One of the biggest problems in my opinion, is the lack of any standard for the AMD overall desktop platform.
A motherboard maker can make the CPU throw errors or bluescreens due improper voltage control or "defective" supply. As stated RAM stability is somewhat motherboard related as well.
To makes stuff worse, good motherboard reviews are pretty much non-existent to my knowledge (not surprising, given the absurd quantity of parts on the market). And I do not mean those "reviews" that just count the number of "VRM phases" and moar better!

Intel seems to be much more closed regarding the platform implementation but not necessarily a bad thing. Can only guess the experience dealing with HP, Dell and Lenovo's accounts a little...

While I use the 1600AF, wich is pretty much a 2600, it doesn't win any FPS race for sure, in some games it struggle to achieve 144fps all the times but the only errors I've seen are caused by my own over/underclocks. From playing games to simulation work always rock solid.
A improper setup on a 10600K can cause errors as well.

One big advntage Intel has over AMD, regarding to playing games is emulation.Some emulators are built around Intel instruction set only, like RPCS3 and Intel TSX.

yes agreed, that is mainly why i decided to grab the more expensive asus rog strix parts/motherboard ( 180 euro's ) ( rog strix advertises a wider range of compatibility then most ) and why i decided for my next build to follow only the parts that are listed as supported on the motherboards vendor site

still the 2600 coupled with a aorus x470 board, one of the cheaper ones (120 euro's ) and the m.2's from corsair and 32 gb's of memory, and a aorus 2060super had an all in all way more inconsistent level of performance in the games i play the most then the 10600k does. In other games i play the performance was exemplary

there's an interesting article, about security concerns in amd ryzen cpu's, as far as i got it:

Questionable AMD PCI Driver May Improve Game Stability But Could Be A Security Headache

"... A researcher has found a seemingly disguised AMD driver toggling certain system behaviors when it detects a list of games, which could open the door to security vulnerabilities and other issues.

This past Saturday, security researcher and Windows Internals expert Alex Ionescu was working with an AMD Ryzen system that had a Ryzen 7 1700 under the hood. As any good researcher would do, he proceeded to dig into what was on the system and made an interesting discovery with a mysterious "AMDPciDev.sys" file. AMDPciDev.sys was WHQL certified as a PnP PCI driver, installed on the system for a "PCIe Dummy Function" device. Seeing this dummy device association, Ionescu decided to reverse engineer the driver and saw some odd behaviors like a hashing algorithm and oddities with process creation, termination, and monitoring. ..."

is this a common thing, that a driver looks out for what exe. one executes?

anyone in here, with the knowledge to assess this article and break it down for dummies?

Graphics drivers tend to do that, to apply various optimization profiles. So it's a thing certain drivers are doing. The problem I guess is what exactly is going on in the underlying code. If they are disabling security features that the CPU normally uses just so the game can get a couple of extra frames here and there, then it's sort of questionable indeed.

AMD would not be the only company with shady optimizations though. Intel has been known to "detect" benchmarking software and "fake it till it made it" to the top in the past, whereas in real world applications its CPUs would be more docile. Though AFAIK this was a while ago and those days are long gone. They just tweak the benchmarking data now :P.

Edit: Turns out they are actually disabling some things to guarantee better stability in certain cases, not extra frames. Still, it does sound like something potentially exploitable.

ok, i thought that the .exe asked the driver for the libraries it desires. but not the other way around. its kinda creepy, if all my drivers just monitor what i'm doing. especially, since telemetry is everywhere nowdays.

I hate to summon you-know-who to this thread, but I'll just say that's less of a concern on Linux :P.

agree