by stevefan1999 | 2025-09-08 06:15:18+00:00
Just a funny anecdote:

I got an i5 13600KF last black friday (with a long haul to Hong Kong for about 2 weeks) from Amazon, with initially a budget motherboard that I thought would be fine, and it turns out the system would keep turning off at one point and reboot again with a huge drop in voltage (it was about 10 months later that I learned this is a brownout).

It was for my company computer, but I bought it personally, so the ownership is still mine. I then bought a new SF750 PSU at home and swapped the CPU for 13100 salvaged from a computer someone donated, so now the 13600KF would be my personal gaming rig.

I made sure it gets a platform that sustain enough power and appropriate headroom for thermals, and it was all fine until 6 months ago, it starts to BSOD all over the place, when gaming; programming; or even just resume from suspend. I have to refund two games because of this, one is accepted and the other isn't. And also turn over to cloud machine for development because BSOD in the middle of debugging is really nasty.

So I decided to say "fuck it, I'm going back to AMD". I actually still use my 3700X gig a year ago but I figured the 5 year old system is now becoming an old dog. I just can't run most modern game at even 80FPS, so I swapped to the 13600KF as an intermediate replacement until it glitched up, so I need another replacement again.

Coincidentally I bought a 7945HX engineering sample ITX motherboard originally for the intent of running Kubernetes homelab (now that I think about it, a big waste of money indeed, yikes). Then I have a eureka moment: why don't I just use that 7945HX plus the 96GB DDR5 that I bought?

So after a painful assemble-reassemble process, I'm back to AMD once again -- it was almost perfect, scoring almost exactly as a 5950X, but only at around 100W TDP for the total package, with almost double the CPU cache, plus it is not the Zen 5/Zen 5c design which complicates CPU scheduling, I have been able to solve the gaming-productivity dilemma at the same time -- and the MoDT motherboard itself is just shy of ~1800HKD in total, which is less than the 5950X CPU alone plus I have a huge TDP headroom for the 9070XT I purchased also in June -- almost complete silent platform with Noctua, too.

The original 13600KF has been redelivered back to my company with a new 800W PSU and a new case specifically bought to fit the wood aesthetic, and another AMD GPU I salvaged from my NUC (6600XT Challenger, but single fan), but this time it runs surprisingly fine -- no kernel panic or PSU brownout just yet.

After all this in a short span of 10 months, I guess I just reached my own "metastability" now -- Intel CPU for office work, AMD for gaming and workstation.

The old 3700X system is being repurposed again for running cheap Kubernetes homelab and I guess this time too it is worth the right place. I don't think I ever need to have a new purchase again for the coming few years, hopefully.

The only problem would be that I'm using an engineering sample rather than the normal version of 7945HX -- the normal one can reach up to 5.4GHz boost but mine only got 5.2GHz boost, at a cost of 600HKD difference, I would say it is not worth it to upgrade to the normal version, no?