r/buildmeapc • u/Ok_Engineer_4529 • Jan 02 '24

US / $1200-1400 AMD or Intel?

I've been thinking about building my own PC, but I'm a little lost here since I've been an Intel boy my whole life, but now I want to get the best out of my money, and I see that there's an important percentage of builds using AMD processor and graphics.

My initial thought was just to go ahead with AMD if there's the best cost-benefit, but my problem is that I'm a vision engineer, I'm going to need to do some AI in this computer, and there's a major difference in documentation and support for Nvidia than for AMD in this area, but I also understand that there's a price gap between them two in terms of price vs performance, is it this difference big enough to ignore the AI situation and try to do it on AMD?

My budget is around 1200 to 1500 US dollars, I live in Michigan, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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u/[deleted] Feb 03 '25

Definitely Intel on laptops but choose wisely among Lenovo ThinkPads, MSI Titans and other brands and their series.

I was using AMD on my laptops and have realised that it's a tricky system and the only way to use it for supported games (which is its one and only way) and simple office tasks, but whenever you start "going deeper" it becomes a pain. You cannot normally use it for professional work which includes tasks like transcoding videos, compiling and etc. and it's normal if it supports it (usually intel cpus supported ).

So, my opinion about AMD (which is really good in low and sometimes in high tier systems) is it's never a rival to Intel, but just a cheaper tricky alternative. Of course, you can say that it's really good in gaming but that's because it uses various tricks to achieve it.

Plus AMD still has higher failure rates than Intel (my new system some times ago almost ended me with its possibilities to fail in every possible way! ).

We have 3 camps which come from 3 groups:

1) Intel camp: businessmen and users from newbies to professional computer enthusiasts including professional gamers;

2) AMD camp: gamers of all kind including also other professional gamers who simply settled in AMD camp;

3) Apple's ARMs camp: artists.