Quote Originally Posted by lonerider View Post
I'm sure you have built enough computers to have a good sense of what's good and what's not when it comes to hardware. In my case, I have owned and operated a small computer shop for 6 years (built HUNDREDs of custom/whitebox computers, upgraded/rebuilt HUNDREDS of branded ones), worked in a couple of companies as tech support specialist and network admin for over 8 years, etc (not going to post my full resume here, lol). I'd say my experience in the field of PC hardware would be enough to have led me to be brand-neutral (Intel vs. AMD). I've witnessed both had ups and downs for the past 2 decades... have to admit though Intel has the edge right now when it comes to overall performance.
While we're exploring the Appeal to Authority fallacy, having worked at or as a vendor to tier 1 PC OEMs and their ODMs for about 14 years now and leading teams that have shipped hundreds of unique products and thousands of individual units through the software QA process (and seen the 3rd-level support data coming back from the field), I don't personally know anyone in the industry that will choose an AMD-based product over a comparably priced (i.e.: within ~20%) Intel-based product when it comes to their home machines or for friends/family units. Seeing the statistics on defect counts throughout the product cycles, I can only report that I've seen enough data that AMD is behind not due to any pogrom on the part of us Intel Fanboys.

That said, when I say "much less stable," we're talking about small percentages that would probably be buried in the noise of bad driver updates, buggy applications, thermal issues due to dust, cheap peripheral hardware, misconfigured timings in BIOS and general cruft most users abuse their systems with.