** I wanted to post in the PC forum but that option was not available **

This is a strange blog really, and I don’t want it start any flame wars, I would really like it to turn into a healthy debate, I want to start with some scene setting though and then I want to move on to ask a question, please try and stay with me if you’re interested in where this might go.

The Scene:

You are in a supermarket buying a loaf of bread and you see they have introduced a new size loaf that offers you extra bread, your normal loaf costs 1.00 (pick your currency) the new bigger loaf will cost you 1.57. Essentially you are facing a 21% increase in volume for a 57% increase in price. If both the smaller and larger loaf of bread were exactly the same brand then I think most people would not be tempted by such a proposition. If the bigger loaf was a better premium brand against the standard loaf then I think some people might be tempted while others would consider the bread to be less important than the quality of filling they use to make their sandwiches. Personally I’m a fillings person, premium bread with a plain filling is ok, but plain bread with a premium filling is better.

That’s it, that’s my case, so what am I talking about? I used bread as I have yet to come across a bread based flame war and more or less everyone I know, knows what it is.

A friend, someone who’s opinion I hold in high regard for most PC related matters said I should change my AMD CPU for an Intel CPU, but I see the benefits in the same light as I see the argument for paying 57% more money to get a 21% bigger loaf. Yes, I agree that the Intel is the Premium brand, and this is confirmed by CPU World who conducted 35 bench tests in which the i7 came out on top in every single one. The results were shown as the winning score being rated at 100% and then the next score shown as a percentage of the winning score. Of course 35 scores of 100 when expressed as an average is not surprisingly still 100% so I will look at the average score of the AMD which topped out at 98.9% and achieved a minimum score of 48%, the average over the 35 tests was 78.6% meaning on average the i7 outperformed the Phenom by 21.4%.

The i7 2600k retails in the UK for £236.60 and the 1100T retails for £149.94 which is a difference of £86.61, that difference expressed as a percentage increase over the AMD price is 57.8%, now my friend’s argument is that this is not important, the price to performance difference is not as important as the performance difference and that is the reason he would choose the i7 over an AMD. My reason for picking an AMD is that if I am going to spend an extra 57% I want at least an extra 57% percent return in performance gain; instead I only get 21%.

Now I don’t want to get into a debate over which is really better AMD or Intel, ATi or nVidia, because to tell the truth I don’t care about that, I think they are all good and I buy the parts that I think will make me happy, after all it is me that I am buying it for. If can get 80fps in a game an increase to 96fps won’t make a big difference to me, just so long as I am getting a decent frame rate with high settings at the highest resolution my screen can handle, then I have a system that makes the games I want to play perfectly playable.

What do you guys think? Do you say best performance at any cost? Or are you more for balancing costs with performance?