Origin PC Ditching AMD GPUs, Goes All In With NVIDIA
While AMD just announced a whole new line of graphics cards, which generally results in system builders announcing new configuration options with the impending products inside, at least one boutique builder is going in another direction entirely--all the way in the other direction, actually.
Origin PC CEO and co-founder Kevin Wasielewski told us that the company is no longer offering AMD GPUs in its systems and will solely provide NVIDIA graphics options. His reasons were initially vague: “This decision was based on a combination of many factors including customer experiences, GPU performance/drivers/stability, and requests from our support staff. Based on our 15+ years of experience building and selling award winning high-performance PCs, we strongly feel the best PC gaming experience is on NVIDIA GPUs,” he said.
AMD Radeon HD 7990
Wasielewski offered a further clarifying statement from Alvaro Masis, one of Origin’s technical support managers, who said, “Primarily the overall issues have been stability of the cards, overheating, performance, scaling, and the amount of time to receive new drivers on both desktop and mobile GPUs.”
Wasielewski assured us that there is no industry skullduggery here, but that simply Origin is working to provide customers with the best possible hardware options for its customers. In his view, that means AMD's GPUs aren't up to snuff. Note that Origin will continue to provide AMD CPU options with its systems; at the very least, the dumping of AMD graphics is about NVIDIA graphics versus AMD graphics, not about AMD as a whole.
Origin Genesis, now only with NVIDIA GPUs
Although higher failure rates of AMD graphics cards are mostly hearsay, we have seen our share of issues with AMD Radeon GPUs in CrossFire configurations, such as in this review.
Regardless, even assuming that AMD GPUs have caused Origin some problems, it seems to be an overly drastic move to cut them out of the product lineup entirely. Surely there are plenty of customers who prefer AMD GPUs, or at least want the option?
We’ve reached out to AMD for a statement and will update accordingly.
