Why is AMD the Budget Option for Gamers?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,097 words · ~10 min read
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so the general wisdom these days seems to be that if you want to save a buck
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and build a gaming rig AMD is the way to go but
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what does that mean exactly like AMD's for poor people who can't afford
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Intel well at a very high price point you
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could make that argument i mean remember we're talking about gaming here where
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Intel's top spec chips do outperform
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AMD's but most people aren't buying top of the
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line computers and that doesn't mean that they're poor
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it just means they want a good value so we designed today's challenge to find
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out if AMD's performance deficit can be
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overcome by its advantages which include
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less expensive cpus and motherboards and
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included overclocking support all the way up and down the ryzen lineup and i
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think you guys are going to find our results really surprising no matter what you
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were expecting i certainly did
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11 hardware sponsors are giving away a slew of awesome prizes at random to
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people voting in the builds.gg 10k challenge so head over to builds.gg
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today for your chance to win so we're gonna start things off right
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with a head-to-head off basically here's how it's going to go
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down using pc part picker Anthony and i
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are each going to put together the best build we can one for each side with a
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budget of 750 us dollars before taxes
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and shipping and a big list of
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requirements we both want to be able to overclock if
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not now then later on we're both going to need at least one
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terabyte of storage and eight gigs of RAM and we both want at least a 500 watt
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power supply with 80 plus braun certification
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so here we go then
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first order of business is going to be the CPU both of us know that we need
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something reasonably powerful but because of the overclocking stipulation
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Anthony's going to get a big discount by going with AMD because all desktop ryzen
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processors are unlocked thankfully the core i3 8350k isn't too
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expensive also because AMD's mid-tier chipset
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enables overclocking i can save money by going with a b series motherboard not
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the cheapest one mind you because overclocking is a consideration i'll
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want a board with decent vrms of course my k-series chip also doesn't
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come with a cooler which means i need to drop yet more of my precious budget on
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one of those wow this is starting to add up really
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quickly knowing Anthony's going for higher speed memory i can claw back a bit of my
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budget by going with a less expensive kit unfortunately that does mean that the
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per thread performance gap is going to close between us which is something i
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can't really afford pardon the pun for storage this hitachi one terabyte drive
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is a no-brainer there are cheaper one terabyte drives but none are 7200 RPM
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i'm also going to pick up this diy pc case and a rosewill arc 650 watt power
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supply it's not the best quality unit but for 40 dollars it's 80 plus bronze
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and has a three year warranty on to the graphics card i really don't have much
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money left to spend here and this is probably where i'm gonna get killed
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i can only hope that Anthony isn't very good at putting together value builds
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okay you just about ready there Linus it's been a while yeah i think i'm done
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you good yep and with that
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our builds are complete so pencils down
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time to compare ooh
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yeah i think i win well it's okay it's not about whether
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you win or lose it's is it more about how you play the game oh okay well i
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think i played better gaming um
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so we've got a lot in common we're both only spending 20 25 bucks on our cases
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yeah um roseville power supply yeah you got
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the same hitachi hard drive as well the graphics card's gonna kill me
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honestly i could almost afford an rtx except i
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couldn't right and i've only got a quad core processor
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because your CPU is only five bucks more even though it's only a quad core but
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like it's a faster quad core than it is than the ryzen cores so it's the 45
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on the board and the cooler that are costing me that
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GPU upgrade yeah and your RAM is cheaper too yeah i probably should have gone
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dual channel it didn't make that much of a difference so here's the thing
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requiring overclocking capability
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isn't really fair in the sense that Intel can deliver
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much better performance per dollar outside of their k series overclockable
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chips even if those limitations are entirely
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their own doing so let's actually work together then and
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modify the blue team build to try and get a little bit closer to that bang for
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the buck shall we sure basically CPU's got to go yeah and
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i think you can get like an 8 400 out of that
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8400 is such an underrated CPU 64
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reviews is all it's got the value is entirely there yeah it's outstanding so
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that means i don't need a cooler anymore you can kill that i don't need a z
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series board anymore yep you can go with a i would say b360 so now you should be
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able to afford the 2060. okay so
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with the Intel build now running a more reasonable b series chipset because we
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can't overclock anyway we're able to get both a more powerful CPU and GPU so
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that's six cores now and an rtx 2060. so
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with this modification then our specs actually even out significantly
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but it's worth noting that any edge the
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Intel system gets in its stock performance in games
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may be offset at least partially by AMD's unlocked core multiplier and
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higher thread count depending on the workload
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so now what well why don't i throw a couple of benches together and see if i
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can't figure out what the performance difference is between these oh so we're not just going to do this theoretical
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we're going to build these rigs and see what happens yeah i like it
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after an afternoon of prep our performance results came out to be
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pretty interesting as you can see our first builds are really different but
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while our AMD machine is way out ahead thanks to its powerful rtx 2060 graphics
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card Intel does pull up close in some
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less GPU bound cases and in cs go
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even manages to pull ahead though it should be noted that this game is
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notorious for performing much better on Intel
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when we overclocked our first builds all those extra threads on AMD's processor
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added up to a lot of oomph and since our graphics card was a little bottlenecked
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at stock this translated to a nice increase in gaming performance so AMD
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beat out Intel by about six percent overall with that said our overclocked
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Intel machine on average beat our stock AMD system's rtx numbers not bad for a
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gtx 1660. moving along we've got our adjusted
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builds so remember our AMD machine saved a few bucks on the motherboard and our
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Intel one jumps up to a core i5 8400 and
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rtx 2060 but loses its overclocking
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capability so here Intel is top dog for performance
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with neither machine overclocked but then gets edged out by our overclocked
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AMD machine this is proving to be a much closer race than we could have possibly
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hoped and it gets even more interesting
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when we look at the value proposition for our original configurations despite
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very decent performance levels and a lower price tag the Intel build ends up
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delivering poorer performance per dollar than our AMD one both at stock speeds
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and when both of them are overclocked now our Intel build ended up a little
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bit cheaper though because we had some budget left over
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just not enough for anything that would impact performance like an rtx upgrade
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so if you were building this box at home and didn't have a hard and fast 750
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limit the story might be a little bit different
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but we are operating within the constraints that we set and AMD came out
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ahead at this price point as for the adjusted builds this puts
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Intel's value at the closest to parity out of all of our comparisons
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but then when we compare it against our AMD builds overclocked numbers it again
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gets edged out and i guess it's that that word that
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keeps coming up edged that is kind of the most interesting
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takeaway here so as it turns out go figure neither AMD
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nor Intel's product management departments are staffed by sea sponges
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and every rig from both teams regardless
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of overclocking ended up being within about
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five percent in terms of the performance
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per dollar like it's almost like AMD's pricing structure is designed to
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maximize their profits while slightly undercutting Intel but not so much that
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they have to react and drop their pricing and like Intel's is designed to
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demand a small premium because of their more recognizable brand
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truly fascinating isn't it i actually i honestly did not expect it to be this
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close no like when we set out for this what was
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the what was your expectation i was expecting AMD to just cream Intel at the
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low end and then when we you know adjusted them i would expect Intel to
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cream AMD because it's roughly the same price and
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and you had six cores of more gaming
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optimized single threaded performance like it yeah
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so i don't know we
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we ended up with a result that wasn't what we were going for but we certainly
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had a lot of fun with it and let us know in the comments below if you'd like to
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see any other of these kinds of value analysis pieces in the future maybe at
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different price points or looking at different components of the system
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rather than just the CPU speaking of in the future
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like oh AMD is so stupid and AMD can't be like oh Intel's little stupid but if
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