Maximum PC

The theme of Operation Upgrade in your July 2012 issue had me excited to receive my issue and start planning on what upgrades I could make to my current systems, only to receive the issue and find out that you had only picked out Intel hardware to feature. Since I started reading MaximumPC over five years ago, your reviewers have constantly reminded me that going with an Intel platform, whether it was the 1366 or 1156 or 1155 or 2133 socket, could lock you into one generation of processor, while an AMD platform had a longer lifespan. So when I started into the article only to find out that Operation Upgrade was Intel sales call, I was MaximumPCly disappointed. If you are going to call an issue "Operation Upgrade", how about a couple of AMD upgrades as well, one for the components and one for the latest platform. Your authors keep telling us that Intel has the only compelling upgrades right now, but there is a lot going on right now with AMD processors that you are not reporting. You have some work to do to make this up to readers like me.

-Dave Feitl

Because AMD is losing ground when it comes to price/performance. Let's take AMD's latest and greatest, the FX-8150. It barely outperforms the Phenom II X4 980 BE. And where it does beat it, it's due to the program being programmed for multiple processors in mind (which cannot be done with every program).

Check it out: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/434?vs=362

Versus the part it was supposed to compete against, the Core i7-2600K, it loses by a good margin in all benches except multithreaded ones that use more cores.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/434?vs=287

And Maximum PC does place emphasis on price/performance when it comes to DIY stuff. AMD doesn't really have that anymore.

The point was not whether Intel builds faster processors or not, but that the Issue and the article was called Operation Upgrade, then only cover one manufacturer's parts. As far as price performance goes, if we are going to talk about raw CPU performance, then my friend, you are correct, the Bulldozer core running on XP or Windows 7 is a disappointment. However, there is a whole segment of APU's that AMD is developing that have Radeon 6000 series cores in them that graphically kick Intel's integrated butt. If you had built a budget system with descent gaming graphics, I don't think you can find a better price/performance ratio than the AMD solution. And isn't part of being an enthusiast getting great performance out of budget parts? I don't have the money to be spending $800 - $3600 on an upgrade (though who wouldn't if they could). Maybe I'm wrong, but wouldn't you be better served reaching out to the a millions geeks who could lay down $300 - $400 on parts rather than a thousand who are willing to pay $800+? I also find it interesting that the overclockers who are setting records in the 9Ghz range right now are doing it with AMD processors. Doesn't that say something about the untapped potential? I have useful computers in my stash that are both Intel and AMD platforms. I am just saying I got a issue that was half full (or half empty).

Then maybe the issue is the title of the article itself, because an $800 budget is enough to build a decent machine.

Unfortunately I don't have access to the article myself. But I'm going to imagine it was like an upgrading article way back in 2004 on similar budgets (to the point where one was basically a complete build and all they recycled was the video card). And all I can say is: what are you trying to upgrade? If you're going to do a complete system overhaul, then you do need to start thinking about bringing a bigger budget, otherwise you'll have a "modern platform" that performs just as good as the system you were trying to replace.

AMD's APU system is flawed because of its unique socket requirement. You can't put anything other than its APUs in there. Considering that their best APU CPU wise is an Athlon II X4, you have a higher chance of bottlenecking current generation high-end graphics cards. So from a performance standpoint when upgrading is in mind, the APU system doesn't make sense. So sure, while Intel's IGPU offerings are balls, at least 1. the platform is compatible with the mainstream parts and 2. it holds better when paired with a current generation high-end graphics card.

And overclocking an FX-8150 to 9GHz not only required liquid nitrogen cooling, but it was just for bragging rights. Clock speed is also a poor measurement of generic performance, considering that the FX-8150 is 3.6GHz stock to 4.2GHz with automatic overclocking while the Core i7-2600K is 3.4GHz stock with 3.8GHz automatic overclocking and it has no trouble beating the FX-8150 by a good margin in most tests.