Building a new PC in a month. Looking for advice. Buying parts Oct 11th.

[Pemalite]

Attiq said:

The reason.

Simple. 3 different AMD computers recommended by 3 different PC companies. ALL 3 dead in a year and a half or less.

That's just bad luck.
I have an AMD rig that is 20~ years old in the shed that still boots fine. (Mostly use it for DOS/Win 98 stuff.)

WolfpackN64 said:

Outside of most compute tasks in general. There's one thing Vega is good for :) (Vega is also quite good for gaming, but they certainly lost some efficiency compared to Polaris). Interesting will be to see when Navi comes out, seeing how Nvidia threw efficiency out of the window with Turing, AMD might have a shot at perf/W.

Vega is a compute monster.

As for Vega being less efficient than Polaris... That's actually not true, if you reduce Vega's clockrates and voltages, she will beat Polaris in terms of performance per watt every day of the week... AMD just figured it wasn't ever going to be able to beat nVidia on performance anyway, so decided to throw efficiency out the Window and get as near as possible.

AMD actually did a similar thing with Polaris refresh. Aka. Radeon RX 580, where it had dialed up clocks and voltages and was actually less efficient than the RX 480.

The other issue with Vega is that the Primitive Shaders got relegated to needing API support to function... And I am pretty sure that their Draw Stream Rasterizer is not functional yet either... And probably will never be until Navi or Next Gen. - Those are efficiency gains that Vega simply misses out on that would have given it a possible edge.

It is what it is though.

WolfpackN64 said:

Then you have a serious case of bad luck. Don't think it's a quality issue though. And yeah, NVIDIA is atm on all levels a more terrible company then AMD.

This.
Often is just bad engineering by 3rd party's at the GPU/Motherboard level rather than AMD's CPU, GPU or Chipsets themselves.

AMD's older boards tended to be significantly cheaper than Intels, so you really do get what you pay for I guess.

With that in mind... I have primarily used AMD's GPU's in my rigs since the Radeon 9000 days, with a few stints of nVidia with dual Geforce 7 GX2 GPU's and 8800GT's, Geforce 1030 etc'.
And really from a reliability standpoint on the GPU side of the equation... Both nVidia and AMD have been perfectly fine.
To me though... At the end of the day a dollar is better in my pocket, so will tend to weight up price/performance rather heavily, which often falls in AMD's favor.

On the CPU side, I tend to want more performance as I will upgrade those components far less often, so usually opted for Intels workstation level CPU's. - But now that AMD has thread-ripper, I am back to weighing up price/performance again.