A publicity stunt that encourages users to buy competition's products for a chance to win one of their own is ridiculous. They simply should do a draw off of their websites for free TR's instead of the free up garbage to Intel users. AMD is basically doing 1 of 2 things. 1) Encouraging AMD users to buy Intel CPU's for a chance of an upgrade to TR, which would result in Intel sales going off and upset AMD users who don't get the upgrades and may even push AMD users who don't win to end up using Intel base systems. That works against AMDs favor. 2) Rewarding Intel users who normally wouldn't buy AMD with a chance to win a TR which is really rude to AMD users/fans and a huge disservice to those who have support AMD for ever. AMD has no idea how to reward it's users if this is this is what they come up with as a publicity stunt. Honestly, I think AMD has a surplus of TR's as the use case for such a system build is really niche. What do you do when you have excess product? Give it away...Since you can't really give it away since no one owns a mobo, what do you do? Publicity BS.
You can't buy your way into AMD's giveaway. Maybe you should have actually read the article first.... To be eligible for AMD's give-away you have to have entered and won Intel's give-away. Says that quite clearly here: Taking the time to read an article before commenting on it makes you look a lot smarter....
"They purchased nothing. Only the free prizes qualify for the exchange." Yes, but who do you think entered the contest in the first place?
You can see from the deal terms already that they dont really want anyone using it. Just cheap marketing. But it made alot of people happy
I know you didn't reply to my post, but I agree with Daz, GTX 1080ti would be a bottleneck at that resolution - AMD CPUs can push 100fps in most cases without a problem, and 3440x1440 is a lot of pixels for the GPU to push to 100fps+. AMD CPUs still not the CPUs to get for 144Hz gaming though, as we know an overclocked 8700K is the best for this.
Any people living in eligible countries who noticed the sweepstakes in time? It's a historical moment of Intel actually giving out something good for free, instead of charging the absolute premium. I'd have participated for that fact alone. Besides, there must have been plenty of participants who could actually use the numerous cores of a Threadripper more (for non-gaming purposes obviously) but wouldn't be able to comfortable afford it. So, even if the 8086K wouldn't be the optimal one for their purposes, it would still likely be much better than whatever they happened to previously have.
This may be the first time I actually feel a little sad for Intel. They were doing something nice for once and people are stomping all over them. Sure, the 8086K is a stupid product, but they're not expecting people to buy it for this.
What comes around goes around. I don't feel any sympathy for them, they made shitty products full of exploits, suits them right.
I'm not sure about that. Charging $70 more for a binned 8700K is not something I would call "nice" ("exploitative" is more like it). The giveaway is just a symbolic gesture.
I think you misunderstood me - the gesture itself is the nice thing, not the product. I think the product is incredibly stupid and if it weren't for this giveaway I'd say the purpose of its existence was so Intel could mooch off their nostalgic hardcore fans.
Well you are right, it's a nice gesture. But it's easy to be generous with peanuts... Sure they are giving away 8k CPUs... don't forget how long they have made more than enough money with selling millions of CPUs? They already earned that money for the CPUs, probably even from those 8k "winners" themselves, over the years, buying two or three CPUs from Intel. So actually, to them, it merely costs shipping and creates PR value. They do NOTHING for free, they already have the money they now spend, made off of those people that want one of those CPUs in the first place.
"Any people living in eligible countries who noticed the sweepstakes in time?" But why? Its not like Intel is giving away a whole system, just a CPU, and a gaming oriented one at that. And the people who tend to be interested in (or even know about) this type of limited-edition (extra single thread performance) CPU are people who put an emphasis on gaming performance.