Re: What's the Deal With AMD
Hmm. I used to hear a lot of things, some saying AMD was great, others saying Intel is the way to go for audio production. I finally got to draw my own tentative conclusion; Intel has an edge. Not saying that will hold for everyone, but here's my story:
In 2016 I got a machine from Cyberpower with an AMD fx8320. 8 cores, 3.5 ghz speed. And the price was a lot cheaper than I thought. It worked well, but because this was a gaming machine, a lot of emphasis was placed on graphics and performance, so it fanned like a boss. Even at its quietest, it was moderately loud, and while it didn't bother me per say, it did make me think. Over time I wondered if it really needed to be that loud. This was my first fancy machine though; before that I was using really cheapo computers with duel core processors and 3-4 gb of ram, just so that I'd have something to use. This was back in the days of Win7 as well. But when getting the AMD, I wanted something that would work well for music production and multitasking, and it seemed a good choice. But every time I posed questions on Twitter especially, such as "Are things supposed to hang this much?" I'd always get replies like "What processor do you have?" And when I told them AMD, they would scoff and say "That's why. Nobody serious uses AMD for audio." To be fair, these are audio people I did respect, having heard some of their work before and having talked to them on other occasions, so while I did take offense to their dismissal, I also sort of believed they knew what they were talking about.
About 6 months ago, the fans in that machine started getting even louder and making horrible rattling noises, and cleaning didn't help, so it looked like I'd have to replace fans. The headphone jack on the tower also went out, it was my fault because the plug accidentally got yanked and bent the jack frame out of shape, because they put the jack in a messy place where it felt really weird to plug and unplug stuff.
I eventually got to the point where I just wanted a new computer which didn't have any issues. I sort of was like, "hell, why don't I just get a nice Intel that's comparable to my AMD machine, or maybe slightly inferior? This way I'd have a shot at a fair comparison between the two and if Intel is as great as people have told me it is, it'll be a win win."
I ended up getting a Dell XPS 8930. It's customizable, so I picked options which were roughly equivalent to my AMD, and then got rid of stuff I didn't need (better graphics, and wifi since myInternet on ddesktop is wired etc.) In the end, I chose Intel I7 9th gen (8 cores, 3 ghz if I remember right), 16 gb of ram. The price was at least a couple hundred bucks more than the Cyberpower, but lower than non-customizable machines with the specs I wanted. Thanks to Covid I had to wait about 6 weeks to get it, but I did get it and... well. It was a nightmare to set up the way I wanted because I had to kill Waves Max Audio, find a way to force it not to come back, had to reinstall Windows to get rid of the crap they bundled with it, neither of which I had to deal with before, but I learned a lot from it. At the end of the day, I really love the machine. Fans are so quiet I often can't hear them, and performance? I mean it feels about the same, but it shines when I'm doing stuff in Reaper. I can push it about twice as hard before I run into trouble, and it is definitely more responsive during heavy tasks. Which goes completely against my expectations; I thought that since the Intel's speed was slower, (3 ghz as opposed to AmD's 3.5 ghz) that I would get slightly less performance but, my results at least are opposite. Of course, there are probably a million reasons why this could be the case, I'm not knowledgeable enough on this stuff to be cognizant of any of them.
Now that I think about it though, I haven't done a super fair comparison really. I'm comparing 2016 AMD with 2020 Intel. And I never laid the machines out side-by-side, with the same configuration, equally fresh installations of Windows etc. to see how they handle certain tasks. Hell, maybe the AmD will do just as well on a clean Windows installation, but I kinda doubt it. It might do better than I usually see, but I tentatively feel like it won't be able to match. Still, I won't know until I try.
So... I guess in conclusion to all this, if you're on the fence, I'd say just go with what feels right. I personally think Intel performs better and I get a little too paranoid aobut performance, not realizing sometimes that there are other reasons to consider one over the other, and also keeping in mind that my experience may not mean a whole lot compared to the many others people have had. So, do your own research if you can, and do what feels right.
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