I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D

Summary

Table of contents The Intel 285K CPU in my high-end 2025 Linux PC died again! 😡 Notably, this was the replacement CPU for the original 285K that died in March, and after reading through the reviews of Intel CPUs on my electronics store of choice, many of which (!) mention CPU replacements, I am getting the impression that Intel’s current CPUs just are not stable 😞. Therefore, I am giving up on Intel for the coming years and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D CPU instead. What happened? Or: the batch job of death On the 9th of July, I set out to experiment with layout-parser and tesseract in order to convert a collection of scanned paper documents from images into text. I expected that offloading this task to the GPU would result in a drastic speed-up, so I attempted to build layout-parser with CUDA. Usually, it’s not required to compile software yourself on NixOS, but CUDA is non-free, so the default NixOS cache does not compile software with CUDA. (Tip: Enable the Nix Community Cache, which contains prebuilt CUDA packages, too!) This lengthy compilation attempt failed with a weird symptom: I left for work, and after a while, my PC was no longer reachable over the network, but fans kept spinning at 100%! 😳 At first, I suspected a Linux bug, but now I am thinking this was the first sign of the CPU being unreliable. When the CUDA build failed, I ran the batch job without GPU offloading instead. It took about 4 hours and consumed roughly 300W constantly. You can see it on this CPU usage graph: On the evening of the 9th, the computer still seemed to work fine. But the next day, when I wanted to wake up my PC from suspend-to-RAM as usual, it wouldn’t wake up. Worse, even after removing the power cord and waiting a few seconds, there was no reaction to pressing the power button. Later, I diagnosed the problem to either the mainboard and/or the CPU. The Power Supply, RAM and disk all work with different hardware. I ended up returning both the CPU and the mainboard, as I coul...