The most recent sales data from Germany’s largest retailer, Mindfactory.de, as presented by TechEpiphany, show almost no changes in AMD’s dominant position throughout December 2023, specifically in the week leading up until Christmas.
AMD’s X3D V-Cache CPUs continue to remain a success story, with AMD netting 88.5% of the CPU sales throughout the 51st week of 2023 (December 18th – December 24th).
As opposed to Intel who had to suffice with weakened demand from an ailing Raptor Lake Refresh, with just 11.5% of weekly CPU sales with just 770 Intel processors sold to AMD’s 5940.
As per Tech Epiphany, the best selling CPU throughout the week remains to be the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, by far the most capable and “affordable” gaming oriented CPU on the market, with 1480 units sold. With the Ryzen 7 5800X3D coming second overall with 950 units sold, showcasing the immense demand that the previous AM4 platform retains simply from continued production frequent price drops.
AMD also rounds off the the entire top ten for processors sold throughout the week, with the Ryzen 5 7500F selling 440 units as previous generation Ryzen 5700X, 5800X, 5600X, 5600G and 5900X all continue to sell in decent enough figures.
As expected, the most popular Intel CPU sold is the Intel Core i7 14700K, my personal preference from the recently introduced Refresh lineup, although Intel would’ve stood a much better chance had they initially given the i7 13700K equal treatment in additional cluster of E-cores as the i7 marks the only actual change between the 13th Generation and 14th Generation CPUs from Intel.
The Intel Core i7 14700K may be a decent uplift in multi-threading performance over the “previous” generation i7 however consumers are obviously wary considering the importance of platform longevity and future upgrade potential, of which Intel’s LGA 1700 socket platform is effectively dead and due to be replaced with next year’s introduction of Arrow Lake processors, or rather it was initially supposed to be replaced this year with Meteor Lake-S, however Intel thankfully scrapped that plan and gave us all another year of a dead-end ecosystem.
Because motherboard sales show an equal grim fate for Intel’s diminishing margins, with AMD stealing 81.3% of unit sales throughout the week leading up until Christmas with 3785 motherboards sold as opposed to Intel managing to shift 870 boards across the week with 18.7% of sales.
Consorting the mainboard sales chart history stemming across most of the year it’s safe to assume that Intel’s latest 14th Generation Core processors have made barely any impact on the general market or at least according to one of Europe’s largest retailers, Mindfactory. With Raptor Lake’s Refresh seemingly failing to generate substantial buzz to stop the swarm of AMD’s dominance in CPU sales.
Breaking the sales figures down to a socket basis, 57.72% of AMD’s board sales are of their newly introduced AM5 platform, due to the far cheaper retail prices associated with AMD’s previous generations, AM4 continues to last the test of time and remain extremely viable for consumers on a budget with 1600 AM4 motherboards being sold across the week.
Regarding Intel, 40 madmen bought an LGA 1200 motherboard, which genuinely makes zero sense given how the Skylake derived “Comet Lake” and Rocket Lake pale in comparison in terms of single-core, multi-threading and efficiency versus AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series even. Unless it was immensely cheap, too good to pass up would you even think about giving a brand new LGA 1200 system a second glance, more sensible people are instead flocking to buy into the superior yet equally outdated AM4 platform with a Ryzen 5000 series CPU.
With 40 suckers getting scammed that also leaves 830 individuals who’ve bought into Intel’s soon to be outdated LGA 1700 platform with equivalent Alder / Raptor Lake based CPUs.
The most popular boards sold according to Tech Epiphany were the B650 MSI Tomahawk WIFI for AMD’s AM5 socket, the MSI MPG B550 Gaming Plus for AMD’s AM4 socket and the Gigabyte Z790 Gaming X AX for Intel’s LGA 1700 socket.
AMD have been holding an extremely dominant position in terms of their CPU offerings for several generations now, offering superior efficiency, platform longevity seemingly uncontested, however Intel haven’t been sleeping at the wheel in terms of providing enhancements to single-core performance with Alder Lake and the subsequent tweaked rendition of Raptor Lake.
While Raptor Lake may provide adequate and comparable single-core and multi-threading performance versus similarly priced Ryzen CPUs it does so at the cost of power consumption, heat generation and the lack of any tangible upgrade paths later down the line, especially with AMD having introduced V-Cache CPUs for the Ryzen 7000 series they have seemingly held dominance in terms of outright gaming performance with Intel not even being a threat for the foreseeable future.
However something unbeknownst to me is that European consumers seemingly have more intelligence than those found in America if GPU sales are anything to go by.
With the Black Friday demand behind us, the run leading to Christmas shows decreased demand and yet at the same time still greater desire to buy a brand new GPU for the holiday season than during the first half of the year, with AMD actually holding a slight leverage over NVIDIA in terms of sales percentage at 55.08% with 2330 Radeon graphics cards sold versus NVIDIA’s 44.21% sales share with 1870 GeForce GPUs sold.
Intel remains to be among the very best codec display devices with just thirty units sold across the entire week with 0.71% of the total sales.
I was generally under the impression that consumers were simply so batshit retarded that they would ultimately continue to buy NVIDIA regardless of superior alternatives for cheaper prices, simply due to the immense mindshare that NVIDIA possesses asserting themselves as a makeshift “premium” brand.
As per Tech Epiphany, the best selling GPUs across the week culminating on Christmas Eve remains to be the Radeon RX 7800 XT, a graphics card that ultimately demolishes NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 in terms of rasterized performance and total VRAM capacity for less money, especially if you were to overclock the Navi 32 based GPU for a guaranteed 10% increase in overall performance.
NVIDIA’s RTX 4070, given how it’s amongst the cheapest of their offerings is the most popular with 450 sold across the week versus AMD selling 620 RX 7800 XT’s during the same timeframe.
NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4060 Ti takes the third slot with 440 units sold, with AMD’s equally comparable RX 7700 XT down the order with just 60 units sold further proving the point that majority of consumers are quite possibly braindead.
The cheapest RTX 4060 Ti on Mindfactory comes in at 399 EUR, while the cheapest RTX 4060 Ti 16GB model costs 455 EUR, by comparison the RX 7700 XT provides substantially greater gaming performance and starts from 456 EUR.
Though we don’t exactly know the split between 8GB and 16GB models for the 4060 Ti sales, if I were to have a guess majority of units sold were the cheaper 8GB model as the Radeon has slotted itself in-between the 8GB and 16GB variants in terms of its pricing, I cannot imagine anyone would be buying a 16GB variant over a 7700 XT outside of a cognitive vegetable.
The previous generation Radeon RX 6700 XT comes in fourth place with 330 units sold, which is amazing to see considering how the older RDNA 2 GPU seemingly makes the Radeon RX 7600 and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 both redundant.
AMD’s flagship, the RX 7900 XTX follows with 250 GPUs sold across the week, followed by the RX 6600, RX 7900 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, 3060 and the 4060 round off the top ten.
NVIDIA’s RTX 4080 continues to collect more dust than overall sales with just 100 units sold, by comparison the equivalent AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has sold 2.5X more units across the week, better performance, greater VRAM capacity, worse efficiency but a lower price tag certainly helps it move off the shelf.
In fact, the RTX 4080 is so damn pathetic NVIDIA have managed to sell more RTX 4090 graphics cards with 120 units sold versus 100, it has to be said that NVIDIA’s “flagship” graphics card costs an additional ~800 EUR over the woeful 4080.
When it comes to the most popular SKUs, the highest selling aftermarket model was the XFX Speedster SWFT 309 Radeon RX 6700 XT, followed by the MSI VENTUS OC GeForce RTX 4070 and then Gigabyte’s Gaming OC rendition of the Radeon RX 7800 XT rounded out the list.
Often enough times I’ll come across belligerent retards on social media platforms that condemn these sales figures as nothing but obscure hogwash, they really like to up the importance that Mindfactory are a German retailer, despite being the only outfit that regularly dumps its sales data, they are one of the largest retailers in all of Europe, with thousands of individual sales being made regarding CPUs, GPUs and more on a weekly basis.
It would be incomprehensible to dismiss Mindfactory’s sales figures as a “one off” or “biased”, but then again seeing a company people don’t particularly like succeed in sales numbers will make them do and or say just about anything to discredit them.
These sales figures further facilitate my thoughts and opinions on what a potential RTX 4000 series “SUPER” refresh would look like. NVIDIA doesn’t necessarily have to provide greater performing hardware to the market, nor does it sound logical that they would be issuing severe price hikes across their range of ADA Lovelace GPUs, considering how it’s believed that NVIDIA are outright halting production of the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080, which is hardly a best seller, to be replaced by these new SUPER variants, NVIDIA doesn’t really have to take the fight towards AMD in the entry-level to mid-range sector.
They’re making decent money as it is selling inferior goods for slightly lower prices than their higher-end offerings, as seen with the RTX 4070 Ti, 4060 Ti and 4070. Rather the alleged RTX 4080 Super won’t be providing a substantial boost in performance versus other Super variants, it’s more than likely NVIDIA will be providing a marginal performance boost over the standard model alongside a minor price drop for the outgoing GeForce GPU, while SUPER variants of the RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti slot themselves in accordingly between the 4070 and 4070 Ti, and the 4070 Ti to the 4080.
