The Am5 Platform: A Journey of Discovery and Growth

As I delved into the world of building a new system, I found myself at the mercy of AMD's latest creation, the Am5 platform. With its cutting-edge architecture and features, it promised to deliver unparalleled performance and power. But, as I soon discovered, it came with its own set of quirks and challenges.

One of the first issues I encountered was a mysterious pause on Qcode 15. It seemed like my system had hit a roadblock, refusing to post until I could figure out what was causing the problem. I knew that this code indicated an issue with the memory timings, but I wasn't sure how to resolve it. It wasn't until I dug deeper into the BIOS settings and discovered that the platform was constantly adjusting its timing settings that I began to understand what was happening.

It turned out that the Am5 platform is designed to fine-tune its memory timings on each boot, starting with relatively tight settings and gradually loosening them until it can find a sweet spot that allows for optimal performance. This process was similar to how older generations of DDR4 and DDR5 systems handled timing adjustments, but with the added benefit of AMD's latest technology.

I couldn't help but feel a sense of trepidation as I watched my system struggle to come to terms with its new settings. Would it ever reach its full potential, or would it remain stuck in a loop of poor performance? But, as it turned out, this was just the initial stage of a learning curve.

As I continued to experiment with different settings and configurations, I began to notice improvements in my system's performance. The Am5 platform seemed to be doing an intelligent job of optimizing its memory timings, even if it took some time to get there. And, as I delved deeper into the world of Windows, I realized that this was not just a minor quirk – but rather a reflection of the platform's overall design.

The 12th Gen Ryzen architecture, for example, had left me with mixed feelings in the past. While it had delivered impressive performance and power, it had also been marred by quirks and bugs that had driven me to distraction. But, as I began to explore the latest features and improvements, I realized that this was all part of a larger trend – one that saw AMD pushing the boundaries of what was possible with its processors.

One of the most significant advantages of the Am5 platform is its ability to deliver smooth and snappy performance, even in the face of demanding workloads. I found myself struggling to find fault with my system's responsiveness, whether I was browsing the web, gaming, or working on complex tasks. It was as if the platform had been optimized for the latest version of Windows, and was delivering results that exceeded my expectations.

And, as I continued to explore the capabilities of the Am5 platform, I realized that it was not just about raw performance – but also about the overall user experience. The addition of features like AMD Expo, which allows users to fine-tune their memory timings with ease, had made a significant difference in my system's stability and reliability.

In the end, building a new system on the Am5 platform proved to be a journey of discovery and growth. While it came with its challenges and quirks, I emerged from the experience with a deeper understanding of what makes this platform tick – and a newfound appreciation for the capabilities that it has to offer.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the very first video of the Fall Gauntlet that is coming your way when it comes to product launches I'm of course talking about amd's 7000 series Zen 4 architecture CPUs can't you tell Just Launch over your inbox you look at your sub feed it's gonna probably be a Zen 4 craziness everywhere but why not Starkey bring your setup to the next level with cable mods all new custom coiled keyboard cables available in a variety of colors and connector types utilizing best-in-class connectors the keyboard cables give your setup a look and feel it deserves to see the complete lineup of custom keyboard cables available from cable mod click the link in the description below all right so today we are taking a look at the 7950x amd's New Zen 4 Flagship CPU on mainstream is still still waiting on any of the breadboard stuff to make it right here but mainstream top of the line Top Dog CPU and we are comparing it to Intel's Top Dog currently at 12 900k and the reason why we're doing that is 13th gen isn't out yet I can't compare it to something that's not out or rumors so when 13th gen launches we'll be comparing it obviously to these results but there's a few things I want to talk about we'll talk about the mounting mechanism I'll talk about coolers we'll talk about the ram the ram timings and training and all that the motherboards and then obviously the benchmarks and stuff so we'll get started here by sort of just saying this is obviously uh amd's zenfor architecture 7950x Top Dog 16 cores 32 threads full size P cores no e-cores or anything like that just 16 cores that have simultaneous multi-threading that can go balls to the wall up to 5.7 gigahertz and yes we were indeed seeing 5.7 plus gigahertz just like anything else there's an algorithm that basically says if temperature is X and power limit is not Max then push harder and that's a neat thing to have because it's Auto overclocking you don't have to do it yourself so yes we were absolutely seeing 5.7 gigahertz on every single one of the cores not all core means every one of the cores was able to hit 5.7 when it comes to trading off that workload whereas Intel on the other hand just like the previous version of AMD whereas only the like two best identified cores per CCX would take that high workload of the max core clock max turbo clock Intel uh during our test was only handing it off to two different cores core six and core 7 which is exactly how the uh the max turbo velocity booster is expected to work it identifies the two best cores and that's it whereas every single core on this guy was able to hit well that guy he's not in the Box more was able to hit 5.7 gigahertz which was just nuts um I want to talk about General use what it felt like using the system but first uh we'll we'll show you the guys the benchmarks and then we'll get into the nitty-gritty but don't click off after the benchmarks there's some stuff I want to make you guys aware of on how zen4 kind of works some of the nuances and things you need to know if you are considering jumping on to amd's new platform here's the way a 700 AMD CPU compares to a 590 Intel CPU Harry Potter thank you foreign this box and calling it for 12 900k it's just because I guess this is almost like a size representation of the two CPUs in terms of power uh yeah so okay you might have noticed a few things on those charts I know I don't have a 1200k CPU that's like in the box or anything they're all being used um okay let's talk about a few things here you might have noticed when it comes to the single core performance of cinebench R23 they were exactly the same now when I looked at that I tested it multiple times and did some sanity checks I was like wait a minute it's AMD 79 and that was the first test I ran by the way so that kind of gave me okay here we go what because I was confused oh wait wait this is 5.7 gigahertz and I verified by monitoring the cores and their utility their utilization and their temperatures and all that stuff while the test was running that they were indeed boosting the 5.7 like they're supposed to but they both got the exact same score so that tells me at 5.7 if this is scoring the same as the Intel at 5.1 again pretend this isn't though that means this is slower per clock that means instructions per clock or IPC is lower on this so I had to do some digging on this here's what we found out about cinebench R23 this time around but the architecture of Zen 4 it does not run R23 in a traditional ABX or a 512 instruction it actually runs a 256x2 or two simultaneous 256 threads which I think is happening per CCX simultaneously so the Intel actually was faster when we locked the clock speed at 5 gigahertz because when you test IPC you have to lock them at the same frequency one's allowed to boost higher that it's instructions per clock the clocks have to be the same so that's when I went wait a minute what happens if I lock it so I locked it and that was when it dropped all the way down to an 1806 putting over 200 points less single core than the 12900k but that's because of again the fact that it's running a 256 instruction times two versus a 512 so it's not as efficient at that particular task that's got to be some sort of a design trade-off on how the CCX is working with this particular family does that mean it's indicative of a um across the board slow down IPC no it depends is it running a 512 instruction bit or instruction set if it's not then it's a completely different story so if you look at geekbenches single core IPC locked at five gigahertz that tells a better story 1951 versus amd's 2026. so let me feel better going okay sanity test everything's kind of running the way it's supposed to but again you might not if you didn't understand the way the instruction sets were running then you think something's really weird to send a bench because I got the exact same score I initially thought there was some sort of a weird cap like are these so fast and the bench can't handle faster but that's not how it works so but when it comes to multi-threading I mean it's a it's a bloodbath over 38 000 on the AMD versus 27 000. and some change on the Intel so I mean we're talking 10 000 over 10 000 points different it's just nuts I remember when the 12th gen launch I was like oh my God I mean 50p you'd get you 27 000 that's nuts and then we'll be tested on like the 5900x and we'd get like 20 000 and then we tested out like 29 or the 5950x and we get like 22 000 I'm like oh my goodness that just shows how far the e-cores and P cores in 12th gen really stepped it up so that's when I started thinking to myself like what is AMD going to pull out of their hat to try and catch up and make up for that difference but not only did they do it this is like a tortoise and a hair story only amd's the tortoise and the hair that makes any sense it doesn't but I think you get the idea here it says if the tortoise was as fast as the hair all along and never took a nap whatever however the faceoff Fable goes we'll move on because I'm just making myself look stupider than I already do every day but I couldn't really like comprehend the advancement they had made with 7950x and Zen four until we compared it to Phil's threadripper now Phil is running as his editing station a threadripper 3970x so that's a Zen 2 architecture so we're two generations behind technically but it's a twice the chords 32 cores and 64 threads and a highly multi-threaded app like cinebench which will utilize all of them he scored a 43 029. and this scored like I said a 38 051 it is less than 5 000 points behind to put this into perspective this is twice the distance closer to threadripper than the 12th gen is to this so if this is 12th gen this is threadripper it's here that's it has twice the cores than this most of the reason for that is because again two generational architecture that maxes out at 4.0 gigahertz all core because again 32 cores that's a lot even though the Chip's like that big but moving on um what I thought was really interesting here is I mean no surprise just across the board just complete Domination by the CPU because of the fact that it's full 16 full-size cores now the ecore P core thing um and when it comes to the bottleneck test that's where we took I took the 39 or the 390 TI evgn EVGA for the win 3 card because I went how do I create a bottleneck test and the way you have to do this is you have to have the GPU rendering so many frames that it's the CPU that's processing those frames holding things up okay so we took Forza Horizon 5 1080p very low settings everything was as low as it could go which felt so backwards from a normal Benchmark routines but anyway what I like about Horizon is it gives you a CPU simulation average FPS a CPU render average FPS and a GPU average FPS so an Intel 363 on the CPU Sim on AMD 490 what this tells you is that if you're currently running a 39 DTI right now and you were for whatever reason running 1080p low setting actually you don't have to be running low settings I could do the same test at high settings and still see a performance difference because of the fact that the CPU is still holding it back so you want a CPU that's not bottlenecking your GPU because that leads to consistent frame times because the GPU is handling it the CP is waiting on the GPU that's the best case scenario the GPU is rendering something and then CPU takes time and then the GPS to wait on the CPU that's where stutters and weird things happen when it comes to bottlenecking I was not expecting that much of an uplift of over 70 FPS so that was mind-blowing let's talk about wattages the Intel Under full load was full all chord load was using 220 Watts package temperature or package wattage AMD was pulling 231. now that's a that's exactly where we expected it to be actually because that is the package limitation on that and one of the reasons why am5 is LGA and not PGA is because of the fact that and it's not professional Golf Association by the way if you're running anyway the reason why it's a land grid array and not a pin grid array is because of the fact that the package wattage limitations on am4 were so much lower than that what AMD essentially did was beef up the architecture and then lift the Headroom the max of how far temperatures were allowed to go and package wattage was allowed to draw when it comes to CPU mounting by the way to keep that wattage cool you can see here I actually have an old this is a Celsius s360 or whatever it's called c360 which is just a basic acetec designed 360 AIO and I am using the same bracket that has been around as long as am4 and in fact when it comes to brackets it comes with the hook style so it's going to work with any am4 cooler and I'm proving that by showing you one right here that was came with like we got in like 2017 or 2018 stuff like that and I kept it at 95c now let's talk about the 95c because I know a lot of people right now are like oh my God the AMD furnace is back I jumped on the phone and had a phone call with my AMD rep to go hey is this normal that's basically what I said was in cinebench that was the hottest cigar in terms of like the quickest all the tests hit 95c all of them except for the gaming test and I said that's odd why is it hitting 95c because what wasn't happening was thermal throttling it was still 5.1 gigahertz all core even at 95c and he said that's by Design now of course all TJ maxxs are by Design but on intel if you hit TJ Maxx your core clocks immediately drop because the way that it keeps it from going hotter is dropping core clocks because voltage and core clocks are directly tied on Intel now they aren't AMD as well however they're directly tied so if you hit TJ Maxx the way that the the motherboard and the CPU control itself is it goes crap slow down turn itself down because to turn down the water to turn down the voltage you have to turn on the clock speed with it they're tied that doesn't happen on A and B it went to 95c it stayed at 95c and it stayed at 5.1 now it will be fully investigating what happens with better cooler Solutions as we go into the overclocking portion of this review cycle and probably one of the next videos that I do but I mean I'm concerned that folks are going to look at this and just say oh it's just another heater you know because that was the 12th gen joke right you're gonna make jokes go for it have a field day I mean the memes are probably already happening but the cool thing was the fact that it didn't throttle because it was explained to me it is absolutely by design it could run at 95c all day every day 24 7 and have and will not degrade that's what I was told but the fact that it's only 11 Watts higher than the pretend 1200k because it's only 11 Watts higher and giving you that much and here's the crazy part if you actually compare performance per watt it's seven percent more efficient than 5000 series seven percent more efficient but up to a hundred percent more powerful depending on the workload I don't think we've seen this big of a jump yet from three to four is a bigger jump than we've seen from one to one point five to two to three it's exciting and that's why I basically wrote AMD back and I said hey I really need another one of these because for the first time since I tore apart my FX 8350 rig back in like I think it was 2013. I have been purely Intel systems at home ever since 3770k is what I had after that 47.90k Devil's Canyon after that than I had uh from there X platform x99 and x299 Intel extreme all the way up until the 10th gen that I'm currently running now my last CPU before the 10900k was actually a 10980x or XE but I ended up going back to mainstream for the first time from there and I built that 12th 12th gen system that I just never took home it's still sitting out there wrapped up in a bag from finishing that video because I went I know this is coming and I wanted to see will this CPU win me back personally we've been using AMD rigs at this at the studio here for five years my rig over there for work is currently at 12th gen because it was one of those things that I was daily driving going do I want to take this home I firmly believe the 7950x now is what's going in my home system but I have to wait to build it for myself because now we have to hope that the rdna side of AMD can bring the same hurt to Nvidia that I'm I it's doing currently to Intel I hope can continue to do with their 10 13th gen improvements I'm just really curious as to how Intel is going to respond because rumors are now saying it can clock higher than AMD which means it better be hitting six gigs and doing it without hitting 105c because that's the TJ Maxx on Intel a couple of things I want to mention here quick though if you're a new Builder and you're buying Zen four the AMD XPO Ram which is the specifically certified am5 ddr5 is slowly trickling out g-scale has some but when you boot the system for the first time or you make any sort of BIOS changes it goes through a series of memory timing trainings every system does that however this one here I want to point out it took a solid 10 reboots or so before I ever saw a biosplash screen on the first boot I was tempted to call my AMD rep and I was tempted to hit the power button or the clear CMOS and I went no Jay it's been a while since we've had to review any new hardware but you know how new systems go sometimes the boot Cycles take time what is essentially Happening Here on the on the am5 platform is you'll see that it'll pause on a q code 15 and that should be qco15 for Asus MSI ASRock gigabyte um and I don't know how many other manufacturers are currently out there but you'll see it pause on code 15 and then probably Loop 15 again no image loop loop loop so in my instance it looped about six times before the blue light on my monitor finally came on and said it sends the signal and then it booted again no no image and I went that's weird and then I got an ASRock text to pop up for like three frames and it went away I was like that's weird looped again and I went the frick is this thing doing then it restarted I got the ASRock logo for a little bit longer and it went away and I got the little cursor in the corner which tells me bios is loading and then it rebooted again and I went what the actual f is happening here then the next boot which was like boot 10. finally made it all the way to the BIOS it was explained to me that what's happening specifically with am5 is it's constantly adjusting on each one of those boots the timing so it starts with really tight timings and if it doesn't post it loosens and loosens and loosens and loosens a little bit till it can get the tightest timings at the ddr5 base which is 4 800 megahertz that it can post with giving you the best memory results based on the sticks and the way the voltage or the memory controller is interacting with those sticks see in the past with ddr5 and ddr4 and three you put the sticks in Boots to whatever the base numbers are the super loose timings and the slowest there's like 13 33 megahertz or 1066 megahertz on like DDR3 uh and then like ddr4 it was 2133 and then with ddr5 it's 4800 it would just boot up that with loose timings and just off you go until you enable XMP on Intel docp on ddr4 or now AMD Expo and ddr5 it's adjusting the timings to be as fast as possible then we enabled Expo it does the same thing so if you're a new Builder don't freak out it seems broken it scared me it's not it's doing the intelligent thing every subsequent boot after that will be normal speed it's just it's during that timing process if your system loses power long enough for the Caps to drain it'll do it again as well keep that in mind or if you clear the CMOS or update the BIOS or make any memory changes whatsoever to the scene to this platform so amd's 7000 series zenfor architecture as far as I'm concerned at the risk of being labeled at AMD Fanboy which would be quite the opposite from when I'm normally labeled in my opinion right now at this day and time is the best most refined platform you can personally build and I'm assuming the 7600 is going to be just as good and just multi-core threading or the multi-core performance will be lower but the snappiness the smoothness of Windows has never felt like it does today the best way to put it is to me it felt like a really like a much faster Intel system than an Intel system it's the best way to put it in the past ryzen systems have had weird quirks Windows would do something weird random error click on something that hesitates and comes up just randomly but the 12th gen and I thought to myself is this is this a placebo is this is this the honeymoon period came back to my 12th gen system started moving around on it again a clean OS you can tell there's a difference and it was confirmed to me by my rep that they've been hearing numerous times now from other reviewers that that's the case for them so that made me feel less like okay it's just a honeymoon Placebo there is really an oh like I'm telling you right now insta click you click on something that's instantly open on the OS I've never seen that and that was while I was installing updates downloading Steam games downloading the benchmarks uh I had like 17 tabs open at one point and you click a tab and it's just up it's instant you click the browser it's instantly open if you've been looking at building a new system I would highly highly recommend keeping the AMD am5 platform oh look obviously Intel's 13th gen is like a month away and we're gonna just do this all over again welcome to review season guys it's been two years of nothing but a bunch of bull crap the manufacturers are back and they are bringing some good stuff just need rdna3 to really put a railroad spike through Jensen's headthis is the very first video of the Fall Gauntlet that is coming your way when it comes to product launches I'm of course talking about amd's 7000 series Zen 4 architecture CPUs can't you tell Just Launch over your inbox you look at your sub feed it's gonna probably be a Zen 4 craziness everywhere but why not Starkey bring your setup to the next level with cable mods all new custom coiled keyboard cables available in a variety of colors and connector types utilizing best-in-class connectors the keyboard cables give your setup a look and feel it deserves to see the complete lineup of custom keyboard cables available from cable mod click the link in the description below all right so today we are taking a look at the 7950x amd's New Zen 4 Flagship CPU on mainstream is still still waiting on any of the breadboard stuff to make it right here but mainstream top of the line Top Dog CPU and we are comparing it to Intel's Top Dog currently at 12 900k and the reason why we're doing that is 13th gen isn't out yet I can't compare it to something that's not out or rumors so when 13th gen launches we'll be comparing it obviously to these results but there's a few things I want to talk about we'll talk about the mounting mechanism I'll talk about coolers we'll talk about the ram the ram timings and training and all that the motherboards and then obviously the benchmarks and stuff so we'll get started here by sort of just saying this is obviously uh amd's zenfor architecture 7950x Top Dog 16 cores 32 threads full size P cores no e-cores or anything like that just 16 cores that have simultaneous multi-threading that can go balls to the wall up to 5.7 gigahertz and yes we were indeed seeing 5.7 plus gigahertz just like anything else there's an algorithm that basically says if temperature is X and power limit is not Max then push harder and that's a neat thing to have because it's Auto overclocking you don't have to do it yourself so yes we were absolutely seeing 5.7 gigahertz on every single one of the cores not all core means every one of the cores was able to hit 5.7 when it comes to trading off that workload whereas Intel on the other hand just like the previous version of AMD whereas only the like two best identified cores per CCX would take that high workload of the max core clock max turbo clock Intel uh during our test was only handing it off to two different cores core six and core 7 which is exactly how the uh the max turbo velocity booster is expected to work it identifies the two best cores and that's it whereas every single core on this guy was able to hit well that guy he's not in the Box more was able to hit 5.7 gigahertz which was just nuts um I want to talk about General use what it felt like using the system but first uh we'll we'll show you the guys the benchmarks and then we'll get into the nitty-gritty but don't click off after the benchmarks there's some stuff I want to make you guys aware of on how zen4 kind of works some of the nuances and things you need to know if you are considering jumping on to amd's new platform here's the way a 700 AMD CPU compares to a 590 Intel CPU Harry Potter thank you foreign this box and calling it for 12 900k it's just because I guess this is almost like a size representation of the two CPUs in terms of power uh yeah so okay you might have noticed a few things on those charts I know I don't have a 1200k CPU that's like in the box or anything they're all being used um okay let's talk about a few things here you might have noticed when it comes to the single core performance of cinebench R23 they were exactly the same now when I looked at that I tested it multiple times and did some sanity checks I was like wait a minute it's AMD 79 and that was the first test I ran by the way so that kind of gave me okay here we go what because I was confused oh wait wait this is 5.7 gigahertz and I verified by monitoring the cores and their utility their utilization and their temperatures and all that stuff while the test was running that they were indeed boosting the 5.7 like they're supposed to but they both got the exact same score so that tells me at 5.7 if this is scoring the same as the Intel at 5.1 again pretend this isn't though that means this is slower per clock that means instructions per clock or IPC is lower on this so I had to do some digging on this here's what we found out about cinebench R23 this time around but the architecture of Zen 4 it does not run R23 in a traditional ABX or a 512 instruction it actually runs a 256x2 or two simultaneous 256 threads which I think is happening per CCX simultaneously so the Intel actually was faster when we locked the clock speed at 5 gigahertz because when you test IPC you have to lock them at the same frequency one's allowed to boost higher that it's instructions per clock the clocks have to be the same so that's when I went wait a minute what happens if I lock it so I locked it and that was when it dropped all the way down to an 1806 putting over 200 points less single core than the 12900k but that's because of again the fact that it's running a 256 instruction times two versus a 512 so it's not as efficient at that particular task that's got to be some sort of a design trade-off on how the CCX is working with this particular family does that mean it's indicative of a um across the board slow down IPC no it depends is it running a 512 instruction bit or instruction set if it's not then it's a completely different story so if you look at geekbenches single core IPC locked at five gigahertz that tells a better story 1951 versus amd's 2026. so let me feel better going okay sanity test everything's kind of running the way it's supposed to but again you might not if you didn't understand the way the instruction sets were running then you think something's really weird to send a bench because I got the exact same score I initially thought there was some sort of a weird cap like are these so fast and the bench can't handle faster but that's not how it works so but when it comes to multi-threading I mean it's a it's a bloodbath over 38 000 on the AMD versus 27 000. and some change on the Intel so I mean we're talking 10 000 over 10 000 points different it's just nuts I remember when the 12th gen launch I was like oh my God I mean 50p you'd get you 27 000 that's nuts and then we'll be tested on like the 5900x and we'd get like 20 000 and then we tested out like 29 or the 5950x and we get like 22 000 I'm like oh my goodness that just shows how far the e-cores and P cores in 12th gen really stepped it up so that's when I started thinking to myself like what is AMD going to pull out of their hat to try and catch up and make up for that difference but not only did they do it this is like a tortoise and a hair story only amd's the tortoise and the hair that makes any sense it doesn't but I think you get the idea here it says if the tortoise was as fast as the hair all along and never took a nap whatever however the faceoff Fable goes we'll move on because I'm just making myself look stupider than I already do every day but I couldn't really like comprehend the advancement they had made with 7950x and Zen four until we compared it to Phil's threadripper now Phil is running as his editing station a threadripper 3970x so that's a Zen 2 architecture so we're two generations behind technically but it's a twice the chords 32 cores and 64 threads and a highly multi-threaded app like cinebench which will utilize all of them he scored a 43 029. and this scored like I said a 38 051 it is less than 5 000 points behind to put this into perspective this is twice the distance closer to threadripper than the 12th gen is to this so if this is 12th gen this is threadripper it's here that's it has twice the cores than this most of the reason for that is because again two generational architecture that maxes out at 4.0 gigahertz all core because again 32 cores that's a lot even though the Chip's like that big but moving on um what I thought was really interesting here is I mean no surprise just across the board just complete Domination by the CPU because of the fact that it's full 16 full-size cores now the ecore P core thing um and when it comes to the bottleneck test that's where we took I took the 39 or the 390 TI evgn EVGA for the win 3 card because I went how do I create a bottleneck test and the way you have to do this is you have to have the GPU rendering so many frames that it's the CPU that's processing those frames holding things up okay so we took Forza Horizon 5 1080p very low settings everything was as low as it could go which felt so backwards from a normal Benchmark routines but anyway what I like about Horizon is it gives you a CPU simulation average FPS a CPU render average FPS and a GPU average FPS so an Intel 363 on the CPU Sim on AMD 490 what this tells you is that if you're currently running a 39 DTI right now and you were for whatever reason running 1080p low setting actually you don't have to be running low settings I could do the same test at high settings and still see a performance difference because of the fact that the CPU is still holding it back so you want a CPU that's not bottlenecking your GPU because that leads to consistent frame times because the GPU is handling it the CP is waiting on the GPU that's the best case scenario the GPU is rendering something and then CPU takes time and then the GPS to wait on the CPU that's where stutters and weird things happen when it comes to bottlenecking I was not expecting that much of an uplift of over 70 FPS so that was mind-blowing let's talk about wattages the Intel Under full load was full all chord load was using 220 Watts package temperature or package wattage AMD was pulling 231. now that's a that's exactly where we expected it to be actually because that is the package limitation on that and one of the reasons why am5 is LGA and not PGA is because of the fact that and it's not professional Golf Association by the way if you're running anyway the reason why it's a land grid array and not a pin grid array is because of the fact that the package wattage limitations on am4 were so much lower than that what AMD essentially did was beef up the architecture and then lift the Headroom the max of how far temperatures were allowed to go and package wattage was allowed to draw when it comes to CPU mounting by the way to keep that wattage cool you can see here I actually have an old this is a Celsius s360 or whatever it's called c360 which is just a basic acetec designed 360 AIO and I am using the same bracket that has been around as long as am4 and in fact when it comes to brackets it comes with the hook style so it's going to work with any am4 cooler and I'm proving that by showing you one right here that was came with like we got in like 2017 or 2018 stuff like that and I kept it at 95c now let's talk about the 95c because I know a lot of people right now are like oh my God the AMD furnace is back I jumped on the phone and had a phone call with my AMD rep to go hey is this normal that's basically what I said was in cinebench that was the hottest cigar in terms of like the quickest all the tests hit 95c all of them except for the gaming test and I said that's odd why is it hitting 95c because what wasn't happening was thermal throttling it was still 5.1 gigahertz all core even at 95c and he said that's by Design now of course all TJ maxxs are by Design but on intel if you hit TJ Maxx your core clocks immediately drop because the way that it keeps it from going hotter is dropping core clocks because voltage and core clocks are directly tied on Intel now they aren't AMD as well however they're directly tied so if you hit TJ Maxx the way that the the motherboard and the CPU control itself is it goes crap slow down turn itself down because to turn down the water to turn down the voltage you have to turn on the clock speed with it they're tied that doesn't happen on A and B it went to 95c it stayed at 95c and it stayed at 5.1 now it will be fully investigating what happens with better cooler Solutions as we go into the overclocking portion of this review cycle and probably one of the next videos that I do but I mean I'm concerned that folks are going to look at this and just say oh it's just another heater you know because that was the 12th gen joke right you're gonna make jokes go for it have a field day I mean the memes are probably already happening but the cool thing was the fact that it didn't throttle because it was explained to me it is absolutely by design it could run at 95c all day every day 24 7 and have and will not degrade that's what I was told but the fact that it's only 11 Watts higher than the pretend 1200k because it's only 11 Watts higher and giving you that much and here's the crazy part if you actually compare performance per watt it's seven percent more efficient than 5000 series seven percent more efficient but up to a hundred percent more powerful depending on the workload I don't think we've seen this big of a jump yet from three to four is a bigger jump than we've seen from one to one point five to two to three it's exciting and that's why I basically wrote AMD back and I said hey I really need another one of these because for the first time since I tore apart my FX 8350 rig back in like I think it was 2013. I have been purely Intel systems at home ever since 3770k is what I had after that 47.90k Devil's Canyon after that than I had uh from there X platform x99 and x299 Intel extreme all the way up until the 10th gen that I'm currently running now my last CPU before the 10900k was actually a 10980x or XE but I ended up going back to mainstream for the first time from there and I built that 12th 12th gen system that I just never took home it's still sitting out there wrapped up in a bag from finishing that video because I went I know this is coming and I wanted to see will this CPU win me back personally we've been using AMD rigs at this at the studio here for five years my rig over there for work is currently at 12th gen because it was one of those things that I was daily driving going do I want to take this home I firmly believe the 7950x now is what's going in my home system but I have to wait to build it for myself because now we have to hope that the rdna side of AMD can bring the same hurt to Nvidia that I'm I it's doing currently to Intel I hope can continue to do with their 10 13th gen improvements I'm just really curious as to how Intel is going to respond because rumors are now saying it can clock higher than AMD which means it better be hitting six gigs and doing it without hitting 105c because that's the TJ Maxx on Intel a couple of things I want to mention here quick though if you're a new Builder and you're buying Zen four the AMD XPO Ram which is the specifically certified am5 ddr5 is slowly trickling out g-scale has some but when you boot the system for the first time or you make any sort of BIOS changes it goes through a series of memory timing trainings every system does that however this one here I want to point out it took a solid 10 reboots or so before I ever saw a biosplash screen on the first boot I was tempted to call my AMD rep and I was tempted to hit the power button or the clear CMOS and I went no Jay it's been a while since we've had to review any new hardware but you know how new systems go sometimes the boot Cycles take time what is essentially Happening Here on the on the am5 platform is you'll see that it'll pause on a q code 15 and that should be qco15 for Asus MSI ASRock gigabyte um and I don't know how many other manufacturers are currently out there but you'll see it pause on code 15 and then probably Loop 15 again no image loop loop loop so in my instance it looped about six times before the blue light on my monitor finally came on and said it sends the signal and then it booted again no no image and I went that's weird and then I got an ASRock text to pop up for like three frames and it went away I was like that's weird looped again and I went the frick is this thing doing then it restarted I got the ASRock logo for a little bit longer and it went away and I got the little cursor in the corner which tells me bios is loading and then it rebooted again and I went what the actual f is happening here then the next boot which was like boot 10. finally made it all the way to the BIOS it was explained to me that what's happening specifically with am5 is it's constantly adjusting on each one of those boots the timing so it starts with really tight timings and if it doesn't post it loosens and loosens and loosens and loosens a little bit till it can get the tightest timings at the ddr5 base which is 4 800 megahertz that it can post with giving you the best memory results based on the sticks and the way the voltage or the memory controller is interacting with those sticks see in the past with ddr5 and ddr4 and three you put the sticks in Boots to whatever the base numbers are the super loose timings and the slowest there's like 13 33 megahertz or 1066 megahertz on like DDR3 uh and then like ddr4 it was 2133 and then with ddr5 it's 4800 it would just boot up that with loose timings and just off you go until you enable XMP on Intel docp on ddr4 or now AMD Expo and ddr5 it's adjusting the timings to be as fast as possible then we enabled Expo it does the same thing so if you're a new Builder don't freak out it seems broken it scared me it's not it's doing the intelligent thing every subsequent boot after that will be normal speed it's just it's during that timing process if your system loses power long enough for the Caps to drain it'll do it again as well keep that in mind or if you clear the CMOS or update the BIOS or make any memory changes whatsoever to the scene to this platform so amd's 7000 series zenfor architecture as far as I'm concerned at the risk of being labeled at AMD Fanboy which would be quite the opposite from when I'm normally labeled in my opinion right now at this day and time is the best most refined platform you can personally build and I'm assuming the 7600 is going to be just as good and just multi-core threading or the multi-core performance will be lower but the snappiness the smoothness of Windows has never felt like it does today the best way to put it is to me it felt like a really like a much faster Intel system than an Intel system it's the best way to put it in the past ryzen systems have had weird quirks Windows would do something weird random error click on something that hesitates and comes up just randomly but the 12th gen and I thought to myself is this is this a placebo is this is this the honeymoon period came back to my 12th gen system started moving around on it again a clean OS you can tell there's a difference and it was confirmed to me by my rep that they've been hearing numerous times now from other reviewers that that's the case for them so that made me feel less like okay it's just a honeymoon Placebo there is really an oh like I'm telling you right now insta click you click on something that's instantly open on the OS I've never seen that and that was while I was installing updates downloading Steam games downloading the benchmarks uh I had like 17 tabs open at one point and you click a tab and it's just up it's instant you click the browser it's instantly open if you've been looking at building a new system I would highly highly recommend keeping the AMD am5 platform oh look obviously Intel's 13th gen is like a month away and we're gonna just do this all over again welcome to review season guys it's been two years of nothing but a bunch of bull crap the manufacturers are back and they are bringing some good stuff just need rdna3 to really put a railroad spike through Jensen's head\n"