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Nvidia And Intel Are Increasingly Dominant In Gaming Hardware Since Pascal And Skylake Releases

Gaming machine purchase behavior data from PCPartPicker goes back approximately 31 months (based on the oldest comment on the oldest build). In those 31 months, there were 25,780 builds priced between $450-$5,000 (I removed the outliers on both ends because they couldn’t be complete builds or they were ridiculous machines). For the rest of the article, I’ll only analyze the builds that were between $450 and $5,000. There are some other shortcuts taken to parse this data for quick insights. If you’re interested in the original data set, it’s here.

The largest group of people are building PCs in the $800 — $1,200 range. Some of these may not be complete builds, but rather upgrades. That being said, the data can provide insight into hardware trends and what a gamer can expect to pay to build your next machine.

Something Big Is Happening In CPU Purchase Habits

In the last 31 months, the average price paid for a build on PCPartPicker was $1,453. In that time, 81% of CPUs purchased were Intel and AMD took 19%. This is in-line with the Steam Hardware surveys. In the last 6 months, however, a lot of people are upgrading to Intel CPUs. This may have something to do with the Skylake release in 2015, and the trend is a really troubling one for AMD. In the last 6 months, Intel builds shifted up from 81% to 89% of all builds.

Nvidia Is Seeing Increasing Market Share Since Pascal Release

Additionally, Nvidia builds are gaining even further ground in market share at the expense of AMD GPUs. In the last 31 months, Nvidia cards were 73% of all PCPartPicker builds. In the last six months, however, Nvidia cards shifted up to 81% of computers built using the tool. This shift is even more dramatic when you look at total dollars. Since builds with an Nvidia GPU are typically more expensive than those with AMD cards, the Nvidia builds now represent more than 86% of the total dollar amounts of computers built using PCPartPicker.

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