av1 only now), it’s had hevc well earlier than amd, and overall it’s usually a good bit faster (an intel igpu will usually encode faster than an amd dgpu).
Also quality has been reviewed to be better, feel free to google that, it’s apparently pretty marginal to human observers.
But like I said, the difference is nowhere like it was, AMD is catching up, software is coming together so vaapi covers most cases without complaint.
There’s no reason to consider the difference between them unless encoding is your primary focus, and you’re trying to use very modern codecs.
I’ve been an intel boy since I first started building computers in 2014.
Buy an AMD.
I was wondering if there would be any conflict in having an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU.
No.
As others said, both work just fine with any GPU and Intel had serious issues lately with crashes. I’d say go with AMD unless you want higher power usage as Intel chips fare worse when it comes to perf/watt metrics. That said Intel CPUs might have an advantage at single threaded loads, but again, at much higher power use. AMD also tends to keep CPU sockets for longer thus less motherboard changes are required if you upgrade the CPU. You might also consider reading reviews on serious technical websites as it might give you inside into what performance and prices to expect.
Update: On more (implicitly expressed consequence) - due to Intel’s much higher power requirements, they are more difficult to cool down - more expensive (air) coolers and quite possibly water cooling required.
The GPU doesn’t care about the CPU, or vice-versa. AMD is probably better value for money right now if you’re intending to replace both CPU and mobo, but Intel will work.
The reason you don’t see AMD CPU + nVidia GPU in premade machines these days has to do with corporate contracts, not interoperability. Before AMD bought out ATI, it wasn’t an uncommon combination.
Any Linux distribution should work on AMD CPUs, well, Debian based distros can sometimes have issues with particularly new hardware due to the long time between releases. But bazzite is fedora based so you should be fine with anything.
Nvidia GPUs work just fine with AMD CPUs.
Realistically the question is how high end of a CPU do you want, the mid to high end range AMD CPUs tend to be cheaper than their intel equivalents, but the highest end intel chips edge out the highest end AMD chips right now. Realistically, that won’t matter unless you are doing something super CPU intensive and just want the most power possible for your machine.
AMD CPUs also have better integrated graphics, not super important if you have a dedicated GPU, but, there are times when having a second somewhat capable graphics processor could be useful.
You could go either way. But with the shit going on with the 13th and 14th gen Intel chips, I personally would rather go the AMD route. I would actually probably go with 5000 series chips with ddr4 ram for the savings. It would probably still be a huge upgrade for me, and it would be overall a much cheaper upgrade. If you are gaming primarily, the 5800x3d is still an amazing chip for gaming when it comes price to performance.
It looks like the 5800x3D (and other AM4 cups) have been discontinued. They are going out of stock everywhere. Might be better to go with AM5 (7000 and 9000 series) at this point.
Fair point. Hadn’t followed recently, but that suggestion makes sense. I would personally buy used, but I totally understand others not wanting to and buying the newer chips would make the most sense there.
On Linux, AMD GPUs work significantly better than Nvidia ones. If you have a choice, choose an AMD. Nvidia is mostly fine though. Even Wayland works well on Nvidia now (after the 560 driver release).
Sometimes you’ll hit issues with memory management if you have <=8GB VRAM, since the Nvidia driver doesn’t support swapping infrequently accessed parts of VRAM into regular system RAM, like it does on Windows and like AMD does on both Windows and Linux. It’s a long-standing issue.
You may also need to manually reinstall the driver after kernel updates. In theory, it’s improving as Nvidia are moving most of the driver logic into the firmware, and making the driver thinner with the new open-source out-of-tree driver (https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules).
For CPU, I’d definitely go with AMD instead of Intel. Intel aren’t having such a good time at the moment.
On Linux, AMD GPUs work significantly better than Nvidia ones. If you have a choice, choose an AMD
Unless you’re interested in AI stuff, then Nvidia is still the best choice. Some libraries are HW accelerated on AMD, and hopefully more will work in the future.
Even Wayland works well on Nvidia now
Damn lies. Nvidia works like shit on Wayland and newer kernels.
Working fine for me on Fedora 40 with a 6.12 kernel. You need to ensure your desktop environment is modern and supports explicit sync. KDE added support in Plasma 6.1, so Plasma 6.1 and Nvidia driver 560 or above should have no issues. I don’t use GNOME but they added support in 46.1 as far as I know.
One of my favourite underrated things about Wayland is that I could finally disable pasting when clicking the mousewheel. That’s so ingrained into XFree86/X11 that it’s impossible to disable.
(disabling it only affects apps that use Wayland)It’s actually working mostly fine me now with KDE 6.2.1, kernel 6.11.3, and nvidia 5.60.something. I get janky scrolling in firefox but apart from that it’s been fine.
I found that Firefox scrolling was janky even with X11 when using a mouse. You can turn off smooth scrolling in the options, and turn off kinetic scrolling in about:config (
apz.gtk.kinetic_scroll.enabled).Kinetic scrolling off and smooth scrolling on is so much better. Thanks for the hint.
On Arch+KDE Plasma it’s nearly perfect for me with a RTX 3070
You may also need to manually reinstall the driver after kernel updates.
As with any module installed outside the kernel. If you install it via your package manager is should setup dkms to handle that for you.
Doesn’t always work, at least on Fedora. On Fedora, it builds the kernel after the package is installed (so you need to wait 5-10 mins before rebooting) and I guess it doesn’t work properly sometimes. I’ve had it happen twice in a few months. It does work properly sometimes though.
Either is fine but i strongly recommend going for amd, especially an x3d one, like 7800x3d(if you care about gaming).
I don’t need the iGPU, my dGPU is a 3080TI.
AMD
Nah, anything will work fine.
Just a quick question, are you sure it’s the cpu that died? Those ivy bridge (?) chips really seem to last. I’d be surprised if it was the cpu and not the motherboard or power supply of something.
You have one of the nicer fourth gen chips. It would probably be worth it to take it to a computer shop or something and have them try to boot it with a good board.
If it’s still kicking, those motherboards are cheap as heck. The ddr3 is cheap too.
No reason not to keep it around to run a file server/seedbox/Jellyfin server/whatever.
Amd
