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For the first proper PC I built for myself, I used an Athlon XP 3200+. It worked out cheaper than the Intel equivalent at the time.

I outgrew it and ended up with a Core 2 Duo which later got upgraded to a Core 2 Quad equivalent Xeon. Now I'm running an i7-6700K as AMD weren't competitive 3 years ago.

For customer builds, I really want to buy more AMD, but a couple of niggles keep steering me back to Intel:

1. Stability. It's taken a whole years worth of BIOS and AMD chipset driver updates to yield stable performance for serious work like AutoCAD. And I've got my fingers crossed that we're out of the woods now.

2. Reliability. In my 35 years with computers, I've seen more completely dead AMD motherboards than I have Intel. And that's despite AMD having less market share over the years.

3. IPC. AMD still lags Intel when it comes to single core performance and raw clock rates. The gap is much narrower now with Ryzen so I'd be prepared to look past this were it not for the more serious points 1 & 2 above.

I also can't help but wonder why so many WiFi adapters don't maintain stable connections running on Ryzen boards as they do on Intel.

Don't just take my word for it, look at some reviews of Ryzen based laptops.

I know AMD have really done a lot to catch up with Intel when it comes to bang per buck and I really want AMD to do even better. I just hope they can improve on the areas I've mentioned above, because these really are crucial factors for long term success.