Originally Posted by itguy08
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Most chipsets for AMD CPU's back in the day were utter garbage. The last full desktop chipset AMD made prior to a significant hiatus was the 760. I had a 750 with a Slot A Athlon 800, and it was a solid rig, AMD provided excellent drivers for their own North/South bridges. Server chipsets followed not long after and it was entirely 3rd party at that point, and they were REALLY hit and miss.
SiS, ALI, VIA, NVidia and even ATI did the AMD chipset game with awful or non-existent drivers, often forcing the use of generic Microsoft drivers like "Standard ATA Controller" that lacked the performance tweaks that dedicated drivers, like what were offered for every single one of Intel's chipsets, provided at the time. The boards that these chipsets were often mounted to were also junk, so it was a pretty bad combo.
It was crucial that you bought a good motherboard back in those days. Problem was there were plenty of junk flooding the market, especially in the AMD space. PCChips comes to mind. If you stuck with a mid level board with a good chipset (I had good success with VIA) you were often good. For AMD systems I built and sold it was a combination of 1 or 2 FIC boards with VIA and a stable driver version. Worked out well - had a few in service as servers with few complaints. Built quite a few of AMD back when I was doing that stuff and only had one that was problematic and I chalk that up to Windows ME.
If you went ultra cheap you had issues or if you tried to be on the bleeding edge driver wise.
Originally Posted by Panda Bear
Intel is good for higher end servers these days but not for low budget home / game machine.
Not even there. AMD EPYC is cleaning up in the server space. Dense, powerful, and has low power/heat requirements. Best of all worlds unless you are tied to something that is Intel only (SAP HANA comes to mind) but for database and big data, EPYC is hard to beat.
They are also winning supercomputer contracts (Cray) and performance in that space left and right.
It's good to see Intel finally losing - they have been screwing us all over for decades.
Unless you are using something super old, you won't be worrying about driver support on AMD. To be honest these days it is really the legacy stuff that got support dropped rather than new AMD CPU / chipset that doesn't get support. I don't think home PC will have exotic stuff that runs into that, those are usually industrial control stuff and enterprise software that mandate certain types of hardware. Most mandates for Intel are really certification and validation, enterprises won't redo all the certifications, validations, and tuning for existing generation of hardware just to save a few thousands. You are not running those software at home.
PCChips is the Cardone Rebuild of the PC industry, they disappeared and they deserved it. Spend money on a good motherboard with good capacitors and power circuitry (not features), and the power supply, and add enough cooling fans, and you will be fine with Intel or AMD. My AMD systems throughout the decades lasted on average 7 years each, that's not better or worse than most Intels I got.
