QOTD: Are You Loyal to Any Specific Company?

Are you loyal to any specific company? Yes.

In the past few years the components from AMD & ATI found a home in my pc's at home and work. NO, that does not make me a fan boy of AMD/ATI for that one reason only.

The reason I always went the AMD/ATI route is plain and simple: When I have the money to spend/upgrade I want to get the best for what I have (Bang for Buck), Intel CPU’s are EXCELLENT but not worth the extra $100/$200 that I can use somewhere else. With nVidia it’s a bit different. I like my ATI cards. Had geForce before but didn't impress me. Now I'm running x1900xt in 2nd home pc and x2900xt in my pc. Yes the x2900 was not that great, BUT my next card will be another ATI. When I buy a graphics card, I don’t care about 7 million FPS in Crysis, I want nothing more than 60 FPS in any game/application, no need for that. What I want to see is detail in the colours and "crispness" of textures etc.

So, yes I'm loyal to AMD/ATi and I will buy them again and again.....and again.

Zander

although everyone is flaming about ati's drivers no such thing ever happened to me with ati drivers. Its the other way around. Nvidia has made my life a lot more complicated. this is the (former) problem: I wanted to watch stuff on my tv through my pc. With my 1950xt it worked flawlessly, svideo cable into the thing, scart in the (old) tv and away we go. Although for the rest nvidia has posed no problems, I cannot watch something on my tv through the replacing 8800gt. The desktop shows alright, but the scaling of fullscreen never worked, placing a partial view that would shift with moving the window on the pc monitor and sometimes disappear.

Now for the good part: I don't know what card will be next, it all depends on the way the card performs. Nowadays the tv will be a bigass lcd tv so that scart problem is long gone and away.
The thing I base my choice on is what performs the best for an affordable price. I don't buy the biggest badass videocard/cpu but the one that gives me the most bang for bucks.
The first pc I bought had the very good amd athlon x2 3800+ and was one of the best cpu's back then, now my pc holds a e6750 that was the best choice almost 2 years ago.
This summer I will upgrade my cpu/mobo again and it will depend on what the i5 cpu's do on performance in relation to the phenom II cpu's. If they're better for about the same price, its intel, otherwise amd.
Same thing for the videocard, ati would be the choice if I would upgrade my gpu, simply because the price is far better then nvidia is offering. Although some gtx260 special editions could make that choice a lot harder but since I won't be upgrading my gpu soon that doesn't matter much.
Sites like this give me the info I need to make a choice.

I wouldn't go as far as saying I'm loyal to Intel, but it seems whenever it's time to build a new system Intel are usually in the dominant position, or at least perform better in the areas I need it to than the competition.

That could change in the next few months when we see how Phenom II matches up with Core i7.

GPU-wise I've always gone for the best card at the time, so I've had my fair share of both ATI and NVIDIA cards. Again it's not loyalty, but I see myself sticking with NVIDIA for the forseeable future because of CUDA and how 3rd parties in my field are supporting it.

I've always tended to lean to Gigabyte or Asus for motherboards though because I've always had very good experiences, but that's probably because they tend to be superior to everything else.

Same with Crucial - I always seem to go with Ballistix RAM.

I'd say no. I get whatever suits my needs for the best value at the time i need it.

I always go with what suites my needs and is within budget. For CPUs/GPUs this has mostly ended up being AMD/ATI but I would switch to Intel or nVidia if they were more suitable at the time of upgrade/build.