[Help with PC upgrade]

The irony is that Intel almost needs to leave something on the table for AMD. If AMD goes away, Intel runs into anti-trust issues. Microsoft bailed out Apple in the late 90s with a $150 million investment to keep them going, Intel might at some point do the same with AMD.

 

Yes, but not quite. Apple has always been a hardware and software company, though their software is mainly related to their OS. Microsoft was (at the time) almost strictly a software company (no Xbox or Surface Tablets back in those days), and only part of that was the Windows OS. Office was pretty much the only game in town, for PC or Apple. Yeah, Apple was small potatoes as far as market share, but they'd still be shooting themselves in the foot if Apple folded and they lost those customers, since die-hard Mac users are more likely to jump to Linux than the PC market. Apple got some cash and Microsoft got to pretend it was a placation to the anti-trust crowd when in reality it was nothing of the sort, since it was a software company bailing out a hardware maker that also made it's own OS.

 

Intel and AMD both make the same product. Direct competitors.

[Help with PC upgrade]

 

Theres no reason to buy Intel today except i7. Well, if youre not concerned about new games, that is. There are few that you need Intel for. But if youre only concerned about THAT, g3258 will bust i3/slow i5 any day of the week by a large margin.

 

But what you FIRST need is GPU that is not actual bottleneck. Which 90%+ people DONT have in the first place, mostly because of buying expencive CPUs they cant utilise.

 

But we're talking SWTOR here, which doesn't rely on GPU as much as CPU. I'm an AMD fanboy, but if this game is built on an engine that needs good singlethread performance, Intel's gonna win. More modern game that process everything through the graphics card, sure an AMD is going to give Intel some competition.

[Help with PC upgrade]

Side note: I remember the glory days of running an AMD 386DX-40 for half the price of an Intel 486DX-25.

 

I remember the glory days of running an AMD K6-2/400 for half the price of an Intel Pentium II.

 

I remember the glory days of running an AMD Athlon 1000C (K7-Thunderbird) for half the price of an Intel Pentium III.

 

I remember the glory days of running an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (K7-Barton) for half the price of an Intel Pentium IV.

 

 

Oh, you just made me shed a little tear. My first computer I built was a K6-3 450MHz, that was an exciting time. Beat the pants off a Pentium 3 for about a third the price.

 

Then came the Slot A Athlon 700, and RAM got down to about $1 a MB. That was exciting too. I still have that motherboard and processor sitting a box of old computer parts somewhere.

[Help with PC upgrade]

It looks like the new AMD Zen chips will (at least on paper so far) finally compete with Intel as far a single thread performance. Have to wait and see what the actual benchmarks and performance say, and they're not due out until late 2016, but I'm in no hurry to upgrade. If they do in fact put up similar performance finally, and follow the usual AMD practice of being WAAAAAY cheaper than Intel, I know what I'm getting myself next Christmas. And just in time for SWTOR 5.0 maybe.

[Help with PC upgrade]

I know the big drawback to the AMD processors is their general lack of built-in graphics support, which helps since this game uses the CPU more than the GPU. But I'm an AMD guy, have been since I started building computers in '98. Don't see a reason to pay more for an Intel just to get a less powerful chip, but if that's the only thing that will truly improve performance of this game...

 

Some of the new AMD A-series APU's have GPU's built into the chip a'la Intel. Anyone have any luck getting high settings and good FPS on an A-series?

[New faction]

So, I'm thinking that since we now have the Revanites, who the Republic and the Empire are supposed to be teaming together to fight, how cool would it be to make them a third playable faction? PVP would be epic.

[“A Deadly Force Returns” Teaser]

And for those of us who don't have lvl 55 characters to do the Rakata FP, this is relevant. Instead of whining about a good game how about you quit and go back to WOW or Everquest or whatever "better" game you play and let those of us who enjoy it do so without a bunch of whiny children around.

[HK-51 seems pointless don't see the hype.]

If he says "Meatbag," then he is in no way pointless. That will make my game right there. One of the reasons I love playing the KOTOR games is HK-47.

[Server crash?]

I would guess if you're looking at multiple servers in multiple areas being down, the cause is not on the Bioware end. More likely a DoS attack, or some kind of network failure in the DNS realm.