Jester,

I really don't have a good handle on what is up with AMD and its spectacular and fast rise from near-death levels. More than a year ago I bought 1k @$3.70 and just hadn't gotten around to swallowing my medicine and taking the loss. On the graphics side, they've basically re-branded video cards that are very long in the tooth, based on a 2012 28nm build I think, and have tweaked the clock speeds, power consumption (their cards have been hogs), and added more GDDR5 (the 380 used to be 2 or 3 gb - it now comes in an '8' gb 'flavor.)

On the whole, their cards are arguably a little better value than Nvidia, but Nvidia's stock price rise from the teens to the 30's pretty much tells the story of who is winning that battle. So it ain't their graphics division. Ms. Su took over as CEO from Rory ...., who proved to be a large disappointment, so she probably has some goodwill going for her. But yeah, your puzzlement is real and worthy of consideration. I haven't heard of any great wins with their SOC or other gambit products. I think maybe lt cap, with his background, might have a line on other areas of their business which might explain this rise.

If you're buying games on the cheap, you may or may not be interested in hardware deals. But if you are.....I had read that Staples will price match with anyone who has an online presence and B and M stores. So....I always see Microcenter ads with some astounding deals, but the best ones are in store only, and I don't have any within a couple thousand miles (where you live, they do have some stores). So, one of the new pc platforms, a faster alternative to the new Intel skylake processors, are the Haswell-E series - 3 'flavors' - 5960X for about $1k, (8 cores), 5930x for approx. $600 (6cores) and 5820k (6cores, I think, but 28 pci lanes rather than 40) for about $400.

Microcenter had the 5930x for $400. In store only. I walked into Staples, asked for a price match, they checked to see if they had a Brick and Mortar store - determined it by seeing 'add to cart' must mean b/m, and placed an order for it, and it arrived in about a week. Nice. This past weekend I tried to ask them for a price match with Fry's on a nice x99 motherboard for that processor - they pointed me to their price match policy, which was quite restrictive, and neither fry's nor microcenter was on the list.

HOWEVER......in Staples sunday add, they changed their price match policy - it is now 110%, has reverted back to the only criteria being that the p/m be at a store that has both an online and b/m presence. And that policy will be valid thru 3/26. So.....if you're ready to give up that console platform and game at 4k, gather your components list AND GET THE HELL OVER THERE, (lol). It's actually kinda interesting - compared to Skylake, the processors of Haswell-E cost more, the mobo cost a good deal more (I assume because you can also use those boards with Intel Xeons for work computers), and prices are coming down, but the boards only accept DDR4. I did snag online an Nvidia GTX 980 for about $375 w/rebates and all in the holiday sales. And the boards allow for 3 or 4 way SLI or Crossfires, if you want to spend your lifesavings on video cards. Just a thought. Actually, I bought a 'combo' at Newegg almost a year ago - about $300 - as a rig to 'practice' building my first computer, since if I fry it by ineptitude, it's a 'learning experience'. With the help of YouTube videos so far, so good.