So whats the deal with AMD support for unraid?

Back in 2021 i decided that my older Xeon setup sourced from ebay was no longer up to snuff. it was very reliable, but it was starting to show its age and a real power hog. I treated myself to a brand new AMD system built around the 24T 5900X which would give me modern hardware for the services i want to run reliably and perform well, as well have room to space for my hobby homelab. Everything went smooth and it was great.

In March/April of 2025 i started seeing random crashes and reboots on a regular basis. it started slow like maybe once a week with complete reboots i would log in and see that its doing unexpected parity check. then in the following days i noticed services would be unavailable and i wouldnt be able to terminal in because the server is frozen. the logs never showed anything of value (i'd tail syslog to cache drive so it wouldnt be lost on reboot). 2-3wks went by where the server was down more than up, mostly because i have a demanding full time job and this shit is supposed to be a hobby for me, not a second job...

I started reading how so many people had issues with AMD, but then also so many had no problems, including myself for the last several years. So I memtested ram for days, eventually replaced ram, motherboards, flash drives, hard drives (lol, i know, desperate), everything...except the CPU. i wasnt prepared to spend money to just replace for the same 4yr old CPU especially if there was any truth to an AMD curse. I did test the CPU (and the original build components) on a windows install and no problems whatsoever. but, nothing helped my unraid install. i was about to take the whole clusterfuck out back behind the barn when as if by magic things started staying up. one hour became a day became a week and before you knew it i was months removed from the nightmare.

Then this past Thursday i notice ads while browsing and wouldnt you know it the server is down. instant flashbacks, but okay, this isnt server grade hardware so isolated problems every few months are acceptable i guess. Except it immediately showed those same symptoms from before. it would stay up for 10-15mins before crashing or randomly rebooting. sometimes getting stuck during the linux boot process. By Saturday morning i still couldnt resolve it and fed up i decided to pay my way out of the headache and just bought intel parts. by noon on Saturday i had it up and running on the intel parts as if nothing had ever happened.

i realize the irony that this was the same experience i had when migrating from Xeon to the AMD system so i guess time will tell, but i have not seen anywhere near the amount of problems reported for people running unraid on intel systems. so whats going on, am i just unlucky and jaded or is there some unspoken truth to unraid not playing as well with AMD as Intel? love to hear some thoughts here.

The AMD system i am currently writing this post from, but with a windows install. if all goes well here for the next few days i will simply sell these parts with a disclaimer in order to try recoup some of the migration cost.

Make sure this has been taken care of:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/46802-faq-for-unraid-v6/page/2/#findComment-819173

8 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Make sure this has been taken care of:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/46802-faq-for-unraid-v6/page/2/#findComment-819173

Yeah all this was part of the troubleshooting phase. Voltage is hard to say whether i ever got that right or not because there are no specific parameters to hit. The point really was that none of this should be necessary just like it isn't with Intel, or many other linux distros running on AMD. I get there is nuance, edge cases, etc. and a smarter more motivated nerd than myself might have gotten to the bottom of things, but i couldnt justify the additional time that was needed for my specific AMD platform.

I have run several AMD CPUs with Unraid for the past 5 years. Starting with my main server in 2020, it started with a 1500X, then 2600 and now a 5700G. Build a second server with a 5600GT for mostly backup duty but also runs Frigate.

My experience with AMD processors has been issue free, except for intermittent system freezes when I first built my initial server on 2020, This was with the first generation 1500X. This was resolved with the BIOS setting typical current idle, which I now make sure I set on any Ryzen build. The issue this addresses generally only affects 1st gen Ryzen (and possibly some 2nd gen) but there is little reason not to use this setting, unless you in a "how low power can you go" contest.

The Ryzen memory controller (Infinity Fabric) can be a little finicky. I use G.Skill Ripjaws V (F4-3200C16D-32GVK) in my builds. Don't get caught up in the industry's XMP marketing - run at the memory's JEDEC setting that corresponds with the tables in the Ryzen FAQ. If in doubt if your DRAM is Single or Dual Bank, choose the Dual setting. Unless you perform frequent CPU computational tasks, you won't notice the speed difference.