My (possibly disastrous) attempt to build a PC

Yeah the 960 is in a weird place, just like the 285. Better cards available for less. Thing is I really don't like the 970, nvidia didn't need to screw the already narrow memory interface even more- the 290 is a cut down core with a full memory interface after all. The thing is, if you avoid the issue on the 970 (ie keep memory usage below 3.5gb it is impressive). However some games can push that limit even at 1080p, at which point the card starts to stutter (lots of vids on you tube showing this). Personally I'd save some cash and get the 290 instead as its very close in perf and isn't going to randomly start playing up when future titles push the vram harder. I must admit I don't see the point in the 290x as its not sufficiently faster thab the non x to change much. I won't deny the 980 is impressive of course, though its a generation newer than amds current portfolio, and I think that's all about to change (if specs on 390x pan out its going to be crazy fast, as we're basically looking at a 7990 in a single gpu + hbm memory).

The issue with the 970 has been vastly overblown, incidentally. It does happen, but it's nowhere near as prevalent as people have been making it out to be.

Be aware of it when making a purchase, but don't let that be the sole factor in making any decision. AMD are, well, AMD.

I'm not too sure what to make of this statement....

1: If AMD had been the ones to release (and then incorrectly advertise) a card with a dodgy memory setup they would have been crucified... I wonder why nVidia gets an easier ride with this? The card is fine at 1080p currently as most games don't push the vram (hence the 'whats the problem' comments). My question though, is it a good idea to purchase a card that has a known problem like this? If you can guarantee you'll not be wanting to go for higher resolution then maybe? Still it's not like nVidia have reduced the price since this all started, seems a lot to pay for something with this limitation.

2: "AMD are, well, AMD"... care to elaborate?

Whilst we're all familiar with their CPU troubles (essentially they were doing fine until Bulldozer, people forget the past where they repeatedly matched or bested Intel, fingers crossed they can get back on their feet in CPU's again), their GPU division has been doing great work. Ok, nVidia are ahead right now, but only because of the gap between product releases cycles of the two firms. AMD are about to release a new card, what I find painfully frustrating is the difference in the way to two firms are perceived...

The 980 comes out: "the fastest, most efficient, greatest card ever buy buy buy". When the 390X comes out: "The fastest card ever made, but wait to see what nVidia's answer is". As I said before nVidia are *very* good at marketing. All the adjectives used to describe them in articles are highly positive, whilst AMD generally gets a 'meh' reaction, or if it is something so good they can't avoid praising it a bit it's always qualified with a 'but' All I'd say to anyone is try to rise above the marketing. nVidia make good kit, so do AMD. Your money should go to the company that is offering you the best experience for the money- I honestly am not very impressed with nVidias latest (the 960 has a 128 bit memory interface ffs, for a mid range card, in 2015? My GTX 560 was a 256 bit card, and when you push a 960 past 1080p it fails hard).

1. I said nothing about AMD releasing a dodgy card. I'd be just as inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt considering the sheer amount of misinformed rage that accompanies such issues, nevermind the incorrect hardware diagnosis by 85% of the Internet on the subject.

I can think of a number of games that push the 4GB VRAM envelope. My problem is that as far as I'm aware that's not conclusive. The fact that there are games that push 4GB VRAM that might not cause issues is evidence of this. nVidia did themselves absolutely no favours by burying their heads in the sand on the subject (I read their forums and the complaint threads on the subject).

If we now have conclusion proof and / or a statement from nVidia that all cards are affected in such a way and that the issues will occur as soon as the 3.5GB VRAM limit is breached, then that's a different story. But I'm inclined to leniency - as I would be regardless of the manufacturer.

2. AMD are AMD. Their underperforming CPUs by comparison aren't that much of a problem because the price markup (vs. Intel) gains them sales. Their main issues are driver support, notably around the stupid stuff the Catalyst Control Centre randomly likes enforcing on games as well as general drivers and oh god Crossfire jesus how can something be worse than SLI (note: not a fan of SLI either). Maybe the insane power draw on their GPUs, that's a point worth mentioning.

All of this is well-known, hence "AMD are AMD". Don't run to them just because a single nVidia card got a bad writeup. Make an informed judgement considering all available information.

I have a 660GTX 3GB which runs most games perfectly (I have issues with system generation in PA but that's also probably due to my RAM only being 8GB, I could do with doubling it). I've always had a GeForce card and personally given what I've experienced of other peoples' troubles working in tech support when I was younger, I'd never recommend AMD. There is no need for me to get the latest GeForce card, but that doesn't mean that nVidia still aren't value for money.

You see your jumping on the 'AMD drivers omg' band waggon just as much as others are going on against the 970 issues. Having owned cards from both manufacturers (currently I have an Intel / nVidia laptop, an all AMD desktop), AMD drivers really aren't a problem these days (at least on the desktop). In fact having done a lot of work on multi monitor setups I'd recommend AMD over nVidia for those, as Catalyst has far far superior multi monitor support (something nVidia is improving at least, but just try to run dual screens with dissimilar resolutions in Linux on an nVidia card... essentially it isn't possible, also try running 6 screens as 3 mirrored pairs on a single nVidia board....).

AMD's laptop drivers are by all accounts not great (something nvidia got right with optimus). However I can vouch for the stability and usability of their desktop and workstation graphics drivers in comparison to nvidias (essentially the same in my experience). I've not had any serious problems with either. As I said, the attitude about the drivers is just as exaggerated to me as your saying about the 970, also I've done plenty of support on forums, I even used to build and sell machines and again I've not had any circumstances where the issue was 'AMD drivers'. 99% of the time the issue was down to amateur users fiddling with things they shouldn't, so maybe AMD drivers expose more settings than they should?

Can there be problems? Well moving from nVidia to AMD is apparently a cause for concern based on issues I've discussed on support forums, although I recently did exactly that with no problem at all, so again I'm leaning on the fact the 'expert' user in question did something stupid.

Also, this business about the terrible power consumption of AMD boards- they're boards haven't suddenly got worse since the release of the 980 / 970. Actually before those cards came out the R9 270 offered better perf / w than any of the GTX 7XX parts (whoda thought a 'power hungry' GCN card would be more efficinet than Kepler?). Maxwell does add some nice efficiency gains, however it's also a generation newer than what AMD have. Everyone was perfectly happy with nVidia through the Fermi generation when their cards consumed more power (in fact before GCN mopped the floor with Fermi in compute, the argument was 'ahh but nVidia give you compute too, thats why it's less efficient- now the situation is reversed we get 'no one uses compute on a GPU anyway' argument).

Sorry to rant, you seem reasonable enough- I'd just point out though that you've never used an AMD card, so your basing your opinions on stuff you've read. Understandable in your position i suppose, however having had plenty of ATI / AMD cards over the years I have no doubts that the cards will work. They've never given me any trouble, though I'd also say neither has nVidia (well actually I had a Gefoce 2 Ti die on me, but it was time served so can't really citisze it for that).

I mean to put it in perspective I've been following all this for years and in my time I've had:

3D Fx Voodoo 3 2000 pci (16 mb of vram, wohoo!- was badass back in the day for Mech Warrior 3).
Geforce 2 MX 200 32mb
Geforce 2 Ti (hand me down of a friend, eventually died)
ATi Radeon 7000 VE (cheap card to replace the dead Ti, worked ok though was slower).
Nvidia Geforce 7600 GT (great card back in the day) & at same time a laptop with an on board Radeon 9000m (slower as laptop part, but ran Command and Conquer generals surprisingly well).
ATi Radeon 2600 (in gf's machine, still in service in my parents rig so my mum can play Plats vs Zombies, lol).
Ati Radeon HD 4600 (great card, now allowing a friend of mine to play minecraft at over 5fps for the first time haha).
Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 (my last card, was still doing ok for most games, though decided to get something with more vram as it was becoming a bottleneck, this is now spare atm).
AMD Radeon R9 280. (my current card, working fine under Windwos and Linux, even runs the Star Citizen alpha ok).
Current Laptop: Geforce GT 420M (96 cuda core fermi part, surprisingly good for a laptop chip, runs PA ok on low settings).

I'm by no means allied to either side, however all the above cards worked fine. I can only tell it like it is- I think some of this 'AMD drivers suck' is a made up myth frankly. I've heard moving between manufacturers cards without reinstalling the OS can be a problem (though I managed it ok with this machine, if it was I would have just wiped it and installed again).

wiat @cdrkf ae you on linux?

I was on Xubuntu, about to install latest vanilla ubuntu as you mention it's improved lately. This is dual boot with Windows 7. Multi monitor configs on linux work much better with AMD cards in my experience.

I'm not jumping on anything, please don't dismiss my posts as such. My opinions are based on years providing tech support for various games more than anything, my job and such aren't really that related. I'm glad ya think I'm reasonable, but nothing gets me unreasonable faster than been classed as "jumping on a bandwagon" (nor am I the reverse, the famed hipster)

AMD drivers are unreliable based the innumerable people I've helped personally over the years. This is more than my perspective, and more than some rants I've read on the Internet (I've read rants about both manufacturers).

Can the cards work? Of course, just like the 970 can work. But I'm not saying every single AMD card is broken beyond repair here!

Even nowadays, my tech support days far behind me (I simply don't have the time I once did) I still see complaints about Catalyst on new games like CoH 2 (as Relic are one of my favourite developers, I still lurk their forums). I see complaints about Crossfire and SLI. I see complaints about GeForce Shadowplay not working effectively. But I, on average, read far more support threads about AMD. I dealt with many myself as recently as DoW II: Retribution (2009, and ironically the first Relic title to have the AMD logo as supposed to nVidia) whereas GeForce cards were fine by comparison.

Buy whatever you want at the end of the day. But don't use the 970 as a basis for bigging up AMD.

Also, I'm a Windows man personally, as are most gamers I've helped over the years (Heroes of Newerth has a large Linux contingent, but that's rare for a game really and I wasn't the main Linux support contact).

same.

common 15 come out! come ouuuuuuuuuut!

so cheers and party poppers on you gating back in with mainline Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!

what picked my curiosity is that linux ports of Amd drivers are reputably bad.

personally I did run something like a Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 2GB on my ubuntu and comparitively I must say that it did look like Ati gave no shiit about how you ran your amd card on a linux.

a lot of the buttons in the driver config app were'nt even removed (and of course not hooked).

and I also defer to @SXX , who on a regular basis tells me how shiit they are.

AMD linux drivers aren't as good as their Windows drivers (which is SXX's main gripe, you get more fps out of the same hardware in Windows which is annoying, nVidia have *yery recently* improved the standing of their linux drivers mainly due to Valve picking them as main partner for their Steam machines). That said, many functions of nVidia's proprietary linux drivers don't work properly (seriously it's simply *not possible* to get dual screens with different resolutions working under linux with nVidia, unless they've fixed it in the last 3 months, ATi / AMD never had this issue, and it's kinda basic).

The other thing to bear in mind of the AMD vs nVidia on linux, is there are fairly decent open source AMD drivers available, but nothing usable for nVidia. They're not as fast as the proprietary drivers, but many Linux users prefer to keep everything open source, which limits you to AMD or Intel for your GPU.

@Gorbles you really are jumping on a bandwagon here.

To quote you from before, without ever owning a card yourself, and talking to someone who has owned plenty "I'd never recommend AMD"... that is very biased and ultimately this attitude will result in:

1: Bankrupt AMD
2: nVidia monopoly on the desktop (which they will get away with now the PC market place isn't the only market, they'll count all the ARM vendors as 'competitors')
3: Grossly increased prices for weak hardware because nVidia will have no competition. nVidia have *no* problem charging thousands for their silicon if they can get away with it (see Titan Z, or anything with a 'Quadro' label on it).

Actually custom AMD cards are inside of the consoles being sold today (as well as last generations)

I know, however it's also true AMD aren't in great financial shape (if they went under, someone would buy the ip / rights for the console APU's I'm sure). It's fair enough when they have bad product, but the problem is people still avoid them when they have good kit on the basis 'omg drivers'.

Well don't worry, the new computer I'm gonna get is going to have an AMD GPU. =)

Also- What is an APU?

Accelerated processing unit = CPU+GPU in one chip. Most of Intel CPUs have integrated graphics but Intel still calls them "CPU", while AMD calls theirs "APU".
edit: Generally APU can mean any processor "accelerated" with some extra logic.

Originally AMD defined an APU as a fully combined processor (i.e. the CPU and GPU bits on the same die, where intel simply had a gpu in the same package but on a separate bit of silicon. Now Intel's GPU is fully integrated as well, although they don't have it as closely tied together as AMD does with HSA).

Edit: out of interest for those that (like me) we're curious how Intel got so much better with GPU tech so quickly- the simple answer is they've licensed a load of patents from nVidia in exchange for some of their CPU 'special sauce' (which nVidia are busy baking into their Tegra processors).

Why is my opinion biased? Why isn't your opinion biased? Everyone's opinion is biased, but I have no bandwagon.

You're discounting me telling you about literal years of tech support where literally AMD was the #1 complaint source.

And no, me telling people things by myself will not cause the downfall of AMD. You started off well, but you've gone to extreme exaggeration / doomsday scenario mode. Peace out.

Lol, the simple fact is that many 'experts' advise everyone to avoid AMD kit at all costs. You yourself have *never owned an AMD card* and quite happily advise other to avoid them because you 'know' that they cause problems. The issue I have is your 'experience' with these cards is based entirely on feedback of others,. The end result of this 'in the know' rubbish is that nVidia are getting a disproportionately large market share despite the fact they've been playing catch up with AMD since the launch of the 7970.

Maybe there are problems with AMD on those (the?) specific game you did all the support for? All the games I've played / play work fine on AMD kit (as they also do on nVidia). I also help out allot on support forums (do quite a bit over on Toms, as well as here for PA), and AMD kit isn't causing any more trouble than nVidia is.

Fun fact:

When someone tells you they've dealt with tech support for years, you kinda need to come up with opposing evidence or bow to the fact that their experience is more relevant than yours.

Enjoy your AMD bias, and your AMD bandwagon

hold on, I don't really think that's the case.

in fact most unboxing youtubers treat AMD and nVidia equally.

Not for everyone, no thankfully. However there is a general undertone that if all things are equal, get nVidia. To put it another way, lots of folks come onto Toms asking for ideas for a build at a given budget. The number of times people get shot down for suggesting an AMD card, despite the fact that (at given price point) they offer the best solution is quite frustrating.

My point is simply that based on lots of first hand experience, with lots of cards dating back into the 90's, I've not experienced all this problems that people cite. I'm not saying there are no issues (there have been all sorts of screw ups from both companies over the years), just that you should look at the hardware, what games you want to play and the price and make a decision based on that- not on the basis of 'nVidia is bettah bro' :/