Gaming PCs are complex beasts. However, despite the millions of possible components out there, when it comes to the gaming grunt of your PC, you’re looking at three key industry players - Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. Between them these three control the CPU and graphics card markets. If you want a gaming PC, it’s going to have one or two of these three hardware giants involved somewhere along the line.
With so few players in the game, it’s an ultra-competitive business, even for gamers. Pick an AMD CPU and you’ve shunned Intel. Pick an Nvidia graphics card and you’ve said no thanks to AMD. Ultimately when you do your PC build, you’ve got to come down on one side of the fence, but where do you lie?
There’s obviously all sorts of factors at play here, be it brute force performance, value for money, post-purchase support, or even just plain old brand loyalty. When you buy a graphics card and you’re pleased with its performance, you’re inevitably drawn back to that brand for the upgrade. It’s often not until something goes wrong that you switch ‘teams’, so to speak.
For me personally it’s always a time and place thing. Once it’s time for a complete new build, it’s about checking out the market at that particular time and place. It seem me leap between AMD, Intel and Nvidia, but there’s been plenty of merit for all three over the years.
Over to you then, and we want to know what your preferred CPU and graphics card combination is. Are you always plumping for Intel regardless? Do AMD bargain buys win you over? Let the rest of GD known in the comments below!
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An Intel CPU in my opinion is the best for gaming because of its temps as well as its efficient power consumption control. For a GPU to go with all that power i would go with AMD. If you own an R9 series GPU then you must be a happy gamer!
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AMD, Intel and Nvidia are all great, none are a bad choice.
It comes to personal preference. They all have their advantages and disadvantages.
I personally choose Intel and Nvidia. Which doesn't mean that I don't like AMD, not at all, but most of us here build our own gaming system and put a lot of time, work and care into it.
So the most important is that we feel satisfied with what we have.
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Son of a bitch where did you get a 6700k from, i've been looking every day for them to release.
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Haha, got it from Alternate, it's in Belgium ;)
But why would you need one? Your 4770K with that overclock is even better...
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the i7 6700k is only 7-10% better than the i7 4790k, you don't need one...
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i like amd more.b/c its cost's cheap and perform good.
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Intel is the best for gaming, and even though amd has better cost/performance ratio, i prefer Nvidia for its consumption and temperature, so it's overall quality
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Intel and AMD Radeon. Intel is the perfect CPU for gaming and AMD Radeon cards are the best value-for-money cards.
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INTEL CPU IS POWER EFFICIENT AND AMD GPU IS POCKET EFFICIENT
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haha probably best summary I've heard so far! :D
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Are you a rapper? Because those rhymed
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Heeeey!! Where's Intel and Intel.. I'm stuck on it since from the start.. the best gaming experience anybody can have is Intel and Intel. Sheesh! rest is shmuck.
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Haha
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Right now, I'm stuck to AMD and AMD, but I'm hoping to build a Intel ad Nvidia system.
Building gaming rigs here in the Philippines is very, very expensive. :(
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Hey bud, I'm a Filipino living in Canada.
I feel your pain. When I built my rig, I looked at GPU prices in the Philippines just out of curiosity. Converted, I paid about CAD140 less for my GTX960. Prices there are more than 60% higher! It's ridiculous, especially considering the lower salary and cost of living.
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amd and amd but for next its going to be intel cpu and maybi nvidia or amd whatever comes for next series gpu s...i think i can survive this year playing games on 1080p but kind will see how demanding its going to be after few months
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AMD and AMD. get the most of your money
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The most out of your money would be Intel and NVIDIA silly lol
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Don't fangirl Maleficarus everyone has a place here
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Intel and amd to intel and nvidia.
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I was on intel and AMD until a couple of days ago, now I am on Intel - nVidvia
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If I had infinite money to spend on rig,it would've got Intel and AMD definitely.
But in this tight budget case I am currently in,with AMD and AMD combo I will get the most for my money
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For me its intel and nvidia but i went with amd and nvidia for my current rig because
1.Using the intel equivalent and compatible mobo meant i wold go over my budget
2.I read that wen it come to single core perfomance intel dominates,but when it comes to utilization of all cores amd is on par with intel if not better
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Some of u might think that's useless because very few games use all cores of a cpu but as far as i know dx12 has a feature that equally divides the load between all cores,thus amd will once again rule the day
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At the moment it's got to be intel for a high end cpu. When it comes to gpu's I always look at benchmarks for my budget with an open mind but as I use a 4k tv for gaming and AMD don't support HDMI 2.0 I had to rule them out.
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Whatever my games are optimised for at the time of buying.
Somehow, that's usually nvidia.
Intel is quite a given, though I bought an AMD CPU for my sister as she wanted a good but cheap build for casual gaming.
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Currently have an all-AMD setup, but I won't get AMD again, especially if they screw up with Zen. Fury cards are utter bullsh¡t with tons of compromises for something that underperforms compared to SIMILARLY(I'd go as far as saying identically) priced nVidia cards (980Ti). Sick of all their issues - these motherfruckers can't get a damn thing right. Next setup will surely be green&blue. No doubt.
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dude, no game is optimized for HBM and the drivers are not mature enough yet. The r9 Fury X has 32% better specs than the r9 390x overall(except ROPs which are equal to the r9 390x) and 100% more l2 cache than the r9 390x, but only performs 10-15% better at lower resolutions.
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ie cr*p also 4GB? pffftttt
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4gb at 512GB/s are better than 6gb at 300GB/s you know that right?
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Depends on how you look at that...For AA and high res textures and resolution i'd go with the 6GB...
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for AA and textures I would go for high bandwidth and TMUs(Texture Maping Unit) over a lot of Vram as they are more important for AA, textures and AF
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Depends, as long as a game doesn't need more then 4GB of Vram 4GB@512GB/s is better then 6GB@336GB/s.
However when a game asks for 5GB the 6GB of "slower" memory is way better, since the 4GB card needs to start addresing system memory which runs at 16GB/s at best.
8GB DDR3 2800MHz is faster then 16GB 1600MHz as long you don't need 8GB of Ram. However when you need more then 8GB the slower 16GB kit will be way faster since the 8GB one has to start swapping. Same applies here
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Then explain how an 8gb vram 390 is 2% weaker then a 4gb 970 which has 256 bit compared to R9 390 and 290 when those have 512bit bus interface
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Shader performance & driver support. Plus nVidia came out with a new & improved algorithm when they launched Maxwell. There is a lot more to it than just that, but it is too much to type here.
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It was about ten years ago that I "switched teams" and went from being AMD exclusive. I didn't know as much about hardware back then, and I had purchased a brand new AMD GPU, and for the life of me it wouldn't work in my machine. In hindsight, I could probably have figured it out - but as Joffy suggests in his article, when you run into trouble it's easy to switch brands. Bought an nVidia GPU to replace that card, it worked fine, and I've been using nVidia since. :)
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My last AMD GPU kept having driver issues. It seemed like every other driver update would break another game. They would fix it with the next update, but break another game in the process. So I swapped back to nVidia after a 10 year AMD binge. In the past 2 years I have only had one bad driver from nVidia, & they fixed within 2 weeks. With AMD I would have been waiting for several months for a fix
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Intel and nVidia, because not primarily for gaming :)
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You just came to the wrong neighborhood! >:(
JK
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maybe I'm just weird, but I enjoy making games more than playing them :)
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May I ask how nV is better for that?
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It's not they are just obsessed with cutie cores then stream proccessors
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I had impression developing softwares use CUDA cores better than games? somewhere I saw such statement,might be old info or entirely wrong.
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nVidia has less problems with drivers in general, which is particularly important for unstable games and game development :)
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Hmm, never had an issue with AMD drivers, not on my ancient 9800XT and not on my old E2-1800 and not on my HD 7850. Also, nVidia was more troublesome with Win10 than AMD.
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What do you mean with "nVidia was more troublesome with Win10"?
I see you have AMD and Windows 8.1, so I wonder what you are basing your facts upon. I have runned nVidia on Win10 for the last 3 months and haven't had a single driver problem or issue so far.
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Intel and Nvidia always!