fx 5950 nightmare chip

Just finished doing some work on a friends PC.

Came to me with freezing up symptons, so boot into windows and mouse freezes up, complete system lock, typically happening within 30 secs of desktop appearing.

Long story short, CPU degradation made a requirement to bump the vcore to stop the freezes, the vendor who built the rig had agressively set the vcore as low as possible, and now I know why, here cometh second problem.

After raising the vcore the system would randomly power off at post, and also in windows, it turns out raising the vcore is creating power delivery problems, a component somewhere, whether its on the motherboard or PSU is not able to deliver what the 5950 now wants for stability at its max stock clocks.

A pretty bad chip made by AMD in their dark era out of desperation to compete with intel, massive 220 watt TDP chip combined with a low thermal limit of 61C, which when hit also causes a system shutdown. Only 3 or 4 boards it seems were only ever made capable of powering the chip.

Right now the vcore is a bit lower than what was set for 4.7ghz (yes that its stock speed, really high to compensate for bad IPC), the chip is underclocked to 4ghz to allow that vcore to be stable, and I also disabled the 7th and 8th cores to keep temps under control alongside power draw, I expect the cooler also isnt in tip top condition either.

This machine is only 2 years old, using top end parts, sabertooth 2 board from asus, 5950 top of line FX chip from AMD, 750 watt corsair branded psu. But degraded to instability within 2 years due to the stress that chip caused on the parts.

Will suggest he sells this to replace with either intel or ryzen. I didnt swap out the PSU (yet) to see if the PSU has degraded to prevent it handing the higher vcore or if its a motherboard power phase delivery problem.

Do you mean the Vishera FX9590?

yeah thats the one, looks like a chip AMD made out of desperation to try and reduce the per core performance gap.

My friend is buying my haswell parts of me, decided to sell to him. So he will get a reasonable pc as well, the cooling on this 9590 is like a hoover, but it has to be I guess with the max 61C ceiling.

There is stories of people buying this chip, then replacing it with a lower FX purely because they couldnt get it stable due to power delivery and thermal limits.

will send a mod request to fix the title.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 15-Feb-18 14:02:43)