AMD or Intel for a work/game PC?

Austion

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I always buy Intel but AMD is the new CPU king. My issue with AMD is how stable is there stuff?

In the past i bought AMD GPU's but always had driver issues and i have read a few issues with there new Ryzen 3 bios over volting.

I want to build a gaming and work PC photography, H265 encoding machine so a 3900x or 3800x.

Should i stick to intel or jump ship?

Thanks for help!
 
AMD CPU's for work, I would support that 100%. No experience with Ryzen 3, but honestly I would recommend buying Ryzen 2XXX series at this point if you're going to be relying on it to put food on the table. For work, I'd always reccomend staying 1/2 - 1 full gen behind bleeding edge.
The GPU, i'm not sure. I haven't used a consumer grade Nvidia gpu in 15 years, their quaddro stuff always worked better for me than the FirePro. For games i've almost always used AMD and been happy.
 
It's not for my day job as i do photography and web sites on the side. I have already bought a rtx 2080 super for gaming just not sure about the CPU. I would like to get PCI gen 4 since it will be another 5 years or so before i do another upgrade.
 
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My coworker has a lower-end AMD Pro GPU in his computer for his Autocad and has never had any problems. One of our IT clients recently switched to purchasing Ryzen laptops and has been enjoying them, no long term results though.
 
My coworker has a lower-end AMD Pro GPU in his computer for his Autocad and has never had any problems. One of our IT clients recently switched to purchasing Ryzen laptops and has been enjoying them, no long term results though.

My issues where with newly released AMD GPU's. I never have any issues with intel stuff on release day.

But sometime has passed since the 3900x has came out.
 
3900X, no question there. I'd recommend Intel only if you know that your applications are tuned better for Intel to a level that matters, and with photography, it doesn't. Premiere seems to be pickier.

The questions are whether you can actually get a 3900X as stock has been reported to be very low, and then you need to do some real research on pairing a motherboard (X570) and memory.

Also, while PCIE4 is interesting, it has no use today. It won't make anything faster. Going forward, maybe, but highly unlikely. However since it is incidental to grabbing a 3000-series and X570 board, it's not hobbling anything, except for the cost over an X470 board.
 
3900X, no question there. I'd recommend Intel only if you know that your applications are tuned better for Intel to a level that matters, and with photography, it doesn't. Premiere seems to be pickier.

The questions are whether you can actually get a 3900X as stock has been reported to be very low, and then you need to do some real research on pairing a motherboard (X570) and memory.

Also, while PCIE4 is interesting, it has no use today. It won't make anything faster. Going forward, maybe, but highly unlikely. However since it is incidental to grabbing a 3000-series and X570 board, it's not hobbling anything, except for the cost over an X470 board.

Yeah the X570 boards are costly. I can find a 3900x someday at it's normal price,
 
Can't go wrong either way IMO. Just get what you prefer.
 
Nobody was ever fired for buying intel.

Intel would be my suggestion.

Not as much bang for buck, but less likely to crash randomly.
 
Nobody was ever fired for buying intel.

Intel would be my suggestion.

Not as much bang for buck, but less likely to crash randomly.

While i have no evidence to back it up, I feel like with all the security holes, and corresponding performance implications for data centres and other security critical uses, someone may have been, or may soon be, fired for buying intel.

Also, none of my AMD gear crashes randomly. or at all.
 
I've had a Ryzen 7 2700 running the full suite of ACC programs pretty much all day everyday for the better part of 18 mos. Zero crashes, zero issues. This is on an MSI X370 mobo.
 
The 3900x has trouble with availability. The boost clock issues have been fixed by AMD with a new BIOS for most of us, and the Destiny 2 issues are a thing of the past if Destiny 2 is your thing. Stability has not been in question except for a small subset of users, and in those cases they likely have some sort of defective hardware. Voltages and over-aggressive boosting have been resolved when using the latest BIOS for your mainboard in conjunction with the latest AMD chipset drivers for Windows.


With buying AMD you just need to make sure you do a few common sense things and you will be fine.

1) Test your RAM after you set XMP/DOCP in the BIOS to make sure it is stable, because it might not be. Ryzen RAM compatibility has improved leaps and bounds with Ryzen 3000 series chips, but it is not perfect. Unless your RAM is explicitly on the board manufacturer's QVL list, just run a full round of MemTest86 to be sure you're good at the rated speed (pretty much everything is fine at default clocks, but default clocks are well below the module's rated speed). Heck, run it even with RAM from the QVL list...

2) Do a fresh install of Windows 10 1903 or newer (assuming you are doing Windows). Don't try to re-purpose an existing install or try Windows 7 with the new chips because that way lies madness. Windows 10 1903 includes optimizations for the new Ryzen chips and you are leaving some free performance on the table without it (at least, if you are into Windows).

3) After your fresh install, download and install the latest AMD chipset driver for your board's chipset from www.amd.com. This takes care of power management and residual "compatibility" issues. This is also recommended for Intel systems, but it is a lot easier to get away with not doing it on Intel since Intel's architecture has not changed radically in quite some time - Windows has solid built-in support for this stuff.

4) If your mainboard has an Intel NIC built-in, download the latest NIC driver from Intel. There were some reports of crashing with the new Ryzens in Windows 10 1903 that were trace3d to the built-in Windows drivers for Intel NICs, and the latest drivers from Intel fix that. (FWIW, I have an Intel NIC on my Crosshair VI Extreme X370 board and have not had any issues with my Ryzen 3900x beyond the now-fixed boosting issue from above. I just put this here becuase it seems to hit a certain subset of people).

5) Don't bother overclocking. Just let the default PB2 engine do it's thing, and the chip will boost cores as necessary and able to account for whatever workloads you are encountering. You will get the best overall stability AND performance. Overclocking is just not really a thing with these chips unless you are looking to always run a heavily threaded workload at maximum all-core clock, but then you are losing out on boost performance for lightly threaded apps.


Edit: Oh, and one more thing... you will see some places say the sweet spot RAM speed is 3733 for optimal performance (1:1 RAM:Infinity Fabric speed ratio). This is incorrect. AMD updated their information to specify this is actually 3600. You can manually overclock MOST chips to have an Infinity Fabric speed of 1866 with 3733 RAM, but not EVERY chip will do this. 3733 RAM is also a butt load more expensive than 3600 anyway, so there is that.
 
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You can't argue "bang for buck" for AMD anymore if you're talking about buying an X570 board.
 
I think PCI 4.0 is only worth considering if you know you're definitely going to be using it with powerful SSDs

There's not much, if any, real need for it beyond that right now. You're better off spending the money saved on a better quality but older gen board.
 
Like with Intel right?

You can't go posting that Intel will crash less than AMD, and then say "There is a risk with everything"

Well, if we assume any CPU core has an equal risk of crashing, since AMD has twice has many cores as Intel does, they're therefore twice as likely to crash! :D

That's a statistical fact!
 
I only wanted it for PCI gen 4 and to use NVME with it.
I think PCI 4.0 is only worth considering if you know you're definitely going to be using it with powerful SSDs

There's not much, if any, real need for it beyond that right now. You're better off spending the money saved on a better quality but older gen board.

You get PCIe 4.0 with X570, but you also get more PCIe lanes -- that's a bonus even if you're connecting PCIe 2.0 and 3.0 devices, to be frank.
 
Like with Intel right?

You can't go posting that Intel will crash less than AMD, and then say "There is a risk with everything"

Most software was developed on intel, therefore it stands to reason that most has been tested on intel more thoroughly than AMD, therefore there is less risk of crashing/corner cases with intel. FFS. Surprised this isn't obvious
 
Nobody was ever fired for buying intel.

Intel would be my suggestion.

Not as much bang for buck, but less likely to crash randomly.
Do you know someone who was fired for buying amd? Seriously bang for the buck especially most photography and encoding is going to be AMD. 3000 series have been out and seem pretty stable at this point. Paired with your 2080 it will be able to game well and handle heavily threaded work loads with ease. If you want pcie 4, you dont have much choice :).
 
You can't argue "bang for buck" for AMD anymore if you're talking about buying an X570 board.
Any reason you feel this way? I can buy an x570 board from MSI or Asus for $150.... The difference between this and an Intel board is less than the cost of a CPU cooler you will have to purchase. I never understood this argument. The prices are very close depending on what features you need/want. Even if it costs $50 more it's still better bang for buck for most media workload build than Intel (except a few select media apps that were highly optimized for intel, so I always recommend finding benchmarks in the particular apps you use).
 
You get PCIe 4.0 with X570, but you also get more PCIe lanes -- that's a bonus even if you're connecting PCIe 2.0 and 3.0 devices, to be frank.
This obviously depends on the motherboard too, lots of configurations to choose from (with a wild price range depending). I doubt you'd notice much difference between pcie 3 x4 nvme and pcie 4 in real world, I barely notice the difference in sata ssd and pcie 3 x4 2900mb/s nvme in most real world workloads but obviously, your mileage may vary.
 
if you dont buy intel you will regret it. hope you live near a geek squad because you will be taking it there a lot.
 
This obviously depends on the motherboard too, lots of configurations to choose from (with a wild price range depending). I doubt you'd notice much difference between pcie 3 x4 nvme and pcie 4 in real world, I barely notice the difference in sata ssd and pcie 3 x4 2900mb/s nvme in most real world workloads but obviously, your mileage may vary.

I don't see the performance increase as being useful, but having more exposed PCIe lanes can be.
 
if you dont buy intel you will regret it. hope you live near a geek squad because you will be taking it there a lot.


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You can't argue "bang for buck" for AMD anymore if you're talking about buying an X570 board.

sure you can.. even the cheap x570 boards are equivalent to the same price when new x370/470 boards.. i mean hell my x570 elite cost 100 dollars less than my asrock taichi x370 when that board was new and the elite's better than it in every way other than lacking 2 extra sata ports i wasn't using anyways.
 
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