No...but not all of us have badass computers.

Nvidia cards are not as worth it these days for high performance though, since it draws more power, when you run SLI setups, you'd need a bigger PSU which would cost even more money on top of higher electricity bills, not to mention the heat on current high end Nvidia cards. ATI has the better cards currently, and they now have OpenCL with a more matured ATI Stream package, I can only see good things happening with ATI from now on, or, now AMD.... since they dropped the ATI brand...

well, if you are into laptops, I'm very excited about the AMD APUs. affordable multimedia and gaming on the go looks so hot. It's bad ass and coming soon! maybe not 120 FPS but I doubt it'll have issues going 60 with AA off.

Apparently you haven't been a gamer long enough to know that back in the mid '90s, Intel was the only way to go, and the 'cheap and nasty' sector was filled by the likes of AMD and Cyrix.

I have owned 1 AMD system. An AMD 133, which worked on a 486 DX4 board. It lasted two weeks. I have not looked back since.

Maybe you should. Things tend to improve, and a single unlucky accident shouldn't be that bad. It could happen with Intel, too.

It could, and most likely, I might try AMD when that time comes, but so far, the record stands at 14 Intels (personal CPUs. Not including any work systems), and none of them faulty.

A few things. I would have agreed with you a few days ago. I had just bought my brand new 6870 and was happy as a lark. It was a Sapphire card, by far the most popular AMD brand of graphics card.

Then I started playing on the card. I noticed that CCC sucks, but that's not a big deal. I then noticed that my card only had a 2 year warranty. Not a big deal. I then noticed that my card manufacturer is notorious for not living up to their warranty. Not a big deal, maybe I would get lucky. Then my card lost all sembelance of stability.

So, I sent it back. I ordered an EVGA GTX 470. EVGA cards come with a lifetime warranty. They also come with the "step up" program. That way you can trade in your card for an upgrade whenever you feel like it. They will also help you mod your card and if you ask the community will GIVE you some IC Diamond to cool down your card. You can also buy aftermarket parts for it, and attain support throughout the cards life. EVGA is a company that stands behind their cards.

New cards are coming out for both companies, and performance is debatable between the current top of the line cards. Yes, the Nvidia cards are currently hotter and more power hungry. However, they are designed to stand the heat better. Yes, heat and power usage are a negative. Some who only consider performance believe those negatives are irrelivant. Another negative is the fact that your company isn't EVGA, lol.

So, I'm not sure I agree with you on your assertion that ATI is defaultly superior. Both companies make fine cards.

It's a similar debate to the Intel vs AMD. If you're min/maxing you might be able to make a case for one chip over the other, but the fact is that these technologies change so fast, you have to take the comparisons on a chip by chip and not a company by company basis, because you are painting things with too broad of a brush.

I voted for Intel in this poll, but I just built my latest rig with a 965 BE, which I think is the chip most builders should buy. I would never recommend Intel, but I voted for them. You can't really generalize these things, it's complicated.

I'm not really into laptops. I just happened to get the ones in my sig by chance.  But thanks for the info, I will look into it :)

After buying all the parts for a PC and having so many problems putting on the AMD heatsink I'm going with intel. Because that heatsink looked so much easier to put on

lol and I've had first gen athlons go up in smoke as soon as I turned the power on to test the part, but that doesn't mean improvements weren't made, they later introduced safe locks so the xp series were fine, but intel's auto down clock in p4 was better of course, either way though, AMD is pretty good these days, and their budget CPUs are good if you are only looking for gaming. I'm using my PC as a total beast so I need i7 class yet don't need x58 =P. 860@4GHz win!