What about Joe? AMD/Intel Does it matter?

Well we know the score, does it matter? Most people go blindly out to Best Buy or Wal-Mart to buy their systems. Most have no idea what they are buying.

I will give one example: Wal-Mart sells single core AMD low power computers! No better than a netbook off of the shelf! You can surf the web, play flash games, watch movies and run basic office apps, most everything else chokes these things! Even one of my old AthlonXP rigs will trounce it. This makes AMD look bad.

Intel systems are usually more expensive for roughly the same performance, for the average user (they have nothing to compete with the above mentioned system, other than a nettop). The price makes some stay away from Intel.

Who protects Joe? Joe don't know! Joe listens to the sales person if there is one and goes with that! What if Joe only needed to surf the Web and pay bills on-line? the above mentioned system would have been fine or even an Atom based solution. If Joe ever decides to Play a game he is screwed though.

The opposite also stands true, A person wants to Game, they buy an i7 rig because the guy at the store said, ____________, did they need it? not really. i5 or AMD 945-65 with a good gfx subsystem would do fine.

Is there any way to inform Joe? Can the manufactures be held to some standard? Perhaps a test suite of some sort and what the thing can do printed on the side of every OEM package.

I love Joe, we were all Joe at one time. Please help Joe help himself.

Back in 2006 when I bought my first ever brand new system my personal ignorance of anything more powerful than a Pentium 4 1.3ghz was vary limited. I got talked in to a single core S939 system (still have the motherboard...what is in my HTPC) All in all it was a decent middle of the road system, but with sAM2 being introduced I could have gotten a better system for roughly equal $$. I think the store was simply trying to get rid of old stock to make room for the new stuff.

As for educating the current generation of Average joe's.... not sure what to say. Many of them prefer to be ignorant (sad but true). Other than launching independent commercials telling the whole story....I am not sure what would make a difference.

Oh the pain is resurfacing thanks to this. In Jan 2007 I got duped into paying $1300 for a POS HP machine with a Athlon 64 X2 2.3GHz CPU, 320GB SATA HD and IDE DVD drive and very weak 7500 video card. It came with a crappy resolution 19" flat screen monitor. The PC had a bad motherboard so I kept sending the PC back to them to fix and had to call the BBB on them to finally make it right with me. A year later I built my first PC and haven't looked back at all.