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Comment by duffyjp | Hacker News Reader

I built a 7700X system as an upgrade to my previous i9-9900K system. Performance and efficiency wise it's fantastic, but I've had TONS of problems. Memory unable to run at its rated speed, GPU not initializing at boot, glacially slow boot times even with MCR enabled, janky BIOS releases...

My old-old system is a Haswell Xeon E3 in a Dell and that sucker can boot from power button to the Windows 11 login screen before the monitor even wakes up on the Ryzen.

I really, really hope Intel can release something competitive with AMD in the efficiency space. I feel guilty using more electricity than absolutely necessary, but I also don't want to spend my evenings troubleshooting.

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New socket and new DDR standard teething, mostly, probably. Granted Intel seems to be doing a much better job with DDR5, so there's no excuse really for AMD.

For best results on AM5 prefer two-DIMM (1DPC) configurations, DDR5-6000 kits with EXPO, and avoid the Samsung B-die stuff (e.g. G.SKILL FlareX 36-36-36). If that's too complicated or whatever I would suggest waiting for Ryzen 9000 and the next wave of AM5 boards where this should all be ironed out, or go with Intel LGA1700 this generation.

Personally I am waiting for 64GB DDR5 UDIMMs and stable four-DIMM (2DPC) configurations before I can even contemplate upgrading from AM4. And since I'm already waiting I also want to see a faster chipset link (B650/X670 are still just PCIe Gen4 x4) and TB5 on my next board.

I unfortunately have the exact kit of ram you mentioned to avoid, it came with the Microcenter bundle.

I live ~2.5 hours from Microcenter, so I took a gamble-- reviews were very mixed but the price was insane. If I had bought this setup from my local BestBuy or online, I'd have returned it.

What's your plan if you can get that 256GB RAM config? Run some full-fat LLM's on your iGPU?

> What's your plan if you can get that 256GB RAM config? Run some full-fat LLM's on your iGPU?

No, mostly running lots of VMs and databases, which tend to chew up a ton of RAM. And I dabble in a few cryptocurrency projects that can be a bit RAM-heavy and/or sometimes benefit from a fast RAM disk.

I actually downgraded, going from 256GB on X99 to 128GB on AM4, so it'll be nice to get back to 256GB with modern features and CPU performance (without having to spend thousands of dollars on Threadripper or Xeon W).

I have read something on Reddit that seems to make MCR actually work nicely on Asus boards (I wouldn't recommend Asus at this point, but I have one). You have to enable MCR in BOTH places in the BIOS. Under DRAM timings under the "A.I. Tweaker" tab (also enable "DRAM Power Down Mode" there, happened automatically for me when enabling MCR) and under... I forgot... something like CPU features, MCU, MCU features, Memory Context Restore. Boot time is pretty fast for me now, I think it's better than on the previous Asus AM4 board, which was also not bad.

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