Back in 2017, I build a PC with an i5 6600k. I paired it with an AMD R9 390, my first AMD GPU. I was done with Nvidia for a number of reasons. Mind you I was still on Windows at this point.

It worked, but it was never super stable. I contended with crashes, some of which completely corrupted the GPU drivers and required a clean reinstallation.

Partly because I wanted more performance for VR and demanding games, and partly because I wanted to fix the instability, I upgraded to a Vega64, which were nice and cheap at the time. Again, it worked, but was never super stable. I put the R9 390 in my son's PC which had an i5 6400. Also not very stable there. I was beginning to detect a pattern.

Later, I upgraded to a Ryzen 3700x and paired it with an RX 5700xt, which I'm using today. Rock solid under Windows, and now I've switched to Linux where it's nothing short of awesome. I put that Vega64 in to my son's PC. Extremely unstable. I went so far as to get him a 5500xt, which was better, but still unstable.

The wife had a prebuilt Asus desktop that was stupid to upgrade. I got her a new motherboard and case, and used the CPU from the Asus machine, another i5 6400. For a time, I put an old 650ti in there, and it was fine for her purposes for a long time. She eventually wanted an upgrade though, so I got her a 1050ti, which was a nice improvement for her. No issues.

To troubleshoot my son's instability, I tried trading my wife's 1050ti with my son's 5500xt. My son, now with the i5 and 1050ti under Linux was absolutely perfectly rock solid. The wife, with an i5 and the 5500xt started getting instability and crashes. Hmm...

Upgraded my son to a Ryzen 3 3300x. On a whim we tried the old Vega64 that had been put away. Running Kubuntu. Absolutely perfect, rock solid stability and performance! Yanked out the 5500xt from the wife's Ubuntu Budgie machine and put the 1050ti back. Now hers is running just fine.

All this leads me to believe that there are issues between the old 6th gen intel CPUs and AMD GPUs. I'm willing to bet that R9 390 is also probably fine as long as it's paired with a Ryzen CPU.

Can anyone else confirm this suspicion for me? Not that it matters at this point, since the only 6th gen i5 left in this house is the wife's paired with a 1050ti. If prices ever become sane again, I'll probably upgrade her to a Ryzen and give her my 5700xt while I upgrade to a 6000 series GPU. Or more like give my son the 5700xt, and give the wife the Vega64. My kid plays far more demanding games than she does.