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Similar to my story. Apart from an Athlon 650 around 2000-era we've always been an Intel household. I recently upgraded my gaming PC and went with the Ryzen 7 2

Similar to my story. Apart from an Athlon 650 around 2000-era we've always been an Intel household. I recently upgraded my gaming PC and went with the Ryzen 7 2700X, partly due to the way Intel have been treating their customers like idiots lately. I'm seriously considering AMD for the graphics card too (currently running a GTX 970) as I may well be moving my main gaming PC over to Linux in the near future.

holtalanm 8y ago
I'm running an RX 580 4GB for the GPU on my gaming rig, and it handles anything I throw at it really well. They do, however, tend to run hotter than the NVidia chips.
KozmoNau7 8y ago
I replaced my GTX 460 with an RX 560, no regrets at all. It uses the AMDGPU open source kernel driver and MESA on the userspace side, so it's supported outright on rolling release distros with no additional steps, and trivially easy to install on any recent normal release distro. For Linux Mint 19 (based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS), I had to add a PPA with the newest MESA drivers, other than that no issues at all.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
> I'm seriously considering AMD for the graphics card too (currently running a GTX 970) Me too. I was running Intel+Nvidia rigs for about ten years, up until last year, when I got a Ryzen 1800X and (this year) a Radeon 7970. Nvidia hasn't been the most ethically behaved as of late (whether it's more or less than Intel, I haven't figured out). Intel will be releasing a discrete GPU in a year or two; who knows how fast it will be, or if they will allow people to benchmark it.
- gargravarr 8y ago
  Same, I had bad experiences with the early Athlons and bought Intels after that, never had any stability problems. But now I'm seeing douchey behaviour from both Intel and nVidia. I've been a big fanboy because of the performance, but the business practises are becoming polarising, and AMD seems to have caught up or surpassed in performance terms. Plus, they handled the vulnerabilities disclosure much better (even a smug 'AMD processors are not affected' on more than one). I always used to root for Intel because AMD made their entire business model off copying (later licensing) Intel's x86 designs (including the model numbers), but that's becoming a lot less relevant now. I upgraded my desktop's Geforce 550Ti with a Radeon HD 7850, and though it's gotten off to a slightly rocky start (Windows logins are noticeably slower, seems to be a known issue), performance is great, benchmarks showing it on par with the 970m in my laptop. When the Haswell i7 needs to be upgraded, I may start looking at a Ryzen. Never thought I'd see the day.
  - sitkack 8y ago
    > AMD made their entire business model off copying (later licensing) Intel contracted AMD to second source their processors as a requirement for being in the IBM PC (requirement dictated by IBM). AMD existed long before their version of the x86, producing the venerable http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/2901/ http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/2901/ which was widely used in minicomputers of the time. The amazing thing about the 2901 and family, was that the engineer could design a board level CPU and full freedom over register sizes, numbers, alus, etc. Don't forget that the 64 bit x86 ISA was created by AMD and licensed to Intel.
    - gargravarr 8y ago
      Huh, I didn't know that. I thought AMD started competing with Intel by cloning the 286 and beyond. Had no idea it was for the IBM PC contract. I knew about 64-bit (Athlon 64, anyone?), but I've always heard x86-64 described as a kludge and an awful hack, not a well-designed architecture. The greater RAM accessibility and native execution of 32-bit code are advantages, but shortly thereafter Intel went multi-core, which seems to have done drastically more for system performance than x64 did.

holtalanm 8y ago

I'm running an RX 580 4GB for the GPU on my gaming rig, and it handles anything I throw at it really well. They do, however, tend to run hotter than the NVidia chips.

KozmoNau7 8y ago

I replaced my GTX 460 with an RX 560, no regrets at all. It uses the AMDGPU open source kernel driver and MESA on the userspace side, so it's supported outright on rolling release distros with no additional steps, and trivially easy to install on any recent normal release distro. For Linux Mint 19 (based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS), I had to add a PPA with the newest MESA drivers, other than that no issues at all.

theandrewbailey 8y ago

> I'm seriously considering AMD for the graphics card too (currently running a GTX 970) Me too. I was running Intel+Nvidia rigs for about ten years, up until last year, when I got a Ryzen 1800X and (this year) a Radeon 7970. Nvidia hasn't been the most ethically behaved as of late (whether it's more or less than Intel, I haven't figured out). Intel will be releasing a discrete GPU in a year or two; who knows how fast it will be, or if they will allow people to benchmark it.

gargravarr 8y ago
Same, I had bad experiences with the early Athlons and bought Intels after that, never had any stability problems. But now I'm seeing douchey behaviour from both Intel and nVidia. I've been a big fanboy because of the performance, but the business practises are becoming polarising, and AMD seems to have caught up or surpassed in performance terms. Plus, they handled the vulnerabilities disclosure much better (even a smug 'AMD processors are not affected' on more than one). I always used to root for Intel because AMD made their entire business model off copying (later licensing) Intel's x86 designs (including the model numbers), but that's becoming a lot less relevant now. I upgraded my desktop's Geforce 550Ti with a Radeon HD 7850, and though it's gotten off to a slightly rocky start (Windows logins are noticeably slower, seems to be a known issue), performance is great, benchmarks showing it on par with the 970m in my laptop. When the Haswell i7 needs to be upgraded, I may start looking at a Ryzen. Never thought I'd see the day.
- sitkack 8y ago
  > AMD made their entire business model off copying (later licensing) Intel contracted AMD to second source their processors as a requirement for being in the IBM PC (requirement dictated by IBM). AMD existed long before their version of the x86, producing the venerable http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/2901/ http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/2901/ which was widely used in minicomputers of the time. The amazing thing about the 2901 and family, was that the engineer could design a board level CPU and full freedom over register sizes, numbers, alus, etc. Don't forget that the 64 bit x86 ISA was created by AMD and licensed to Intel.
  - gargravarr 8y ago
    Huh, I didn't know that. I thought AMD started competing with Intel by cloning the 286 and beyond. Had no idea it was for the IBM PC contract. I knew about 64-bit (Athlon 64, anyone?), but I've always heard x86-64 described as a kludge and an awful hack, not a well-designed architecture. The greater RAM accessibility and native execution of 32-bit code are advantages, but shortly thereafter Intel went multi-core, which seems to have done drastically more for system performance than x64 did.