I RMA's 3 Raptors. First one I ran stock. 2nd and 3rd at really conservative settings and they still started to degrade. By "started to degrade" I mean after a few months they wouldn't run the frequencies/voltages they were running in a stable manner. I remember I was giving Topaz tech support all kinds of hell because Photo AI was suddenly locking up my system, which I thought was due to one of their updates. They kept telling me to check my system stability and I was telling them I'm 100% certain I was stable. Then I backed my frequency down to 4GHz and all of the problems went away. I sheepishly went back and told them they were right. Topaz Video AI is a good application to test stability by the way. Once I figured this out I proceeded to get the RMA going on my third and last Raptor Lake CPU and seriously started to consider a Zen 5 rig...
I never ran them over 5.5GHz and never overclocked or ran over 85C. I could have increased voltage to maintain performance and maybe they would have "stabilized." Or maybe not. I didn't want to find out. After three strikes I retired the Raptor train and moved to a 9950X. Just running stock and no issues, no fiddling with the BIOS, load lines, and endless tweaking to hopefully find a configuration that will last under high stress rendering and other stuff I do a lot of. While I don't overclock I am "hard" on CPU's I think. I'll be rendering out a video in Vegas Pro while running PureRaw to process photos while at the same time processing them with Photoshop, running a tv stream in the background, and flipping through websites all at the same time. I expect my computer to be responsive and stable the entire time. I work in a very "bursty" manner. When I sit down, it's "go" time and I don't want to work around my computer. I want IT to work around me.
Perhaps I got bad samples or just wasn't good at set up or didn't have good enough cooling, could be on me. I'm about 5 months on the 9950X and so far so good, performance is better and I've spent literally zero time tweaking. I think I increased TDP, decreased TDP, and then settled on stock. AMD seems to have found the sweet spot so I'll stick with it.
It seems like all of the "fixes" for Raptor and the like are not silicon fixes but more tweaks to the BIOS. After my experience I am wary especially when there is such a well-performing and cost effective alternative available. I am a fan of CPU's. I don't care who makes them. It took me A LOT to give AMD a try after literally lifetime of Intel Only Inside for me. Part of me was supporting Intel because I don't want them to fail. I want them to succeed... and I want AMD to succeed as well. But eventually I was wasting too much time investigating, tweaking, and trying to figure things out. In the beginning it was fun but it became a chore.
Seems like Arrow Lake isn't having the same issues and performs very well in a lot of the apps I use though. I'll take a good look at both AMD and Intel when it's time to upgrade again. I am still under the impression that there is nothing inherently wrong with Raptor Lake silicon, Intel just got too aggressive with boosting frequencies and they are having a hard time walking it back due to the published specs, which they obviously don't want to revise so they are dancing all around trying to maintain the specs in theory but not in practice. That is my theory anyway.