Probably Intel/Nvidia, possibly AMD/Nvidia once Ryzen comes out (any day now?).

Ryzen is available for preorder today and will be out March 1st apparently. I just found those videos. AMD seems to have cheaper alternatives to Intel's top processors by now.

Spoiler, click me

View video on youtube.com
View video on youtube.com

I would definitely recommend waiting until March, so you can probably save lots of money with an AMD build compared to an similar Intel build.

The thing that I am most interested in (and cautious about) is AMD graphics. I have been using bumblebee so basically getting the best of Mesa features and stability, and NVIDIA performance for games. But NVIDIA driver in itself is not that great in my book. I experienced stability issues and external screens not working properly on pure NVIDIA machines.

At least with a dedicated AMD graphics card I can run Mesa, xrandr, modesetting, and other open-source goodies. Which I think is awesome. But what about game compatibility and performance? Is it there yet?

Have we heard anything about the motherboard chipsets that'll support these new AMD chips?

Intel chips with Intel chipsets have been a successful recipe for stable systems the last few years. I hope AMD either has strong partners or are releasing their own (well tested) chipsets.

A slew of chipsets was unveiled a while back. I'm sure you can find info no problem.

Looks like AMD/Nvidia is a very viable option come March 2.

Thanks, damarrin. I normally keep up on the news, must have missed it. Apologies!

To save other's the search here's a decent write-up (with pictures!) of the soon to be available motherboards - LINK.

I'm in a very similar situation here. Currently on a AMD/Nvidia build and it's worked well for a while but the components have start to show their age. I was thinking of going Ryzen/Radeon next month but I want a small build. I don't think there are many options for a smaller build to start off with.

Just a warning to those who are getting an X370 mobo dont expect it to work flawlesly on Linux until 4.11 kernel is released! ONLY with kernel 4.11 everything will work ok :P
for example most of the X370 motherboards are using ALC1220 sound cards and that is supported only on 4.11 kernel.
Also Ryzen support added on 4.10 Kernel so you should be fine but it will be fully supported on 4.11 kernel.

As for me I am going AMD Ryzen 1800+, Nvidia 1080Ti (depends of the price) which will be announced in a few hours ^_^

so here are the parts I have chosen

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Boxed
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB DDR4 Kit 3000 CL15 (2x16GB)
ASUS CROSSHAIR VI HERO or MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM (supports 2x M.2- Linux mdadm RAID 0 SSD960 Pro M.2 , Anyone? :P)
Samsung SSD 960 Pro M.2
Nvidia GTX1080Ti
EVGA SuperNOVA Platinum 850 Watt p2

I would expect that many games don't work properly with an AMD graphic card. At least many games are not official supported.

I think it will take several years for the open AMD driver to run as well as the binary Nvidia driver. Even then older games may not run with it anyway.

I'm wrong? Would be happy, please correct me!

Yeah, I'm currently unhappy about the AMD graphics side on Linux. It is getting there (driver improvements). I just trust more games to work without problems on Nvidia on Linux.

Once AMD drivers are working great, I might consider future AMD cards ( e.g. RX480 ).

On the CPU side, I've been happy to avoid Intel and go with AMD FX processors. I've been buying AMD for many of my computers over the years. (Athlon, Phenom, Phenom II, FX, and even the AMD APU for second pc.)

The new RyZEN - I hope it does very well, and offers a good value alternative to Intel. Ideally showing Intel up with AMD as the new processor kings.