Convince me to buy an AMD chip

[Dinzy]

Hi

I am a long term AMD fan who currently owns a 3 yr old Core i7 920 system that I use for an HTPC/ gaming system on my TV. I have absolutely no problems with it, but I am interested in supporting AMD, and Global Foundries and the IBM alliance. I built this rig in January 2009 which was a few months after the i7 launched and put 6 gigs in it. I later switched things around a little when I built a cheapy Phenom II system that was originally going to be my HTPC, adding an SSD and an HD 6970.

I am totally out of the loop and from what I can see AMDs chips cannot really compete with Intel's current chips. However I am just using it as a gaming rig/HTPC and it needs to fit that bill for a few years. I would just be buying CPU/mobo/ram for this and maybe throwing the i7 in my desktop or hocking it on ebay. I am biased towards Gigabyte for the mobo because they have done me well.

So sell me on an upgrade, or sidegrade to an FX 8350 system. Does anyone know if these chips are fabbed in Malta?


Note: I bought the i7 system when I finished grad school and went to the worst job in my life, working for Intel in process R&D in their R&D fab in Oregon. Let's just say there is a little bad blood there, even though Intel is now one of my current company's biggest customers. When I was there for 14 months or so, they were hit with the 2 big fines for their anti competitive business practices that really hurt AMD. I am currently considering an offer to go work at Albany Nanotech which has GloFo as an R&D partner.

 

[trents]

If money is not an issue, go with Ivy Bridge. If value and performance vs. price is important to you or if you are altruistic and want to support AMD for the sake of maintaining some semblance of a competitive market in the CPU sector then go with Piledriver when it debuts soon. The fact is, all the upper end CPUs, whether made by AMD or Intel are extremely fast and way more than most of us need to do what we want to do.

 

[Alaric]

Convince me to buy an AMD chip

When I was there for 14 months or so, they were hit with the 2 big fines for their anti competitive business practices that really hurt AMD.

That about covers it for me. Drives me nuts that a free QX9650 ES fell into my lap recently and finances dictate that as my next upgrade. I'll do my best to get a Phenom II in my current rig before passing it along to my daughter , though.

 

[Buddywh]

Hi....

At the risk of feeding a troll....


If money's no object and you simply want the highest performing, buy Intel <<whatever the really knowledgeable people here suggest>>. But if you want to save some money get AMD and get really, really great performing. Assuming a budget, the money you save on processor AND mobo let you buy more/better peripherals (memory/SSD/drives/graphics) and come out ahead on total system performance.

Again, if money's no object and you've simply gotta have the 'bestest/fastest' in every category don't worry about it: buy Intel. It doesn't take a genius to put together the most expensive system to get high performance; putting together a cost effective one is a different matter.

 

[Nephilim]

Well I was under the impression the pII 1100t was the best for gaming. Newer stuff being more suited to multitasking and such.

 

[Aldakoopa]

I thought AMD left Global Foundries and went to ARM?

 

[Dinzy]

AMD is still fabbing some chips at GLoFo. They get their GPUS from TSMC and there is talk that they would move CPUs to TSMC as well. ( ARM is a fabless IP licenser not a foundry)

Money is an issue. I don't want to spend any of it on Intel

It's hard though. It looks like it makes no sense to buy an AMD system given my current setup. I really miss the days when your rig was a piece of **** when it was 3 years old. Maybe I should just wait for the HD 89xx and buy one of those.

I will still think about it. I can subsidize the cost of the Piledriver by hocking the old gear on ebay and a new build is always fun to assemble, though I don't have the time to devote to any serious tweaking anymore.

Maybe a 6300 or even 4 core is a better option. They are cheaper, and should be good enough for my purpose. Hmmm

 

[amddork]

I too have been a AMD fan(<---Check the name. lol), started out about cost, than loyalty, but the road has been a rocky one. Now that I can afford it, I went with an Intel build... and love it. I was going to hold out for piledriver, but it was oh so tempting to do this builld. I will probably do a Piledriver build for my cooling project, and keep the I7 as my daily computer. If cost is you major factor than by all means stick with AMD, if you want the best, go with Intel.

-Don't knock it till you try it-

 

[buffalowings]

Go Intel, nobody needs to convince you to go with a inferior manufacturer such as AMD

 

[DOM.]

Don't do it lol

 

[Tech Tweaker]

Go Intel, nobody needs to convince you to go with a inferior manufacturer such as AMD

Inferior manufacturer? Excuse you? Aw hell no, I know I did not hear what I think I just heard.

Intel is like that rich kid you knew that was totally loaded back in high school (or college) that could afford to throw their money at anything. It definitely shows in their business practices too. (cough, questionable business practices, cough) Corruption seems to run rampant in their company. Their parts aren't "superior" because they are more expensive and AMD is not "inferior" because they are so much cheaper, Intel's parts are grossly overpriced though.

AMD is like the rest of us "normal people" who aren't made of money, actually care what we spend it on, and don't want to overspend just to get what we want/need.

Long story short, an AMD CPU will meet your needs. Grab yourself a quad or hexa-core and off you go. A quad will probably do just fine, but you can look into a hexa-core if you like.

 

[ziggo0]

If you have a Microcenter near by you can get a i5 2500k for $159.99...the one I just picked up is steadily doing 4.8ghz with sane volts...more CPU power than I know what to do with for the next 2 ~ 4 years.

 

[ssjwizard]

I think alot of the people suggesting Intel CPUs might care to actually read this thread. The guy is former Intel employee who wants no part in buying Intel CPUs.

 

[Knufire]

Exactly...I think a lot of people are missing the point of the thread. This has nothing to do with the chips, but the companies themselves.

 

[ziggo0]

So if prices were equal, we should tell him to purposely choose the lesser performer? That makes sense.

 

[Robert17]

We're talking cage/grudge match here, not performance, pricing, or color scheme.

I'm just hoping that Dinzy doesn't get mad at AMD as well. Building a system using other off-the-shelf chips would be challenging. When you've got many choices in the marketplace, such as brands of beer, it's easy to avoid the ones that give you the worst hangover. Not so with CPUs.

 

[Dinzy]

I thought AMD left Global Foundries and went to ARM?

Go Intel, nobody needs to convince you to go with a inferior manufacturer such as AMD

AMD is not a manufacturer, they are fabless. I worked for Intel's manufacturing R&D and yes they are superior to anything out there, but they do so by being something akin to a sweatshop for PhDs and their marketing is anti-competitive and unethical.

The product does seem to not be as good as a fully decked out new i5 rig. But I was hoping I could get an argument for why it might make more sense to build a new machine to replace my older i7 rig. Things like Faster memory and larger capacity, better chipset, etc also noting that I can recoup some cost by hocking my old gear.

Can I build a marginally better HTPC/ gaming console-like PC with a new AMD chip and motherboard than my current, first gen i7 920?

 

[os2wiz]

So if prices were equal, we should tell him to purposely choose the lesser performer? That makes sense.

Your reliance on artificial benchmarks to determine performance is pathetic. I challenge you to run your 10 favorite games on I5 2500 or I5 3550 vs the FX-8350 and show me where VISIBLY you see a difference in performance. Nobody needs a frame rate above 40 fps. NOBODY. It can't be noticed as better above 35 fps. So your benchmarks are garbage, total manure and mean less than than garbage.
I will show you time in video and photo editing where the AMD FX cpu will taker a significantly less time to do the work. That DOES mean a whole lot if you are at work or time means something to you.

 

[tungureanu]

AMD is not a manufacturer, they are fabless. I worked for Intel's manufacturing R&D and yes they are superior to anything out there, but they do so by being something akin to a sweatshop for PhDs and their marketing is anti-competitive and unethical.

The product does seem to not be as good as a fully decked out new i5 rig. But I was hoping I could get an argument for why it might make more sense to build a new machine to replace my older i7 rig. Things like Faster memory and larger capacity, better chipset, etc also noting that I can recoup some cost by hocking my old gear.

Can I build a marginally better HTPC/ gaming console-like PC with a new AMD chip and motherboard than my current, first gen i7 920?

It can be done . But the marginal performance is somewhat unclear to me(gaming,office-type multitasking, video edit...) and if you don`t mind high noise levels, an extra heater in the room, bigger power consumption.

 

[Dinzy]

Your reliance on artificial benchmarks to determine performance is pathetic. I challenge you to run your 10 favorite games on I5 2500 or I5 3550 vs the FX-8350 and show me where VISIBLY you see a difference in performance. Nobody needs a frame rate above 40 fps. NOBODY. It can't be noticed as better above 35 fps. So your benchmarks are garbage, total manure and mean less than than garbage.
I will show you time in video and photo editing where the AMD FX cpu will taker a significantly less time to do the work. That DOES mean a whole lot if you are at work or time means something to you.

My TV has a 60 FPS refresh rate. I would prefer to drive it at 60FPS as that is the frequency it is optimized for. Also those numbers are averages. If it is 40 fps, some frames may glitch a little causing occasional stutter. These should be less of a factor on a unit that performs fast enough to render 60- fps on average.

Maybe I should replace my desktop with a decent FX machine instead of the HTPC. The only issue is that I do all of my work on my work laptop. If I still had use of a general purpose computer I could justify the purchase for that reason alone.

I really cannot believe there are no compelling reasons to upgrade a 3 year and 9 month old computer. I thought the same thing before buying the last one which was an upgrade to the unit in my sig and I was definitely wrong then. Somebody needs to start making a killer app for powerful computers. Gaming is the best thing the PC industry has for it, but you can participate with older equipment and still blow away consoles. I hope Valve is on to something with their supposed new, innovative hardware.

****. Now I have the stupid idea in my head that it is OK to buy an IB chip because I worked on that process as one of a few hundred in D1D.