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Cooling Cooling a Ryzen 5900X and Crappy Motherboard (Was: Cooling a Ryzen 9 9950X... on air?)

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Gareth Halfacree, 3 Apr 2025.

  1. yuusou

    yuusou Multimodder

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    I installed CachyOS the other day on my laptop. My first non-rpm-nor-deb distro! All fine and good, but it lacks the polish and support of deb and rpm based distros I'm used to (Fedora and Ubuntu). Downloaded Ubuntu 25.04. The new installer is great, ZFS encrypted with LUKS, gnome is much less finicky than KDE. Stuck with that.
     
  2. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Looks like -5 is the ticket:

    10:54:02 up 5 days, 20:39, 1 user, load average: 0.67, 0.80, 0.90

    (It's been suspended-to-RAM for a lot of that, but still. That's with stock clock settings and 3,600MHz RAM.)
     
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  3. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Nope!

    18:07:32 up 2 min, 1 user, load average: 2.47, 1.52, 0.61

    Six days, then poof: sudden hard reboot, while I was watching something on Crunchyroll.

    Set PBO to -2, which is my last stop before 0. Bleedin' thing.
     
  4. sandys

    sandys Multimodder

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    Perhaps forget the witchcraft of PBO and set a traditional fixed OC.
     
  5. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Nah, if I have to set PBO back to defaults I'm leaving well alone!
     
  6. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Had another crash, but not the usual symptoms: just completely frozen and unresponsive, no hard reboot. Physically rebooted, and the CPU fan went to full speed and stayed there - no BIOS, no post, no boot, no response to a long-press on the power button. Cut the power, turned it back on, booted up fine.

    Have turned PBO back to "auto." Quick benchmark shows around a 10% performance penalty (3m29s to process those PNGs, from 3m9s or so before.)

    Fingers crossed that's it, now; just stable from here on in.
     
  7. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    21:12:20 up 7 days, 7:29, 1 user, load average: 5.02, 1.76, 1.07

    First solid week with the new CPU! I guess either the chip or the motherboard or both just don't like running at anything other than stock.
     
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  8. Byron C

    Byron C I was told there would be cheesecake…?

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    Honestly, I’ve rarely been too bothered about under-volting my CPU, I just haven’t found a benefit in the workloads I run. But the most intensive workload I have is gaming, unlike the processing you’re doing here. Although it sounds like it’s not necessarily gaining you a massive difference in processing time either way.

    Under-volting my GPU, on the other hand, is something I’ve definitely found to be beneficial. Especially the 3070Ti I used to run, because boy… that thing dumps some serious heat in the case, and “flow-through” cooler designs mean that it passes all that heat straight to the CPU fan…
     
  9. Pete J

    Pete J Employed scum

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    Heh. Funnily enough, what you wrote for undervolting the GPU rings true for me undervolting my CPU. It was the difference between audible and inaudible fan noise when using the Cinebench benchmark.
     
  10. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Not much point messing with my GPU: it's an RTX 2080, from the era when flagship GPUs weren't monstrous things requiring a small nuclear reactor to power. It's a 280W TDP, 225W stock power target. I've had it down lower before, but 99% of the time I'm using the PC the GPU's ticking away at... ~6W, according to Green With Envy.
     
  11. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    I forgot to celebrate two weeks, so here's to 15 days:

    Code:
     _________________________________________
    / 17:23:14 up 15 days, 3:39, 1 user, load \
    \ average: 0.43, 0.59, 0.87               /
     -----------------------------------------
            \   ^__^
             \  (oo)\_______
                (__)\       )\/\
                    ||----w |
                    ||     ||
    
     
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  12. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Ta-da!

    neofetch.png

    EDIT:
    Amusingly, it popped up a dialogue to inform me that 24.04 was available and did I want to upgrade to it... while it was still in the process of upgrading me to 22.04(!)
     
    Last edited: 24 May 2025
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  13. yuusou

    yuusou Multimodder

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    I've been running 25.04 (not LTS as you know) on my laptop and it's really noice. Surprisingly polished for a non-LTS release.
     
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  14. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Had some glitches since upgrading: DOSBox was briefly freezing at odd times - like, fine while playing Quake or something but everything grinding to a halt for ten seconds or so while loading a web page - and file dialogues were slow to appear. Oh, and it'd only get about halfway through a SMART short test before reporting it as aborted.

    Traced the problem to the spinning-rust drive, which was parking the heads and going to sleep... after fifteen seconds of inactivity.

    Okay, weird, but whatever. Let's turn APM off. oh, APM not supported on an IronWolf. Okay, why? Ah, Seagate has its own thing, EPC, which requires a specific tool, because of course it does. Fine, set those timeouts... Nope. Okay, disable EPC altogether. Nope, still sleeping after 15 seconds.

    Turns out that it's PowerTOP: for some reason having power management enabled on the SATA port, which I've always had enabled, is the culprit. Turn that off and the drive's behaving - and no more weird freezes as something waits for it to wake back up again. (And no massive amounts of head unload/load cycle wearing on the drive!)

    Weird stuff. What kind of default sleep timer gets set at 15 seconds?!
     
  15. sandys

    sandys Multimodder

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    The joys of software updates.
     
  16. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Yeah, this is exactly why I stick with an LTS release until the clock runs out - that, and the fact that every upgrade seems to bring with it another GNOME feature removal. (This time it's vertical workspaces, plus the old Firefox plugin for managing shell extensions doesn't work anymore - which I found while while trying to add an extension so I could have my vertical workspaces back...)
     
  17. yuusou

    yuusou Multimodder

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    The GNOME extension works on native Firefox, but not on the snap.

    You can switch to the native install using the Mozilla PPA with the following:
    Code:
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
    
    sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox.pref > /dev/null <<'EOF'
    # Prefer Mozilla Team PPA for Firefox
    Package: firefox*
    Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
    Pin-Priority: 1001
    
    # Prevent Ubuntu's Snap-based Firefox from being installed
    Package: firefox*
    Pin: release o=Ubuntu
    Pin-Priority: -1
    EOF
    
    Same goes for Thunderbird.

    I don't really like snaps, flatpaks, appimage, and am not too fond of containers either.
    The overhead these sandboxed environments create are pretty insane.
     
  18. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    I'm on native Firefox - and have been since you had to use a PPA on Launchpad for it, though now I'm using Mozilla's official apt repo. (And if you're still using the PPA, I'd switch - I was two major versions out of date before I realised!)

    It still doesn't work - says the connector is outdated. It doesn't really matter, as I've now got Extensions Manager (which is a separate thing to Extensions, which I already has installed) which works fine.

    Thanks, tho'!
     
  19. yuusou

    yuusou Multimodder

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    huh odd, the addon works fine on my work laptop with Fedora (company sanctioned linux), and I'm pretty sure it works on my personal laptop with Ubuntu 25.04 with the PPA.
    Thanks for the tip on the official repos, will do that on my personal laptop.

    EDIT: just tried both the PPA Firefox and the official repo Firefox on Ubuntu 25.04, gnome extensions addon works good. Mozilla don't include Thunderbird in their official apt repos, odd choice but whatever, so I've kept the ppa for it. Firefox version was the same for both. This is what my apt preferences looks like:
    Code:
    Package: *
    Pin: origin packages.mozilla.org
    Pin-Priority: 1001
    
    Package: *
    Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
    Pin-Priority: 1000
    
    Package: firefox*
    Pin: release o=Ubuntu
    Pin-Priority: -1
    
    Package: thunderbird*
    Pin: release o=Ubuntu
    Pin-Priority: -1
    
     
    Last edited: 29 May 2025
  20. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    That's because Thunderbird isn't a Mozilla project. Or, rather, it's not a Mozilla Corporation project.

    There's the Mozilla Foundation, which is the not-for-profit parent. Supposedly exists to promote an open web, recently sacked everyone in its promote-an-open-web division. Yeah. If you donate to "Mozilla," the money goes here.

    That owns the Mozilla Corporation, which is in control of Firefox. Money flows one way: from Corporation to Foundation. The Foundation isn't allowed to give the Corporation a single penny from donations to fund browser development - which is why the Corporation is crapping its pants about Google getting broken up, because the vast majority of its funding comes from Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox. (It's also why it keeps launching new services and is diving deep into AI crap: it's trying desperately to find a new revenue stream.)

    Thunderbird, meanwhile, is wholly owned and operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation - another Mozilla Foundation subsidiary, but one that's completely independent of Mozilla Corporation. It shares no staff and no resources. Yes, even though it's called "Mozilla Thunderbird" and not "MZLA Thunderbird."

    Confusing, right?!
     
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