14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has been the subject of rather unfortunate PR over the past couple of quarters, so it decided to do something about it, namely get gamers to bring it good PR themselves.
Recently, there was an AMD & HardOCP Game Experience event in Texas, which involved two sets of gaming machines and a number of different people asked to play on them.
One set was made up of two gaming rigs intended for people on a budget (each had one monitor), one based on an AMD chip and one on an Intel CPU.
The second set was composed of two high-end installations, also powered by an Intel and AMD platform, respectively (both had three-monitor setups).
Nothing seems so strange yet, but AMD did put a twist on things: it made the rigs in each set look completely alike, down to the peripherals.
Also, it refused to tell the players which was the AMD system and which wasn't.
That way, the people who got to test the machines could, without prejudice, tick on a sheet of paper whether one brought a better experience than the other, or if there was no difference that they could discern.
In the high-end setup (Radeon HD 7970 graphics drove 3-monitor Eyefinity), the Intel desktop had an Intel Core i7-2700K running on an ASRock P67 Fatal1ty motherboard. Meanwhile, the other had an AMD FX-8150 (yes, the one that sold surprisingly fast) on an ASRock 990FX Fatal1ty platform.
AMD expected the 'no difference' box to be ticked by most players, hence the positive PR hopes, but what it got was even better.
Though there were 28 'no difference votes', 73 people felt that System B (AMD FX-8150) ran better. Meanwhile, the Intel rig got 40 votes.
The situation at the budget setup, where system A (based on ASRock H61 chipset motherboard) had an Intel Core i3-2105 and system B (ASRock A55 chipset motherboard) relied on an A8-3850 chip, was even better.
Only two people saw no difference, while 5 players liked system A and no less than 136 people enjoyed playing on system B the most (the integrated graphics fight was one-sided indeed).
All in all, Advanced Micro Devices really was on to something when it called this the AMD Reality Check Test.
