I`m ready to upgrade. not sure if I want a 4790k or a 5820k though. The first option would let my use my current ram though.

Wait what? it end users fault for wanting the faster cpu?

When you put it as simple as that and ignore all the other details, of course it sounds dumb. That's like raising taxes without explaining what they'll do and expect citizens to be agreeable to it. But like I said, it doesn't make sense to pay more for something with the same experience even if it is better. And again - depending on your workload, intel is obviously the better choice. @xIcarus Intel Pentiums are very good for offices, and I'd say their real selling point is their power efficiency. Though A4s or A6s are technically worse than a pentium for an office PC, I prefer to support them for the sake that AMD needs the money, intel doesn't, and the end result is pretty insignificant; the user experience is roughly the same. The end cost is roughly the same - sure the AMDs are more power hungry but considering the total load of an office PC, the average power consumption also wouldn't be very significant. I just wish AMD didn't use modules for A4 and A6 and used standalone cores. That would give those processors a little more of an edge. But yes, I entirely agree that you should only get what your workload needs. I have an AMD-AMD system, a intel-nvidia system, an intel-intel system, and I used to have an amd-nvidia system. All of them serve different purposes - if I'm going to have more than 1 computer, I want take advantage of the hardware for what it's good at.

But if you're doing office work, playing games, want a media center, home server, or run tasks that have an indefinite run time, AMD is just fine.

But Intel does those much faster as well... Even on laptops, can't beat the snappiness of a i7 compared to other ones.

When you put it as simple as that and ignore all the other details, of course it sounds dumb. That's like raising taxes without explaining what they'll do and expect citizens to be agreeable to it. But like I said, it doesn't make sense to pay more for something with the same experience even if it is better. And again - depending on your workload, intel is obviously the better choice. @xIcarus Intel Pentiums are very good for offices, and I'd say their real selling point is their power efficiency. Though A4s or A6s are technically worse than a pentium for an office PC, I prefer to support them for the sake that AMD needs the money, intel doesn't, and the end result is pretty insignificant; the user experience is roughly the same. The end cost is roughly the same - sure the AMDs are more power hungry but considering the total load of an office PC, the average power consumption also wouldn't be very significant. I just wish AMD didn't use modules for A4 and A6 and used standalone cores. That would give those processors a little more of an edge. But yes, I entirely agree that you should only get what your workload needs. I have an AMD-AMD system, a intel-nvidia system, an intel-intel system, and I used to have an amd-nvidia system. All of them serve different purposes - if I'm going to have more than 1 computer, I want take advantage of the hardware for what it's good at.

Hi, Have you met 90% of world that has always went after the better performance. even if it more expensive? hell there are people that pay 1k just for gpu. It not the end users fault amd cant make competitive cpu vs intel. even when AMD was better then intel intel was still more expensive now they got reason to be more expensive.

Hi, Have you ment 90% of world that has always went after the better performance. even if it more expensive? hell there are people that pay 1k just for gpu. It not the end users fualt amd cant make competitive cpu vs intel. even when AMD was better then intel intel was still more expensive now they good reason to be more expensive.

Yes, that's true - people always feel the need to buy the best regardless of how much they need it or how little anyone else actually cares. Anyway, intel won the CPU battle because intel was, on numerous accounts, anticompetitive and played dirty. AMD, for whatever reason, never bothered to reach out to home users the same way intel did. So they became an unknown brand and therefore ignored. Popularity goes a long way toward success - this is how the crummiest of politicians get elected.

Popularity has no affect on the ability to fabricate a CPU..

And Microsoft has a MONOPOLY on all things PC which just as bad if not worse. Bottom line Intel has the CPU people want cause it flat out out performance AMD regardless of price. AMD problem is AMD they have to many heads of office, and canned most there teams to pay there heads of office. I never liked AMD and this is going back to the late 80's early 90's there cpu where trash then and it still much of the same. I dont like MS either but have no choice but to use there OS if i want to game. seeing they like to force feed there ideas as the only thing there is. Companies are no more corrupt then governments, Money talks everything it overrides everything including doing the right thing

Popularity has no affect on the ability to fabricate a CPU..

It seems people around here are extremely short-sighted. Yes, obviously popularity alone has nothing to do with fabricating a CPU. But if you're not popular, you don't get customers. When you don't get customers, you don't get revenue. When you don't get revenue, you can't afford engineers. When you can't afford engineers, you don't get new/good designs. When you don't get new designs, you're stuck with something that has performance that was sub-par 2 years ago. And the cycle continues. I really don't understand why I should have to spell this out. The only point I was ever trying to make is IF you have the option to go for something weaker and not worsen your outcome, there isn't really much of a compelling reason to pay more for something that will not improve your experience, especially if you intend to make another upgrade within a few years. Therefore, people who could have had a decent experience with AMD but went with intel anyway were cutting back AMD's funds and therefore indirectly worsening their products. It's really basic economics... @tsunami231 I don't disagree, but when people whine that AMD isn't keeping up, very often (not always) it is indirectly their fault. If you actually need all the performance of an i5 or an i7, then it is money well spent that AMD is not in a position to offer. I'm not happy with AMD's products either, but I personally would like to see them get somewhere, so as long as their products do what I need, I'm going to support them and hope to see something competitive some day.

Amd uses what revune that do get from them GPU and what lil they get from the cpu/apu to pay there one to many heads of office there salary instead of use it to make some thing competitive Which unless i am wrong was headline news year ago. The ATI GPU are it atm that competitive. And that more to do with ATI knew how to made gpu before AMD bought them, AMD never really knew how to make competitive cpu and it shows. CPU wise APU is all that got going for them, give intel time and AMD will be back in same postion. As for AMD geting all the console markets it shows those lovely mobile chips that are used are terrible and reason why consoles have issue with 1080p still the gpu in those consoles way better then that actual cpu. Till AMD pulls there head out there asses and does something INTEL will continue winning and people will continue to pay for the intel chips. Which exactly why i buy intel. Would it be nice if AMD could compete yes. Would force lower prices from intel or force intel to stop resting. and doing rehashes

It seems people around here are extremely short-sighted. Yes, obviously popularity alone has nothing to do with fabricating a CPU. But if you're not popular, you don't get customers. When you don't get customers, you don't get revenue. When you don't get revenue, you can't afford engineers. When you can't afford engineers, you don't get new/good designs. When you don't get new designs, you're stuck with something that has performance that was sub-par 2 years ago. And the cycle continues. I really don't understand why I should have to spell this out. The only point I was ever trying to make is IF you have the option to go for something weaker and not worsen your outcome, there isn't really much of a compelling reason to pay more for something that will not improve your experience, especially if you intend to make another upgrade within a few years. Therefore, people who could have had a decent experience with AMD but went with intel anyway were cutting back AMD's funds and therefore indirectly worsening their products. It's really basic economics...

What makes you think they dont have enough revenue to make a CPU, that would be incorrect. Has nothing to do with not having enough 'customers'

No matter how you look at it, they were hammering Intel... and then the Core 2 Duo's came and it was done. A strong "reply" is long overdue.

No matter how you look at it, they were hammering Intel... and then the Core 2 Duo's came and it was done. A strong "reply" is long overdue.

Intel sat on Netburst for an eternity and it got dumpstered by the Athlon 64... then AMD did the same Intel did, sat on their asses for an eternity spewing out the same technology. Core 2s came around and Intel has been dominating since 2006. AMD won't even have a reply by 2016, or 2020 for that matter. At this rate they'll never have a reply and it really does seem like problems at the top of the company.

Intel sat on Netburst for an eternity and it got dumpstered by the Athlon 64... then AMD did the same Intel did, sat on their asses for an eternity spewing out the same technology. Core 2s came around and Intel has been dominating since 2006. AMD won't even have a reply by 2016, or 2020 for that matter. At this rate they'll never have a reply and it really does seem like problems at the top of the company.

I tend to believe that they've learned their lessons. If AMD would release something more powerful than current i7s, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel would blow them out of the water again with a new launch just a few weeks after. Just like nvidia's driver optimizations shortly after mantle's release. I mean let's be honest, they can't pop up such a polished driver with such performance increases across the board in such a short amount of time. Nvidia's driver team is good, but it's not that good. From a business point of view, it makes sense to hold technology to yourself until a release is needed.

I agree, they could lower the prices of their processors to be more in line with AMD's.

1st of all, Intel does not have high desktop/server prices because they are just a bit ahead of AMD. It is us customers who allow them to sell at such price since way too many of us buy what we do not and will not use. And what intel uses those money for? They "donate" resources to gain foothold in mobile platform, to point AMD is nearly non-existent there. In other words every over-expensive CPU bought by person which has no real use for it results in someone else getting cheapo netbook/tablet and keeping AMD from those areas as they can't compete with intel in market where even intel does not make money. Why? Because while intel can afford to sink 4B $ in mobile platform a year, AMD would bankrupt if they compete in throwing away money.

A bit? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html As you can see, intel's top-end, which is the i7-5960x is 60% (!) faster than AMD's top-end, the FX-9590. Intel DOES have high desktop/server prices for that exact damn reason, that i7-5960 is over 1k USD. How much do you think it would cost if AMD wasn't so damn behind? And the FX-9590 is a poor excuse of a cpu. They just took good FX-8350 chips and overclocked them. Nothing more than a money grab, those cpus were 1k dollars when they launched. Look at the price now. And you know what the deal is? You can't even blame them, a lot of people bought them because 4.9GHz must mean they're faster than intel's 3GHz right? No. And do you really think intel makes no money from mobile chips? I really hope you're joking. If there was no money in that market, nobody would have bothered making them. Mobile chips are a direct result of desktop chips R&D, they do not spend a lot more in making mobile chips after they have their architecture up and running. Take my i7-2670QM for example. It's just a gimped version of my i7-2600k. Reduce the clock, cut the cache size, gimp the igp and pass the least amount of voltage possible through it. Result? A gimped 2600k. http://ark.intel.com/compare/53469,52214

A bit? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html As you can see, intel's top-end, which is the i7-5960x is 60% (!) faster than AMD's top-end, the FX-9590. Intel DOES have high desktop/server prices for that exact damn reason, that i7-5960 is over 1k USD. How much do you think it would cost if AMD wasn't so damn behind? And the FX-9590 is a poor excuse of a cpu. They just took good FX-8350 chips and overclocked them. Nothing more than a money grab, those cpus were 1k dollars when they launched. Look at the price now. And you know what the deal is? You can't even blame them, a lot of people bought them because 4.9GHz must mean they're faster than intel's 3GHz right? No. And do you really think intel makes no money from mobile chips? I really hope you're joking. If there was no money in that market, nobody would have bothered making them. Mobile chips are a direct result of desktop chips R&D, they do not spend a lot more in making mobile chips after they have their architecture up and running. Take my i7-2670QM for example. It's just a gimped version of my i7-2600k. Reduce the clock, cut the cache size, gimp the igp and pass the least amount of voltage possible through it. Result? A gimped 2600k. http://ark.intel.com/compare/53469,52214

And that is how you confirm even rest of my post. You think about top end which you do not need for gaming, even 2600k is overkill unless you are on 144Hz screen. I am dragged behind by GPU, and this poor i5-2500k is enough for 3times more powerful GPU. And with current trends (Mantle, DX12, OGLNG) only fool would think you need even 400$ CPU. And I really love hypocrites justifying to themselves they need 1000$+ CPU for rendering because they can't get hands on OpenCL capable renderer. And even so they spent by rendering less than 5% of time spent on PC. Yes, 75% of time PCs sit at idle clocks, 15% of time people play games (no benefit of extra CPU) and 10% goes to creativity + rendering. Or this 10% of creativity is just another game session. So, if 5% of time is rendering, then from 100hours top intel would take 5hours to render and next good choice would take 8-9hours. Now, do you sit at your PC and watch every frame of animation you saw so many times before when designing it? I don't think so. Therefore it does matter little if I watch movie in meantime, spend time with friends or whatever. And my post is about reality that only like 1 in 5000 people (or even smaller fraction) actually does some stuff which needs really robust CPU. And I can only laugh to that, because I built few months ago extremely cheap PC with what matters (SSD, 8GB RAM 2133MHz & a10-7850k). It plays games better than OCed i3 + HD6850. This week friend built very similar system just with different mobo and SSD brand. When we play StarCraft which apparently is so bad on AMD platform, he has it maxed. Very cheap PC can do 60fps@60Hz just fine. As usual my conclusion is that people waste so much resources. And then live in denial.

Firstly, I wasn't talking about gaming. Since I said I own 2 i7s, that should be enough of a hint that I need that raw processing power. Rendering, encoding and sheer cpu power for audio work. Take the following scenario: Cubase with 20 tracks, all of them vst plugins with big and complex libraries. Do you know how much cpu power that needs just to play my compositions? You would be surprised. And it's pretty obvious you haven't worked in the field of modeling and rendering (I'm not a professional, just a mere hobbyist), there are many limitations with using opencl or cuda when rendering. Some examples will include: you sometimes have to triangulate all your meshes (although this will not be the case soon, many gpu renderers already support quads), you can only use certain raytracing and antialiasing algorithms. You can only use certain materials, certain lights. Textures are also generally limited, you have to use time-consuming workarounds in order to get the desired effect. Don't you tell me about rendering boy, it's not all sunshine and bunnies as you seem to believe. And about getting more cpu power than you need, it's justified getting an i7 for gaming. The immediate factor is that you WILL see a bit of a framerate increase, the long-term factor is that you will not need to change that cpu for a long long time. It's actually more cost-efficient getting an i7 (obviously not the 1k dollars extreme ones) over getting an apu and changing it every 2 years. Look at my rig. This cpu is in it for 3 and a half years already and I'm willing to bet it will still be here for 3 more years at least. I don't need to change it. If you had a 3-year-old apu, you would probably need to change it now if you would buy a 970 for example. And then change it again in 3 years. And if need be, I can push it to 4.8 GHz like it sais in my specs since it's currently hovering at 4 GHz. I can squeeze a lot more time out of it. Your vision on high-end cpus is very flawed my friend. They do have a purpose, even for normal-ass gamers.

Firstly, I wasn't talking about gaming. Since I said I own 2 i7s, that should be enough of a hint that I need that raw processing power. Rendering, encoding and sheer cpu power for audio work. Take the following scenario: Cubase with 20 tracks, all of them vst plugins with big and complex libraries. Do you know how much cpu power that needs just to play my compositions? You would be surprised. And it's pretty obvious you haven't worked in the field of modeling and rendering (I'm not a professional, just a mere hobbyist), there are many limitations with using opencl or cuda when rendering. Some examples will include: you sometimes have to triangulate all your meshes (although this will not be the case soon, many gpu renderers already support quads), you can only use certain raytracing and antialiasing algorithms. You can only use certain materials, certain lights. Textures are also generally limited, you have to use time-consuming workarounds in order to get the desired effect. Don't you tell me about rendering boy, it's not all sunshine and bunnies as you seem to believe. And about getting more cpu power than you need, it's justified getting an i7 for gaming. The immediate factor is that you WILL see a bit of a framerate increase, the long-term factor is that you will not need to change that cpu for a long long time. It's actually more cost-efficient getting an i7 (obviously not the 1k dollars extreme ones) over getting an apu and changing it every 2 years. Look at my rig. This cpu is in it for 3 and a half years already and I'm willing to bet it will still be here for 3 more years at least. I don't need to change it. If you had a 3-year-old apu, you would probably need to change it now if you would buy a 970 for example. And then change it again in 3 years. And if need be, I can push it to 4.8 GHz like it sais in my specs since it's currently hovering at 4 GHz. I can squeeze a lot more time out of it. Your vision on high-end cpus is very flawed my friend. They do have a purpose, even for normal-ass gamers.

Lets give cubase benefit of doubt and say it does something extraordinary with each track so mixing 20 tracks requires incredible amount of CPU power. You may be right there or standard soundcards down-mixing 64/128 audio sources in real time are just little miracles. But then again I am just mere boy who's audio making times started and ended with midi/8bit computers while Music Assembler was the king used on stage and I have never grown tired of procedurally generated music like simple MilkyTracker. (I am not musician, my friends are since I no longer have piano.) As far as OpenCL/CUDA goes, you get well accelerated video stream encoding, quite a few 3D rendering engines are working. Google is friend here. I would not be lower end CPU advocate for gaming if I did not take my CPU down to 1.6 GHz in many steps to see at what points it starts to bottleneck GPU in way fps drops below 60. And you are right to say your CPU lasted for more than 3 years, mine did same and will last for some time. But same applies to anyone who got 3.0GHz i5 which is well enough for 60Hz gaming, because most gamers do not even own those and games are made for masses not for very few at top. (exceptions apply, but I do not call them games anyway)

You don't understand. Vst instruments simulate the way real instruments actually work. As an example, to get a guitar sound it's not possible to trigger a signal and filter the sound so that it resembles a guitar sound. I mean it IS possible, but it sounds bad and artificial. You need the pick sound, the picking direction (up, down), automating the direction in which it strikes the strings (alternating between up and down when needed), variations in volume, variation in velocity, calculating the fact that you cannot possible strum 2 strings at the exact same time (there is a slight delay), making sure you don't hit 2 notes which conflict with each other (eg 2 notes on the same string cannot be played at the same time). And this is just 1 instrument. I compose symphonic metal. I need 2 guitars, a bass, a drumkit and a lot of orchestral instruments. That requires a good amount of processing power. This is also why good organs/keyboards are so expensive. Soundcards have nothing to do with this process, they just take the data and output it in a manner you can hear. The better the soundcard, the more accurate the sound. You are right about video encoding, opencl/cuda helps a lot with that. But I stand by my statement about 3D renderers. They are more limited in what they can do compared to classic CPU renderers. The end result might look approximately the same but the process is different. You don't have the same amount of 'freedom'. And trying to bottleneck to under 60 fps highly depends on the game used. Depends on how cpu-intensive the game is mostly. Crysis, metro, arma 3 come to mind.