AMD Household - revisited

computing amd

A few months back I posted my musings on how much AMD technology exists in my house. Since then I've recieved my Framework 16 and upgraded the kids PCs, giving my wife's PC a slight spec bump along the way.

  • My Wife's PC was upgraded from an AMD 5600X to an AMD 5700X
  • With my wife's "old" CPU availible, I purchased another 5600X and then upgraded both the kids' PCs from their previous i5-6500 CPUs.

I took this approach to upgrading for a reason. For my wife, the 5600X was already a great performer, but the two extra CPU cores of the 5700X providers her with a bit more headroom for multitasking and productivity. With regards to the kids' PCs it was all about value for money and keeping costs low. Motherboards and CPUs for the AM4 platform are pretty cheap at the moment, this paired with the fact I had used some DDR4-3200 for previous RAM upgrades (specifically with upgradability in mind) made a "previous gen" upgrade the obvious low cost upgrade path. Throw in some new NVME SSDs to finally leave SATA behind and the kids' PCs now feel insanely fast. In fact PCI-E Gen4 SSDs are so cheap now compared to a few years back the kids now have the fastest storage in the house - if manufacturer claims are to be believed.

So all of this is to say that two of the last Intel CPU hold outs have been migrated to AMD. Let's see what impact that has had.

The numbers

Here's the latest state of things, the numbers have utterly tipped to AMD:

Personal Desktop PC CPU: AMD 5950X GPU: Nvidia RTX-3090

Personal Laptops CPU: AMD 7940HS, AMD 7840U, AMD 7640U GPU: AMD RX7700s, Integrated, Integrated

Personal handheld PC CPU: AMD 6800U GPU: Integrated

Wife's Desktop PC CPU: AMD 5700X GPU: AMD RX6700XT

Wife's Laptop CPU: Intel i5-8365U GPU: Integrated

Daughter's Desktop PC CPU: AMD 5600X GPU: AMD RX6600

Son's Desktop PC CPU: AMD 5600X GPU: AMD RX6600

Living Room PC CPU: Intel i9-13900K GPU: AMD RX6700XT

What does this all mean?

With the exception of my wife's laptop and our living room PC all regular-use CPUs in the house are now AMD Ryzens. Likewise the only discreet non-AMD GPU in the house is the RTX-3090 in my own desktop PC and based on the current trends of NVidia vs AMD's value offerings the next replacement (years from now!) may very well not be in the team green camp.

I recently picked up an ARC A310 for transcoding accelleration for a pending media server upgrade, so while not for 3D gaming tasks, I will be dipping a toe into Intel discreet GPU land soon.

On the CPU side of things, Intel has been a hot (pun intended) mess as of late, with the recent 13th and 14th Gen instability issues making me very nervous to own a 13900K and forcing me to hunt around for BIOS updates that are often tricky to find - how any end user who has never heard the term BIOS update is supposed to deal with this is beside me. Again, much like the GPUs my thinking with CPUs comes down to value and even though AMD has become more expensive in recent years I still find they offer the best value solutions. Even with the whole family being on 5000 series Ryzens (the last of the AM4 platform) I still find the value compelling.

Without conciously planning to we have become a team-red family. It happened over time and all I did at each point was look online and ask "who's offering the best value for money".

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