ORIGIN PC Drops AMD Radeon Graphics Cards From PCs Or Maybe Not

Earlier today we ran across a story on Engadget about how Origin PC is no longer using AMD video cards due to a long list of reasons. Here is the official statement given by ORIGIN PC to Engadget on dropping AMD Radeon graphics cards:

This decision was based on a combination of many factors including customer experiences, GPU performance/drivers/stability, and requests from our support staff. Based on our 15+ years of experience building and selling award winning high-performance PCs, we strongly feel the best PC gaming experience is on NVIDIA GPUs.

ORIGIN PC builds custom, high-performance desktops, workstations, and laptops for hardware enthusiasts and gamers. The news of them dropping AMD certainly grabbed our attention as it comes just days before AMD will be releasing it’s latest series of GPU’s is very odd. It was also odd that we couldn’t find the statement on their website, blog, forums, press releases or even their Facebook fan page. It was almost like they went straight to Engadget and dropped them a story in their lap.

We asked ORIGIN PC for more information about this in an e-mail, but we have yet to get a response. So, we figured we’d give them a call on their toll-free number (1-877-674-4460) to find out what is going on. We got on the phone with a sales consultant who asked us to hold on for a second and then he read the statement given to Engadget pretty much verbatim. What he said next came as a shock. He said that if we wanted to build a system with an AMD Radeon graphics card that they could special order one in for us if we wanted to go that route.

Right now it appears that ORIGIN PC has removed AMD Radeon graphics cards from their congifurator for the time being, but you can call and have a Radeon card included on the system that you want to build. Sounds to us like AMD and ORIGIN PC are having some internal issues that spilled over to the public realm. If AMD Radeon graphics cards suck so bad that you have to pull them from your systems, why even offer them to any customer? Money talks.

10/04/13 7PM CT Update: The marketing department over at ORIGIN got back to us with the following statement. It’s pretty self-explanatory and is copy/pasted below.

Thanks for reaching out to us for comment. My sincere apologies for not replying to you sooner, but we have received a lot of inquiries from the press as to our decision to stop offering AMD GPUs and we are answering every one of them. To ensure that we get back to everyone today, I am sending everyone some additional information from one of our tech support managers and a further statement from me to help provide more details.

Here is a direct quote from one of our Technical Support Managers, Alvaro Masis: Primarily the overall issues have been stability of the cards, overheating, performance, scaling, and the amount of time to receive new drivers on both desktop and mobile GPUs.

Here is a quote from our CEO, Kevin Wasielewski to provide more details:

ORIGIN PC is dedicated to providing the best experience for our customers and right now that is with NVIDIA GPUs. Its not about brand loyalty or marketing, our loyalty is 100% to our customers. We work very closely with numerous manufactures and we are constantly testing and validating the latest hardware to provide options for our customers. Parts that ORIGIN PC validates have to provide an extremely high level of performance, stability, and support. As hardware changes and evolves, so do we. We will continue to focus on providing the best possible experience for our customers, regardless of brand name, and devotedly dependent on customer satisfaction.

I also wanted to provide some clarification on your recent news article that was just posted on Legit Reviews.com. Our sales rep mistakenly mentioned and offered that we could special order an AMD graphics card for customers which is actually incorrect and was an honest mistake on his part.

The reason why our sales rep mentioned this is because we normally offer to special order components that we do not currently offer or carry on our website all the time (this is literally our mantra), however, due to the reasons mentioned already, we will not special order any product that we know that doesnt deliver or provide the customer experience that meets our quality standards.

Also as a side note, all existing and recent ORIGIN PC customers who currently have AMD GPUs will still and always be supported 24/7 by our U.S. based technical support staff for the lifetime of their product.