Legit Reviews

Hi Nate –

Six months ago you would have been hard pressed to draw an analogy between a nursery rhyme like Goldilocks and the PC industry, but with a strained economy and an even more competitive PC market, we might as well be sitting in front of three bowls of porridge for how things are playing out.

As a PC buyer, it’s hard to know what to believe. On one side, you’ve got Intel claiming that to improve your computing experience you need a more powerful CPU, and that whether you’re buying new or upgrading, ratcheting up the power of your processor is the ticket to better computing. On the other side, you’ve got Nvidia claiming that the way to get the best experience is by using a more powerful graphics processor, and that buffing up your CPU doesn’t give you much. Who are consumers to believe? Obviously each company has its own bias simply because of their core competencies.

If there’s someone in the middle of all of this whose answers could be considered “just right”, it’s AMD, the only company of the three that has a portfolio of both CPUs and discrete GPUs. AMD’s take: you actually need both for a great computing experience. It’s not an either/or situation, but that doesn’t mean that having that great experience has to cost an arm and a leg. What you want to do with your PC dictates the type of technology needed.

These shifting market dynamics are resulting in a number of often conflicting messages hitting consumers today.