Topic: AMD vs. Intel/Geforce (computer talk, yay!)

@RancidVomit86 Cool! I know what you mean, I think 2 is still too expensive for right now... The display should match what your system can handle, anyways. My R9 380x can support FreeSync 1, but I'm fine with my current 1080p/60 Hz screen I got from work until the time comes for a GPU upgrade...

Exactly! That's why I've been using AMD GPU's and CPU's for about a decade or so now. Even when were a bit behind their competitors, they still offered a better price/performance ratio and the difference was usually unnoticable anyway as you mentioned.

Going for the lastest and greatest is a bad strategy anyway in my opinion. It's all about timing, one should buy hardware when it offers the best price/performance ratio. I got my R9 290 more than three years ago for 200€ (second-hand, in a PC forum) when new ones cost around 300€. Later the prices even went up because of mining, I could probably still sell it without any losses. 😆
But why would I? It's still serving me well, I can play every game I want in high or ultra settings.
I actually thought about getting a new graphics card several times because of HBM, but everytime I looked up the prices it just didn't seem worth it.

hmm....should I got for a 4K monitor at some point? xD

@Joeynator3000 I would say to at least wait for HDR to become more common/cheaper before diving into 4K monitors... Unless you want a 4K TV display for XB1X/PS4Pro. 1080p/1440p 60-144 Hz/FPS is still where it's at for PC. Personally, I wouldn't go for 4K until qLED (quantum LED) panels are released.

@Joeynator3000 I personally just go for 1080p with the best frame rates I can get

Alright, just heard that 4k gaming is all the rage these days. lol

I haven't paid attention to cpu performance lately, especially i know nothing about the new Ryzen processors... but don't worry about pairing brands with your cpu and gpu.. just find out the best processor you can afford and if you're trying to find the best deal on a video card, you'll likely want to go AMD.

AMD cards are just as good as nvidia.. i am not biased, I've owned both and I've loved both, but AMD cards are generally priced more competitively which is why my last 3 cards have been AMD, because i always find the better deal.

I would suggest a glossy panel 1440p unless you want to pay out the ass for a nice 4k monitor plus top of the line pc and probably more frequently required video card upgrades.

A few things to add to this discussion. Firstly all those theories that somehow rattle around about one manufacturer being better for gaming than the other are BS. The same is true of the idea that somehow pairing an AMD CPU with an AMD GPU is somehow "better". Components are components, they do their own individual jobs. Your graphics card doesn't care whether the bits delivered over PCIe are Red or Blue it just cares about how fast they are pushed.

On the AMD vs Intel? Personally I was 100% behind AMD back in the early 2000s purely because they delivered. But they fell behind the curve. The only reason they're considered the "good value" option is because their chips have been relatively cheap, and they're been cheap because they're underwhelming. It has changed a bit in the last year or so but frankly at this stage for gaming any modern quad core or better will do the trick. Ryzen is an attractive option these days but I'd personally still get an i5 paired with a decent motherboard that has the I/O I want.

AMD vs Nvidia? It's a bit trickier. Generally NVidia has been the king in the same way that Intel is and generally the same applies. Although in the GPU market they have generally been a bit closer. Probably the major difference between the two is on power consumption. NVidia cards are generally quite a bit more power efficient which is a pretty big positive if you care about that sort of thing. It means quieter, cooler and potentially smaller machines. For that reason I'd personally buy an NVidia card if I was going GPU shopping today.

With all that said? Just go with whatever makes sense for what you want to do. My current gaming PC has an Intel CPU with an AMD GPU and my first gaming PC had an AMD CPU with an Nvidia GPU. The best option varies depending on what's currently on the market, what your budget is and what other features you want.

@skywake Intel CPU's being generally better for gaming isn't bs. Most Intel chips matched up against their AMD equivalent will outperform it on games but AMD chips mostly are the better performer for things like video rendering. There's plenty of YouTube videos showing this.

There's also the question of how effective will a quad core be over the next couple of years for gaming though. There is already some games that give more FPS on an Intel quad core but the CPU is under a much heavier load vs a Ryzen chip with 6-8 cores.

@RancidVomit86
It depends on the workload. Generally games, even the most multi-threaded ones, tend to lean on one of the cores harder than the others. Which is why Intel has had somewhat of an advantage recently with their higher single threaded performance. AMD's approach for a long time has been to throw more cores at the problem. And with Ryzen they've finally come out with the first chip in a while that's fast enough under single threaded loads to actually be competitive.

So yes, generally if you're spending about the same amount of money? An AMD chip as of today will probably perform better in multi-threaded workloads vs Intel which will perform better under single threaded loads. Things like video rendering is inherently parallelizable, games are not. But that doesn't change the fact that your application generally doesn't care what the brand of your hardware is. And in the vast, vast majority of cases you're not going to be CPU bottlenecked in games anyways. If we were CPU limited in games the XBOne X wouldn't have what is essentially a last generation mobile AMD CPU at its core.

@RancidVomit86 @skywake Intel were definitely offering better CPU's overall from 2007-2016. (Unless you're going for overclocking records, Vishera chips like FX 8350 are still usable today due to overclocking) Lots of people still use i7-2600K or i7-3770K even today 6+ years later, because still no absolute need to upgrade just yet. (Although next year, that will begin to change...) As of 2017 though, the Ryzen series forced Intel to adjust their strategy for 8th gen onwards. There's a good reason why Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake released within the same year. (Although Coffee Lake was mostly a paper launch, not unlike Vega, figure that out; 8th gen Core i CPU's are still back ordered in a lot of places to date)

The thing about i5's is, they were offering either among the best or the best price/performance value from their inception in 2009... However, as of 2017, the US$220 Ryzen 5 1600 bested their price/performance value in every way. In several different countries like the UK, it was even besting the i7-7700K for top selling CPU of the year. (Meanwhile, #2 on Amazon USA behind the i7-7700K)

Intel countered this with the $190 i5-8400, which was briefly the cheapest hexa-core, but AMD has since dropped the price of the R5 1600 to $190-200, which completely rains on the i5-8400's parade. With 6 less threads and only a base clock of 2.8 GHz, with a requirement to buy a $100+ motherboard (if discounted from $120+) to actually keep more than 1 core above stock clock for more than a minute due to reliance on more expensive VRM's, not to mention needing to buy an aftermarket cooler to actually clock up to 4GHz, the i5-8400 is simply a worse value than the R5 1600.

By contrast, the R5 1600 can go from it's stock 3.2 GHz up to 3.8 GHz on 1 core and up to 3.4 GHz on the other 5 cores using it's stock cooler and no voltage changes, has no trouble with sub-$100 motherboards, and runs cooler than the current i5's when a similar level of cooling is applied, because Intel is now using cheap TIM instead of decent solder. (The R5 1600X also got price dropped to $220, which allows the $30 discount to go towards an aftermarket cooler, but that's still not quite as good upfront value as the R5 1600.)

The $260 i5-8600K is a better performer in several ways over the i5-8400, but the Ryzen 5 2600/X is going to be released in April for $220/$250, which will most likely once again offer better price/performance, even for the X variety. (Even with a 4.3 GHz boost range on the i5-8600K, the 2600/X will likely go up to 4.1/4.2 GHz; +100-200 MHz on single core isn't going to overcome the value of 6 additional threads. And while they both only have an IPC gain over the previous generation of about 5% tops, Ryzen chips benefit more from faster RAM.)

In the quad-core range, the $110 i3-8100 and $180 i3-8350K are about to receive major competition from the $100 R3 2200G and $170 R5 2400G in 10 days, and the $330 i7-8700 non-K runs into the same VRM limiting issues as the i5-8400, basically leaving the $390 i7-8700K as the only really standout exceptional Intel CPU choice for the average consumer. (Except for the ~$80 dual core Pentium G4560, although R3 2200G could end up usurping it for super low budget builds)

So... yeah, I'd say Intel lost on the value proposition this round. They mostly only come out somewhat ahead in raw gaming performance, which at this point can often make virtually no practical difference over the AMD competition. (Except for the nearly $400 i7-8700K...) They'll have to pick themselves back up for Cannon Lake, but I doubt they'll have any potential to make AMD CPU's into a hard sell until Ice Lake... maybe.

@PlywoodStick One can always count on you to make PC sound more unappealing than ever

@NEStalgia What can I say, this is a time of turbulent change...

@PlywoodStick just like every time I've bought in the past. Sigh....

@PlywoodStick
I must admit that I haven't really been paying that much attention to this new and revived battle between AMD and Intel. Mostly because I got a mid-range i5 about 4 years ago and have pretty much zero reason to upgrade at this point. I'd also add that one of the reasons AMD is more appealing now isn't just their improved performance. They've also caught up on the number of expansion options and you now find AMD motherboards with M.2 slots, USB Type C and even thunderbolt.

@skywake Good points! Competition is good...

@NEStalgia Ah, but this time, it's....

I think people are over-complicating the analysis here. While picking the absolute best in performance per buck terms might be a highly volatile equation, there are so many options for both CPUs and GPUs that are good enough for gaming that you can't really go wrong if your budget stretches towards the modern quad cores and past the cheap graphics cards like the GT 1030 that are only really good enough for extending the life of an older system. All the improved competition from AMD really means is that you've got more good choices and less bad ones.

About the only thing you're guaranteed to get a raw deal on these days is RAM. Still, 8GB will do the job for nearly all current games and it's the easiest of all things to upgrade when you need to.

@Matt_Barber @PlywoodStick is the master of overcomplicating pc gaming