AMD PC: Strengths & Weaknesses

September 10, 2018

AMD PC: Strengths & Weaknesses

AMD PC: Strengths & Weaknesses

AMD has seen a strong resurgence in the PC market over the last few years. With the launch of Ryzen/Epyc CPUs, and Polaris GPUs, they have burst back onto the scene with a bang. We looked at the strengths and weaknesses of AMD PC components.

If you are looking to build or buy an AMD based PC, you should be aware of what you can expect. While Intel is still the king in terms of sales, AMD seems to be closing the gap on that front and in terms of performance.

AMD CPU Strengths

AMD Ryzen and Epyc CPUs look to kill the competition by offering more cores. Their mainstream desktop chips come in variants from 4 to 8 overclockable, cores. Like their main rival Intel, each AMD CPU features multithreading technology to increase productivity.

The increased cores make these CPUs great for multithreaded workloads like rendering videos or creating 3D graphics.

AMD GPU Strengths

AMD Polaris based GPUs offer a tremendous value to any user looking to do some gaming. These parts typically sell for less then the Nvidia counterpart and feature more RAM. Users looking to build mid-level to high end machines for gaming or productivity look to Radeon cards because they offer rock solid performance at an affordable price.

AMD video cards also support FreeSync, which lets your GPU and monitor sync refresh rates providing a much smoother experience. AMD licenses this technology for free, so it is found in a lot of the new modern monitors coming to market.

AMD CPU Weaknesses

Intel still holds a large advantage when it comes to clock speeds. If you take a look at the top tier consumer CPU’s from AMD and Intel, the Ryzen 2 2700x and the Core i7-8700k, the 2700x reaches a max boost clock of 4.3GHz while the 8700k reaches 5.0GHz. This gives Intel a huge lead in single threaded tasks and workloads. This sort of speed advantage can be found up and down each manufacture product lines.

AMD has made great strides as of late, but Intel still holds an advantage when it comes to IOC (instructions per clock). Some task like gaming are still faster on Intel hardware.

AMD GPU Weaknesses

AMD GPUs offer great performance for the money. However, Nvidia GPUs still offer better performance overall, especially when it comes to the high-end parts. Nvidia graphics cards also draw less power and create less heat.

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Charlie O'Donnell

Charlie has been a member of Velocity Micro's team since 2018. He has a love for both graphic design and PC gaming.

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