Why AMD’s AM5
One of the biggest decisions we had to make when designing Rebel PCs was whether to build our systems around AMD or Intel.
The easy answer would be performance.
The real answer was much simpler:
We wanted our customers to be able to upgrade their PCs for years to come
With the rise of AMD over the last few years people could easily say that choosing the AM5 Platform was easy. For high end gaming set ups you certainly cannot go wrong with the 9800X3D, but is it the right choice for every gamer?
Why not Intel?
Well for this we have to look at the past few years of the Intel line up, and the trials and tribulations of the line up since Intel's 13th Generation of CPU there have been some issues with the chips, Intel has faced a number of challenges over the last few years, from power consumption concerns to platform longevity questions.
This is the first thing we look at but next is longevity.
Longevity
Since 2016 AMD have had two socket types AM4 and AM5, Intel on the other hand has had five LGA sockets 1151, 4189, 1200, 1700, 1851 and we know that Socket 1851 is end of life after the new Core Ultra Chips, so there will be at least one more socket from Intel soon.
For us while the Intel CPUs are great we really struggle to recommend them past the 1200 series for gaming. However the Core Ultra range is certainly something we would recommend for specific tasks, especially in video editing, code compiling or as a general purpose pc these CPU’s are fantastic.
But for us, and more and more so for gaming AMD CPU’s are the ones we land on. Longevity per socket is just out of this world. A great example of this is AM4. Launched in 2016, it is still receiving attention from AMD today. In fact, at Computex 2026 AMD celebrated the platform's 10th anniversary by releasing a special Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition. That's almost unheard of in the PC industry and shows exactly why platform longevity matters.
Imagine you buy a Rebel One today.
A few years from now you might decide you want more performance. With AM5 there's a good chance you can keep your motherboard, RAM and storage and simply upgrade your CPU.
That's exactly the sort of flexibility we want our customers to have.
Also AMD has just announced that the AM5 socket will be supported until 2029! For us, that's exactly what we want to see: a platform that gives our customers options rather than forcing upgrades.
Price
Looking at price this is a simple equation, when we were making a choice on the platforms price absolutely came into the equation. Yet it wasn't as big a part of the equation as most people might think because this is about finding the best parts for the tiers we had in place. And again this was one where AMD beat out the equivalent Intel processors.
Coupled with the Longevity of the platform it was another tick in the AMD box.
But we have to remember PC parts improve all the time so if an Intel CPU can beat the AMD processors and give us the longevity we wanted for our customers then we will look at what we need to use.
Gaming
So for any gaming scenario where only one set of CPU’s stood out we didnt need to look too far any X3D processor from AMD absolutely dominates the gaming benchmarks.
If you look at any of the benchmarks out there the top CPUs for performance. The last few benchmark charts we have seen lately have 9800X3d, 7800X3d and 5800X3D dominating the charts for a very long time.
But what CPU is right for you will very much depend on what games you play and what else you want to get out of your PC.