4 Reasons Intel is better than AMD for gaming
I have four AMAZING REASONS I ALWAYS RECOMMEND INTEL for every new gaming PC – so listen up! First, Intel obviously stands for INTELLIGENCE so it’s great, whereas AMD is just AND spelled wrong, so it’s dumb. Second, blue is a cooler colour than red, meaning Intel must run cooler and faster! Third, Intel’s chip numbers are higher – their latest chip is called the i9-14900KS, whereas AMD’s terrible ones are like.. 7600. That’s 7,000 less! Lastly, Intel is so much better value! Look, this AMD chip is an insane £600, but the Intel i5-14600K 14 core 20 thread BEAST is just £300. That’s AMAZING VALUE!
[Leave camera rolling, AMD hands me a comically large “INTEL SPONSOR MONEY” cheque. I ‘realise’ the camera is still rolling and scramble. Cut to me taking the intel hoodie off and talking more seriously]
If you didn’t pick up on the satire, that was, in fact, a joke. It’s actually a reference to this, an article published last week on XDA-Developers.com, making some frankly even more insane claims that my mockumentary did! The article is actually called “4 reasons I always recommend Intel over AMD to the average gamer”, with the byline, “For most gamers out there, Intel is clearly the better choice when building a gaming PC. Here are the simple reasons why”. It is exactly as insane as it sounds – so let’s go through it and see just how high on Intel’s marketing Tanveer was when writing this. Although, to be abundantly clear, this is not a call for anyone to harass XDA or any of their writers on my behalf. Don’t give them the clicks.
Point one, “AMD’s stability issues are still worse than Intel’s”. This is an incredibly funny one, because it’s a completely unrelated title masking a complete false equivalency. His point is essentially that AMD chips don’t like running overclocked RAM, whereas Intel chips generally don’t mind it. This is a false equivalency because the chips themselves don’t benefit from super-overclocked RAM speeds, whereas Intel chips do seem to benefit more from faster RAM. It’s an incredibly marginal difference, often not worth the extra cost, and it voids your CPU’s warranty too, but to say “well AMD doesn’t work well with overclocked RAM, so it’s bad” is laughable. It’s also funny that he brushes past the recent Intel CPU game crashing issue Hardware Unboxed did a full video talking about this week – he says “well that only applies to the 13900K and 14900K which is too high end for the average gamer anyway”. Yet he is complaining you can’t use overclocked RAM on AMD chips? What?
I also want to point out that the final paragraph here is insane too: “What this boils down to is that anyone not willing to grapple with RAM replacements or tweaking BIOS settings for manual memory overclocking should simply pick Intel for their gaming build.” That is a truly amazing leap of logic there. If you don’t want to spend time overclocking your RAM, just buy in-spec RAM for either CPU. If you want the best performance on either platform it is generally known that tweaking the timings is more important than the transfer rate, and that’s something you’d need to do on both chips. I think that also implies that DOCP and EXPO doesn’t exist too, which is flat out wrong.
The next point is amazing. “AMD’s power efficiency isn’t a huge factor”, and “Every gaming PC has a decent cooler”. The meat of it here is basically arguing that if you have a suitable CPU cooler, who cares that it’s a space-heater. Apparently power consumption doesn’t matter, and ironically that overclocking “isn’t something you’d be interested in, being a no-nonsense gamer” – wait I’m confused. Are you a no-nonsense gamer who doesn’t care about overclocking, or do you care a lot about overclocking so Intel’s higher memory speeds are super important? Which is it? Obviously, this point is laughably dumb. Even if you ignore power consumption, which yeah especially for a CPU while gaming isn’t likely to be hundreds a year in difference, you still have all that heat being dumped into your room, and on hot summer nights that’s an absolute killer. It’s also a significant point to consider – Intel’s chips generally drink power. You can’t just negate a negative point by saying ‘yeah but who cares really?’.
Point three, “Intel provides more bang for the buck”, “Budget and mid-range have Intel written all over them”. He compares the 13600KF at “under $250” to the 7600X which is… cheaper. $25 cheaper, by his reckoning. But the 13600K is faster, right? He even says so! Well Hardware unboxed says otherwise – in their 12 game average the 7600X comes out ahead, even with the oh-so-precious faster RAM too. So, how is the 13600K a better value? I don’t know. To then follow that up with “Choosing Intel places you in a better position in terms of the value you get from your processor.” is the most unsubstantiated sentence I’ve read. So far.
As for point four, “AMD’s platform longevity isn’t a must-have”, “The average gamer isn’t chasing easy CPU upgrades”. Honestly, I want whatever Tanveer is smoking. He claims the average budget gaming PC should last for 3 to 4 years without ANY upgrades. Cool. Guess how long AMD supported AM4? THERE ARE STILL NEW AM4 CHIPS BEING LAUNCHED IN 2024! From 2017 to, let’s be harsh and say 2022, that’s FIVE years. So someone who built a budget system in, say 2018, can still upgrade to a brand new generation of chips in 2022. That is an incredible benefit, so to just discount it with no substantive justification is insane.
This sentence is just.. Chef’s kiss: “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a huge plus for those after seamless processor upgrades, but that’s not something everyone cares about. This is why Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs are great for mainstream gaming PCs despite them being the last generation to support the existing LGA 1700 socket.”. Or in short, “while this is a genuinely compelling benefit, I don’t care, which is why these effectively end-of-life chips are great!”. Even better, he then says that value-for-money is more important than upgradability – which discounts the fact that upgradability IS A MAJOR FACTOR IN THE VALUE PROPOSITION! Like, if you know you can buy an AM5 board today, some DDR5, and a compatible cooler, and in 5 years time upgrade to a brand new, much faster CPU, well your upgrade cost is just the CPU. Buy a Raptor Lake chip today and you KNOW you will have to buy a new motherboard, cooler, and maybe even RAM, just to use it. To claim you care about value, then discount a significant portion of the value proposition shows this is not a well thought out discussion.
The final paragraph is just hilarious, talking about how weird it is that popular sentiment is driven by marketing, enthusiast opinions and YouTube videos – you know, like every industry, and how “AMD might turn out to be the better choice for many users, but, by and large, the average gamer stands to gain a faster, better value, and safer gaming rig by picking up Intel over AMD in the current market”. A claim substantiated by no observable facts. Genuinely, how much money did Intel pay you XDA? Because that’s about the only reason I could imagine you’d write drivel like this.
Somewhat hilariously, they later updated the article with this note. They changed the headlines to pretend to be more balanced, but most of the text is the same. There are a couple of minor tweaks to soften the shilling, but the points are still ostensibly the same, as is the conclusion. This still acts as a ChatGPT-written Intel marketing device. Now I don’t actually think Intel paid for this – doing so and not disclosing that relationship is actively illegal in a lot of countries, and is shady AF either way, so without any evidence of those payments or contracts, I’m going with Occam’s razor here. Realistically this is the writer’s preferences written in a pseudo-professional way, in an effort to meet a seemingly sisyphean publication quota, and drive ragebait/clickbait viewership. I mean, look at how many ads are meant to be on this page – 11 by my count. I have to imagine this article got significantly higher traffic than usual, so I guess it worked.
Just looking at one of the other writer’s profiles on XDA’s site shows they are contributing at an insane pace – at least one article per day, with some days having three articles. That is an insane pace for any level of quality – like this article about the “Best Motherboards for Intel Core i9-14900K”. This is a fairly cursory spec-sheet comparison of a few higher end boards. There’s no testing here, there’s no insight into the usability or overclocking stability, it’s all just reading from the product page and going “well that one has more ports”. If I was going to post a video called “best X for Y” I’d want to have tested all the options and be able to give you a genuine insight into the products and their performance – more than just comparing spec sheets. This sort of content-mill leads to content like this, and sensationalist crap like the Intel one. It’s all affiliate link farming clickbait. It’s targeting the less experienced and knowledgeable people who are just searching for “what CPU to buy for gaming”, and are being delivered a professional sounding article that gives, on the surface, some pretty sound points for why you should buy this over that (via this little link right here…)
As a wider point I wanted to address – I really don’t get fanboyism. You gain nothing from attaching yourself to a single brand or product. The market changes, your situation changes, so the best choice for you changes too. Maybe Intel does genuinely make more sense for you right now – awesome, go for it. But maybe in a couple years AMD makes the best chip for you – but if you’re a diehard Intel fanboy, well now you’re stuck with a worse chip because you’ve attached yourself to a brand who really, really doesn’t care about you. These are all corporations. If AMD was in Intel’s position, they would end up being just as cutthroat and anti-consumer. It’s so much better to make an informed decision than it is to take it as a personal attack when a competitor does a better job. There is no one right answer. Intel is not infinitely better than AMD, nor is AMD the sole choice you should make. It is different for everyone.
