The night after I posted my last article, I was brushing my teeth on the way to bed and thinking about what I'd written. I was thinking about the recent transitions of hardware in my home and came to realise there has been something of a revolution. From a landscape that was entirely dominated by the Intel and Nvidia duopoly my household is now dominated by AMD. In some instances (mobile iGPUs) it's just the only common sense answer. For the most part the decision has been dominated by value for money.
So this is a quick and short summary of what's in the house today and what it's running. Now before I get into the details, yes there's a LOT of tech here: It's what I work with for a living and it's one of my passions.
Personal Desktop PC CPU: AMD 5950X GPU: Nvidia 3090
Personal Laptops CPU: AMD 7840U x2, AMD 7640U x1 GPU: Integrated
Personal handheld PC CPU: AMD 6800U GPU: Integrated
Wife's Desktop PC CPU: AMD 5600X GPU: AMD RX6700XT
Wife's Laptop CPU: Intel i5-8365U GPU: Integrated
Daughter's Desktop PC CPU: Intel i5-6500 GPU: AMD RX6600
Son's Desktop PC CPU: Intel i5-6500 GPU: AMD RX6600
Living Room PC CPU: Intel i9-13900K GPU: AMD RX6700XT
So 4 out of 5 discreet GPUs in the house are AMD and 6 out of 10 CPUs are AMD. This of course is just the devices that are getting active regular use, so it ignores the plethora of older PCs sitting in storage, used as test/lab devices etc.. The most interesting realisation was that the GPU landscape in my house has shifted so dramatically, when I originally built the kid's PCs they were using GTX1650s because my going in assumption was just to go directly to Nvidia. Since then those GPUs are now largely mothballed, powering some spare PCs that I have built for my friend's kids to use at LAN parties. Nvidia has almost faded away from the house as every new GPU purchase has favored AMD from a price to performance ratio perspective.
Now that I've become ware of this I can't help but notice it. I'll keep watching my habits over time, do I stick with AMD from a price to performance perspective or does Nvidia / Intel pull me back in?
So the odd one out is the 13900K, why go for such an extreme Intel option when, again the equivalent AMD options tend to work to a better price/performance ratio. It all came down to form factor. Being a living room PC, I had my marching orders from my wife:
You can connect a computer to the TV but it can't be ugly.
So I went through various options, different cases, sizes etc.. The answer: the least ugly PC is an invisible one. I initially considered building up a mini-ITX machine but was running into two hurdles: A) mini-ITX can get very expensive very quickly, and B) airflow in my TV cabinet was going to be a problem. Eventually I landed on the NUC13 extreme: the size was an ideal fit for my cabinet, the side-to-side airflow of the NUC was perfect for my use case (better than the mini-ITX solutions I was considering) and the price at the time I purchased was better than the DIY approach I was originally considering. In short, my price to performance view-point continued to inform my decisions. When I was pricing up mini-ITX solutions AMD was leading the pack, but the NUC ended up stealing the show. The decision to go with an i9 as opposed to a lower-end SKU was simply with longevity in mind - the price difference was ~ $200AUD, the NUC is a fixed non-upgradable platform and I expect the i9 will give me an extra year or more of "acceptable performance" than if I had opted for the i7 alternative.