Best Computer Brand

There’s no such thing as a best computer brand. Today’s computer market is full of very similar products, but each of them has a more or less significant feature that the others don’t have. This only means that a specific device accomplishes something faster or cheaper, while other similar products do it slower or they need some extra components in order to achieve the same thing.

Computer brands can be classified from many points of view. These classifications however don’t guarantee that if you choose a specific product of a specific brand (the best according to a top list or another) it will be the best on the market at that specific retail price. Every large computer manufacturer has its problems. You may read about recalls of thousands of laptops almost every month.

Apple is accepted to be one of the top computer brands, mostly because its products always look exceptional and are made of carefully selected materials and components. However good a reputation Apple may have, it’s also known that some of its newest products are based on 2-4 years old hardware components such as Core 2 Duo processors and very old nVidia Geforce 3xxM graphics cards. Competing manufacturers already use hardware launched in 2010, but still fail to convince an Apple fan to buy their product instead, no matter how fast and capable these products are.

Dell is also perceived as a top computer manufacturer. People browsing the Internet find a lot of exceptional Dell laptops, monitors and desktop computers. In reality however many series of products were launched with known problems, so customers may unknowingly buy a Dell laptop which will require maintenance monthly or even general repairs like changing the logic board, blinking LCD panel or constantly overheating graphics card.

When we’re talking about computer brands, component brands have to be mentioned too. The most important manufacturers in the computer market are AMD, Intel and nVidia. All three make microprocessors and graphics processors too, but in slightly different sectors. AMD started out as a secondary processor manufacturer for IBM, using only Intel architectures, but today it’s at war on two fronts. AMD is battling Intel on the CPU market, and it started a war with nVidia too when AMD purchased ATI.

In 2010, AMD lost the battle in high-end computing. AMD Phenom II X6 processors are 20-30% slower than Intel’s best Core i7 processors. This however is an unfair comparison, because the Core i7 platform cost much more than the one from AMD. Still, AMD is at fault for not making processors with high performance compete with Intel’s most expensive processors. Below the six-core border AMD processors are winning because of their lower price and better performance is 3D games. In the graphics sector AMD was ahead in 2010 for at least 6 months, after which nVidia only managed to beat AMD with extremely inefficient products (GTX 470 and 480). Only recently has nVidia improved its GPU architectures in order to enter the competition for efficiency too. The GTX 460 and GTX 580 are much more efficient than other nVidia chips, and they managed to beat AMD’s top single-GPU cards with 10-20% better overall performance. AMD (formerly ATI) graphics cards are still worth buying, because it seems that AMD is making extra efforts to make them more efficient, instead of just pushing for performance. This is something we have to appreciate, especially since nVidia and Intel frequently release CPUs and GPUs that simply murder power supplies by exceeding the official power requirement. Take a look at a Core i7 at CPU-World.com, Intel’s official website doesn’t mention the 160Watt power consumption at sustained full load and the 189Watt peak. AMD processors on the other hand always respect the official maximum TDP, a 45Watt processor consumes around 43Watts max, a 65Watt processor under 62Watts … and so on.

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