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GPUs and CPUs · AMD Ryzen 7

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X

10owners with an opinion
80%of verdicts positive
3/0positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for noise.

What people wrote

Neutral
> Alternatively, it could be a hardware bug, since afaict it's only been repro'd on one hardware config. (I know there are a bunch of ARM cores with erratas around TLB invalidation) Which raises the question of whether any HN readers have successfully reproduced this? I've just tried (using his file generation script and the official rg binary he links) on a Ryzen 7 5800X / 7.1.5-arch1-2 with sufficient free ram as the github issue suggests, and still no segfaults after 10 minutes.
Likes it
I'm not moving past my DDR4 build (and the 32 GB of DDR4 2133 MHz backup chips I still have around from way back, before I got the current 3200 MHz ones) until the prices go back to being at least partially sane. This also means that CPU manufacturers are not getting my money (since the 5800X is fine for now) and I have no reason to get a new GPU either (though admittedly the B580 isn't perfect).
Likes it
If I needed a budget build, I'd probably look in the direction of used parts on AliExpress, you can sometimes find good deals on AM4 CPUs (that platform had a lot of longevity, even now my main PC has a Ryzen 7 5800X) and for whatever reason RX 580 GPUs were really, really widespread (though typically the 2048SP units). Not amazing by any means, but a significant upgrade from your current setup and if you don't get particularly unlucky, it might last for years with no issues. Ofc there's also the alternate strategy of going for a mid/high end rig and hoping it lasts a decade, but the current DDR5 prices make me depressed so yeah maybe not. I genuinely hope that at some point the market will get flooded with good components with a lot of longevity and reasonable prices again in the next gens: like AM4 CPUs, like that RX 580, or GTX 1080 Ti but I fear that Nvidia has learnt their lesson in releasing stuff that pushes you in the direction of incremental upgrades rather than making something really good for the time, same with Intel's LGA1851 being basically dead on arrival, after the reviews started rolling in (who knows, maybe at least mobos and Core Ultra chips will eventually be cheap as old stock). On the other hand, at least something like the Arc B580 GPUs were a step in the right direction - competent and not horribly overpriced (at least when it came to MSRP, unfortunately the merchants were scumbags and often ignored it).
Neutral
> Sure we don't play the most abusively unoptimized AAA games like RDR2. Wait, RDR2 is badly optimized? When I played it on my Intel Arc B580 and Ryzen 7 5800X, it seemed to work pretty well! Way better than almost any UE5 title, like The Forever Winter (really cool concept, but couldn't get past 20-30 FPS, even dropping down to 10% render scale on a 1080p monitor). Or with the Borderlands 4 controversy, I thought there'd be way bigger fish to fry.
Doesn’t like it
> I also double-checked if the CPU temperature of about 100 degrees celsius is too high, but no: this Tom’s Hardware article shows even higher temperatures, and Intel specifies a maximum of 110 degrees. So, running at “only” 100 degrees for a few hours should be fine. I'd say that even crashing at max temperatures is still completely unreasonable! You should be able to run at 100C or whatever the max temperature is for a week non-stop if you well damn please. If you can't, then the value has been chosen wrong by the manufacturers. If the CPU can't handle that, the clock rates should just be dialed back accordingly to maintain stability. It's odd to hear about Core Ultra CPUs failing like that, though - I thought that they were supposed to be more power efficient than the 13th and 14th gen, all while not having their stability issues. That said, I currently have a Ryzen 7 5800X, OCed with PBO to hit 5 GHz with negative CO offsets per core set. There's also an AIO with two fans and the side panel is off because the case I have is horrible. While gaming the temps usually don't reach past like 82C but Prime95 or anything else that's computationally intensive can make the CPU hit and flatten out at 90C. So odd to have modern desktop class CPUs still bump into thermal limits like that. That's with a pretty decent ambient temperature between 21C to 26C (summer).
Neutral
Just because it doesn't match your situation, doesn't make it a silly argument. Even though I haven't compiled a Linux kernel for over a decade, I still waste a lot of time compiling. On average, each week I have 5-6 half hour compiles, mostly when I'm forced to change base header files in a massive project. This is CPU bound for sure - I'm typically using just over half my 64GB RAM and my development drives are on RAIDed NVMe. I'm still on a Ryzen 7 5800X, because that's what my client specified they wanted me to use 3.5 years ago. Even upgrading to (already 3 years old) 5950X would be a drop-in replacement and double the core count so I'd expect about double the performance (although maybe not quite, as there my be increased memory contention). At current prices for that CPU, that upgrade would pay for itself in terms within 1-2 weeks. The reason I don't upgrade is policy - my client specified this exact CPU so that my development environment matches their standard setup. The build farm argument makes sense in an office environment where the majority of developer machines are mostly idle most of the time. It's completely unsuitable for remote working situations where each developer has a single machine and latency and bandwidth to shared resource is slow.
Likes it
I had both an A580 (not an A770, but at least something from that generation) and then later a B580, at one point even both in the same computer, side by side, when I wanted to use one for games and the other for encoding: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/what-is-ruining-dual-gpu-setups https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/more-pc-shenanigans-my-setup-un... https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/two-intel-arc-gpus-in-one-pc-wo... When paired with a worse CPU like a Ryzen 5 4500, the experience won't always be good (despite no monitoring software actually showing that the CPU is a bottleneck). When paired with a better CPU (I got a Ryzen 7 5800X to replace it, eventually with an AIO cause the temperatures were too high under full load anyways), either of them are pretty okay. In a single GPU setup either of them run most games okay, not that many compatibility or stability issues, even in older indie titles, though I've had some like STALCRAFT: X complain about running on an integrated GPU (Intel being detected as such). Most software also works, unless you want to run LLMs locally, where Nvidia will have more of an advantage and you'd go off the beaten path. Most annoying I've had were some stability issues near the launch of each card, for example running the B580 with their Boost functionality on in their graphics software sometimes crashed in Delta Force, no longer seems to be an issue. Temperature and power draw seem fine. Their XeSS upscaling is actually really good (I use it on top of…
Neutral
Yes and no. I have been developing some local llama 3 inference software on a machine with 3200MT/s ECC RAM and a Ryzen 7 5800X: https://github.com/ryao/llama3.c My experience is that input processing (prompt processing) is compute bottlenecked in GEMM. AVX-512 would help there, although my CPU’s Zen 3 cores do not support it and the memory bandwidth does not matter very much. For output generation (token generation), memory bandwidth is a bottleneck and AVX-512 would not help at all.
Doesn’t like it
For a 13B model, depending on what quantization you choose, you’re going to need a system with at least 16GB RAM, and even my AMD Ryzen 7 5800X at full throttle feels a bit sluggish on 7B Llama - a Raspberry Pi or similar would be painful. Here is the best explanation I’ve found so far, covering various trade-offs and scenarios: https://www.hardware-corner.net/guides/computer-to-run-llama... In your shoes, not being in the position to spend much right now, I’d try a few different 7B models at 4 and 5 bit quantizations on the Mac, which is going to be better than just about any other 8GB RAM system, and look into using cloud for larger stuff (remember to fully deallocate the VM when done for the day!)
Neutral
I have a 5800x and an RX 6800 XT - definitely not a low-end system - and this is the worst performance I've had in a game. I have a 4K display and use FSR2 with 50% (!!) render scale in order to maintain as close to 60 FPS as possible. All that for a game that looks pretty okay, with uncanny valley NPCs, awkward (awful?) animations, and fine I guess graphics overall. It doesn't look like 'Creation Engine 2' levels of quality, it looks like a well-done Skyrim mod. It looks as impressive as the HD mod packs I've tried for Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim, but it runs far worse. It's not an apples to apples comparison, but Baldur's Gate 3's level of detail in texturing, character design, and animations was mind-blowing; Starfield has a mid-range level of detail and very clearly didn't bother with any sort of motion capture (and the voice acting for a lot of NPCs is mediocre as well).
Neutral
I just tried this on the 7B model. Steady state single threaded CPU performance of 23 seconds/token on a Ryzen 5800x (I'm not sure why it's only using a single thread... usually these libraries automatically use more) and 14GB of ram. It used more than double that amount of ram while loading the model, and the first token took 183 seconds (potentially it's doing more work to parse the prompt that I'm not measuring properly).
Likes it
I'm on a 5800X with a 3080ti and 64GB, also PCIe 4.0 SSDs. I built in in 2019 then upgraded the CPU a year ago from a 3600x to the 5800x and it's so insanely fast for everything I do, including VMs, compiles, transcodes, etc. Nutty performance. The past few years have had amazing performance boosts.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
You're wrong here. This is top-of-the line enthusiast CPU. They always have costed around 1k$, see e. g. Intel Core i9 Xtreme lineup (the chips with 'X' designation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i9_processo... ). You can have absolutely fine 8c16t CPU which will handle anything you can possibly throw at it for 230$ from Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-5800X-16-Thread-Processor/d... ).