I'm not exactly ready to discard my Intel system just yet and throw money at an AMD system. But I'm very close, really. I'm thinking of the recent news coming to light about the susceptibility of Intel systems to Meltdown. Of course the case, psu, ddr4 ram and SSD would all transfer, if I were to make the switch.
The sort of distressing thing is that if I get a Ryzen cpu and mobo, I'm going to have to have some sort of discrete graphics card. My understanding is that there's not integrated graphics on the Ryzen chips, is that right? Which is just disappointing because I was entirely happy with the integrated graphics on this Kaby Lake Celeron. Plays HD streaming netflix just fine, etc. But, that's probably the extent of my power-usage.
I want to see how all this Meltdown/Spectre stuff plays out. I mean the susceptibility of the Intel chips, I take it, isn't brand-new, but these threats seem to be new-ish. I read through the responses from both Intel, and AMD, and I have to say if I were to read between the lines, the Intel response sounded almost frantic, and the AMD response sounded, well - rather confident. So I'll see what happens. I was probably going to upgrade my system, anyway, and so now that this has all come to light, I think I know what direction my upgrade might take... cpu/mobo/graphics card.
I don't want to throw tons of $$ at a graphics card, but if I do purchase one, I'd certainly want it to be superior to the integrated (Intel) graphics I just mentioned, not
inferior. Cursory glance, I know nothing about these things, but I was looking at this AMD Radeon RX560. Maybe I could get it for... meh. $100? Something like that. That's about as much as I want to spend. Again, I'm not gaming or any other power-usage. I compared the RX560 to the HD 630 integrated graphics that comes with the higher-end Intel chips, on UserBenchmark:
http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-RX-560-vs-Intel-HD-630-Desktop-Kaby-Lake/3926vsm178724So it sort of looks like it would eat the HD 630 graphics for lunch. Any other ideas about this? Anyone? Also, were I to actually get that GPU, should I expect it to play nice with peppermint 7? Or PM8? (I'm currently running PM7) I mean could I expect it to be more-or-less plug and play?
Just curious. Like I said, I'm not ready to abandon ship just yet until it seems everyone has a clearer grasp on this issue. I actually just canceled an order for a large HDD that I was going to use for storage on this system, which I never really found very compelling, anyway. Anyway, Amazon was sort of dawdling, as Amazon will often do... and so I had the opportunity to change my mind, and maybe I'll just save this credit back for a while until I figure out what the hell is going on with Intel and Meltdown. This I find a lot
more compelling than a little more storage. Or, frankly, even more so than the most-powerful processor, or the snappiest SSD.
So far, nothing has Melted Down. But it still bugs me. Seems like Intel knew about this thing for a rather long time, and just sat on it and didn't do anything. There's this, today, from CNBC: "AMD shares are up 10.4 percent in the two days through Thursday following the report, while Intel's stock declined 5.2 percent in the period, wiping out $11.3 billion of shareholder value."
This thing about the "fundamental design flaw" in the Intel chips leaked (I read this on the Intel site) about a week earlier than they were hoping, they had some "patches" scheduled to come out next week, and were hoping to keep it quiet until then. And the thing apparently really blew up in their face. But I'm surprised they've been able to keep it quiet for whatever it is - 10 or 20yrs??? Anyway, the shit really hit the fan in the media, and now they're freaking out and saying wait, wait, the media is really exaggerating this thing, and it's really not that much of a problem...
But a lot of smart folks are saying they're
not (exaggerating) and that it really
is (a problem). It's exactly the way you'd expect a massive corporation/bureaucracy to react when they get caught in a lie, and lose $11BIL in share value in two days. And then out of the other side of their forked PR-tongue: we care about security!
Apparently not.
ANYHOO. There, I've said it, I've vented. But what would you make of, say, a new AM4 motherboard, Ryzen 3 1200 with this Radeon RX560, running Peppermint 7? (Or 8?)