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Katakuri2024
Journeyman III

Why do so many users choose AMD to Intel?

Since I am VERY new to practically everything gaming PC-related, I sincerely apologise if this is a stupid question. However, I recently decided to build my own PC and I did a lot of research on AMD vs. Intel. Almost single article I've read claims that Intel is superior to AMD because it is more affordable, has higher performance, etc. However, I've seen many more AMD gaming rigs than Intel builds. Does this have a rationale that I'm unaware of? Again, I apologise if this is a silly question, but I'm not sure what I'm asking.

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13 Replies
Justifier
Challenger

Price was my reason. That and 12th gen wasn't out yet.

While I'd have still went for the Radeon GPU. If I were building a pc again at this moment, I'd be leaning toward a 12900k with DDR4+5 support, with a caveat. It would have to be a board that only had 2 ram slots.

(and I'd get DDR 4, not 5. DDR 5 needs to mature for about a year before its worth snot.)

As I don't think there are any which meet those criteria... well maybe some ITX board does now that I think of it

Yeah I'd be looking at a ITX or mITX board that supports both DDR 4 and DDR 5. If that's not on the market, I wouldn't even consider a DDR 5 capable platform right now

And that's purely due to the ram tuning capabilities of DDR 4

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gotgrant
Adept III

I went with AMD because of Price to Performance was better than Intel at the time.

While I personally like AMD - I am not opposed to Intel- but until 12th gen the price to performance was beat out by AMD.

johnnyenglish
Grandmaster

My first ever computer that I put my hands on was this Apple SE when I was like sub10 years old

johnnyenglish_0-1663368573142.png

Having said that.. 

I had Intel, AMD and Cyrix (yes Cyrix!)

johnnyenglish_2-1663368913855.png

I won't put here the full list because probably I'll just miss several CPU's

From am386 (the one in my profile pic, yes its real) to Intel Pentium 166 that I accidentally overclocked it.
I can even remember some codenames, the Klamath for Pentium II and Katmai for Pentium III
Thunderbird for the 1Ghz Athlon and Palomino for my first AthlonXP

johnnyenglish_1-1663368891835.png

I work everyday with Intel in my IT job, Intel stalled like a fighter jet and then... it crashed. Generational improvement were so laughable that doing life cycle management was not a big deal when you only had 2/3% more performance over EOL model.

AMD was seen like the underdog, delivering what needs to be delivered with a fraction of the price.
But there were also times where AMD was the indisputable king.
This magazine made pull the trigger back to AMD, January 2002. AthlonXP 1800+ (1533mhz single core at the time) beat the c..p out of the Pentium 4 running at 2ghz. It was really embarrassing losing all the benchmarks sometimes with 62% margin (Adobe Premiere).

johnnyenglish_3-1663369686388.png

Hey!
Don't get me wrong, although I'm big fan of AMD and RoG, very fierce fan actually. As an IT, I can't overlook the competition and I need to keep a professional level on my day job, super impartial.
But... I can also learn from experience and that leads me to buying an AMD product.

Zen was a major leap over the old Vishera FX8370 I had. Actually, FX was a very poor improvement over the Phenom that I still use on secondary builds today. For some reason my FX didn't like OC as much as the Phenom. The Phenom 965 was a beast, OC'ed at 3.8 or 4.0 I had the 140watt TDP chip, HOT!! (The computer was a jumbo jet taking off)

Why I didn't had an Intel when FX was around? Long Story Short: Price was half or less than an Intel CPU
Although the ship was sinking, they were still throwing punches back (respect!) although.. 220Watt punches

johnnyenglish_4-1663371291757.png


Price plays a major deal for so many people including me, that's why I waited so long for a replacement on my RX480, no way I would pay +1000€ for a RX6800, glad I could find a sweat deal. But don't cheap out too much too.

And that is it! There is always a story behind our motivations. This one is mine.

The Englishman
DRDOS
Adept III

Can't answer for all of those many users, but can try to answer for myself.
Though i no longer read these trash articles, i probably won't lose if i bet many of them are still (likely) paid, and many contain misinformation-based ads. Same way as it was 20 years ago back then when i was actively reading them yet.
Good picture about Athlon-XP vs Pentium 4 there above... (let's try to flashback and recall some details from those times)
I do remember a lot of those articles telling us that one CPU is literally twice faster than another because of twice wider system bus (Intel's quad bus against Alpha's bus) and twice higher clock speeds, providing results of some synthetic tests which have nothing to do to real life applications, at the same time silencing any really important information such as incredibly slow Intel's FPU, low performance to clock ratio etc. That overall was quite aggressive ads campaign with a lot of lies. I did wonder if Intel has employed a PR professionals to design a Netburst architecture, because those soap bubbles gigahertz looked just that way. Not just a daily trash article writers, but even big IT professionals participated that ads campaign, unlike the rest they surely knew that they lie, but still they did it (why?). A lot of people did believe those "tests" and went to buy Intel's PC thinking that's the best choice ever.
Of course, there's no evidence whether those articles were paid and were paid exactly by Intel. But the things tell themselves... In such cases no need evidence to make an appropriate conclusions, at least for self. Though i wouldn't like to talk/discuss any conclusions having no appropriate evidence.
In any case, even with no evidence all of those facts are more than enough to realize something is not alright there in this matter...
There were a lot of such articles spreading an obvious misinformation, and a major part of those was an Intel CPU ads telling us about "twice faster" Intel CPU.
At the same time, the fact is that i've never seen such sort of articles with AMD CPUs ads. Question is - why?
Of course, it could happen they were there but i've just missed them all for some weird reason.
Eventually, aggressive Intel ads campaign turned into a sort of propaganda that went so far that AMD then decided to introduce a rating "+" system, but who cared? Those, who knew the truth - didn't need any ratings, and those who didn't need the truth just used this opportunity to tell us in their trash articles "how AMD fools us by fake ratings to hide real CPU clock rates".
Anyway, whatever, this is just one part of the problem.

So, if you ask why do i prefer AMD over Intel, that is just one reason of many... Doesn't matter how good Intel CPU's are nowadays, i still dislike and will always dislike that dirty marketing they did (or supported) in past. I won't be surprised if they proceed doing it so far, and i'm glad to be unaware of that sort of misery business today if they still do it that way - simply no any interest to it.

Rest of the reasons begin to take place years before... When i've discovered simple manipulations with CPU pins make allegedly "incompatible" CPU and Socket in fact - completely compatible. When i've discovered simple firmware bits manipulations does the same. When i've seen socket-to-sockets adapters being sold on the markets that make "incompatible" CPU and Socket to be very compatible. A lot of other things that followed further such as nonsense BTX "standards", pushing proprietary things here and there in order to get license profits afterwards and attempts to build up a cartels and an international monopoly were just adding more and more bits into a whole picture that eventually shows up about those people on the other side behind of the Intel logo doing all this, and about who they really are.

In a few words - i dislike things done in an unfair way. That's why i rather choose AMD whenever that depends on my personal desire. As a nice bonus AMD traditionally provides (so far) better performance and quality to price ratio. In times of that "Athlon-XP vs Pentium 4" picture, IIRC, it was nearly up to twice.

Nevertheless, i deal with Intel's machines almost daily, having a lot of them at work, and also my laptops, testing a software with them, writing/optimizing code for them, and so on...
Often, personal preferences and reality we exist in - are 2 very different things... That's how it is.

johnnyenglish
Grandmaster

Actually, that magazine favored AthlonXP. Here in Portugal, every magazine, either profissional or enthusiastic. Showed Intel being kicked, smashed, harassed or destroyed. Like I wrote in the last reply, Adobe Premiere showed 62% better performance for AthlonXP. RDRAM for Pentium 4 was ultra short lived here, slow and expensive. The price for a Intel system was more than double of the AMD. 

Here in Portugal, price plays a great deal. If its cheaper then its the right way, at least most of the times. Thats why I saw so many FX desktops here, no surprise there. Laptops, well, thats a story for another day and it involves someone paying OEMs for... Eheheh you know.

One only thing that scared people at first with the AthlonXP, was the PR rating with the + sign. Because the earlier "+ signs" attached to a cpu were kinda of a downer. Cyrix 686 166+ was one of the culprits for people being scared of the +  sign

And I had one Wasn't that bad'... ish,

The Englishman
cpurpe91
Volunteer Moderator

I chose AMD because there is an upgrade path without having to buy a whole new motherboard. At the time Ryzen 5000 was not yet even announced and AM4 supports 1st gen all the way to 4th gen Ryzen chips. AMD has proven that their boards will last longer than the competition when it comes to upgrade paths and with the announcement of AM5 and their pledge that AM5 will support to 2025 and beyond I am going to stick with AMD so I do not have to buy a new motherboard every time I want to upgrade my CPU. Here is an article about it. AMD plans to support the new AM5 socket through 2025 and beyond | PC Gamer

The problem I see with Intel chips is the need to purchase a new board every time you want to upgrade to the newest CPU. There are a few boards like the current 12th gen that will support the 13th gen CPUs but that is as far as those boards will go. This article speaks on that. Intel 14th-gen Core desktop processors will likely require a new LGA 2551 socket | TechSpot To my knowledge LGA1700 will only support two generations within it's relatively short life cycle. Meteor Lake, or 14th gen Intel, will need a new socket, while AM5 is set to support Zen4, Zen 4 3D V Cache, Zen 4c, Zen 5, Zen 5 3D V Cache and Zen 5c. This means you will be able to pocket the money you would use to buy a new motherboard and use it on a better faster chip instead. 

To be fair Intel is currently more powerful than AMD's Ryzen 5000 series (except for the Ryzen 5800X3D), but with the announcement and immanent release of the Ryzen 7000 series later this month the 7600X a six core 12 thread chip at $299 USD matches and beats at times the high end Intel's 16 core 24 thread (8P cores 8E cores) i9 12900K in gaming. This was shown in the AMD announcement event stream. 

 

While Intel may push past with 13th gen Raptor Lake CPUs, AMD and Intel are just pushing each other tugging back and forth for the performance crown. Both are amazing but at the end of the day the value proposition of not needing to buy a new motherboard every time AMD releases a new chip is just too sweet of a deal for me to pass up.

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CN50
Adept III

After having intel for many years on all my main desktops  and I did have one very old laptop(2005) with Amd on it years ago. (still works by the way)

I decided that when buying a new computer I would really look into what I was buying and after many months of watching video's and reading about AMD new Ryzen 5000 series at the time, it was pretty easy from there onward that I would be switching to AMD for my main computer everything seemed to point to AMD from price, power and preformance.

I doubt I'll ever go back to intel. 

Axxemann
Forerunner

I went AMD because for the longest time, they were significantly less expensive than Intel. And in a way, they still are, for a lot of the reasons laid out already (motherboard support, prior to Zen technology, the Mobos were even backwards compatible which made things a bit easier for upgrades in terms of being able to stretch a budget out.)

I'll be sticking with AMD, because the way I see it (and I could be wrong, though I'll rarely admit to it) AMD is geared more towards tinkerers, hotrodders and modders. Intel is more of a buy it, set it up and run it. I like to tinker, tweak and hotrod stuff.

Performance over Pretty.

Op missed their timeline to drop Advert spams, will probably never reply (or get busted).

 

Ryzen 5 5600x, B550 aorus pro ac, Hyper 212 black, 2 x 16gb F4-3600c16dgtzn kit, Aorus gen4 1tb, Nitro+RX6900XT, RM850, Win.10 Pro., LC27G55T..
samaritaninfotech
Journeyman III

i think you use AMD because AMD processors with PRO security are the world's only processor family with AMD's full memory encryption as a standard feature. AMD Memory Guard helps protect data with full memory encryption should your PC be lost or stolen. about ADM all information is available on SamaritanInfoTech 

BlackSabbath
Adept II

Intel is expensive i have first time intel cpu 12700k i dont have regrets

J20Joe
Adept III

Great Performance, affordability (apart from recent Intel Gen), Great For overclocking, but i think the main reason for me what the AM4 Chip set (which until recent has been replaced by AM5.

Intel were constantly changing the chipset so that motherboards were out of date if you wanted to get a new intel processor you would have to buy a motherboard for it to fit. AMD stuck with AM4 for years which was a massive bonus for people upgrading their processor.

 

Also AMD manufactures GPU's so their are benefits of having an AMD processor and graphics card in the same system.

 

If you are building a pc that is not likely to get upgrading frequently, either is absolutely fine

jedisaber
Adept I

Price to performance.

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