I saw this on Toms Hardware and figured I'd post it here. This is pretty much a PC that will rival consoles in terms of gaming capability. Its more powerful than the PS4 and X1, but it needs the extra power to compute all the extras that come with running a PC.

Conclusion:

If you are a gamer and want best bang for your buck, now is the time to buy a console. 2-3 years later as these console age and PCs get more powerful and cheaper, story will be different.

This fall PS4 and X1 will come with a lot of extras like controllers, bluray, Kinect 2.0...and are cheaper than this PC to begin with. They will provide amazing gaming value...

As long as we're talking purely about gaming, it's a no-brainer that consoles are the better choice. Afterall, that's what they're made for. It'd be a shame if they end up inferior to an all-purpose device.

im not a PC tech guy by any means. but isnt an core i3 just 4 CPU cores?

What about the controller?

Edit: To be more fair put a X1 controller which cost 60$

Bullshit on 4GB System RAM, that's REALLY reaching.

I think I spent around $500 for my current build and I think it is fairly comparable to the X1. 1080p video card with 1gb dedi ram maybe 512. 8GB ddr3 Ram. DX11 compatible... I think the X1 beats my PC in terms of processing power and just being a raw powerhouse for gaming overall. Even still I think I could run most of the next gen upcoming games on my PC fairly well except for online. Tried Crysis 3 alpha on high and lagged like crazy on PC...

I use both PC and consoles for gaming and your comment is just plain wrong. It is very much a preference thing and definitely not a no brainer, if you have the money then you can achieve significantly better gaming performance from a PC, Bang for buck consoles are better but as the article shows it only takes a midrange gaming macine to equal the performance of a console. some games are also better suited for a PC and vise versa.

Console makers have a large advantage in terms of economy of scale when buying components, so they will always have an advantage when it comes to performance per $ early in the generation where they are willing to barely break even or even sell the hardware at a loss.

But in saying that comparing what you would have to pay today against the price of a console that is months away from release, especially considering they are using AMD GPU which will be almost 2 years old by the time the consoles launch.

Actually, its 2 cores, but 4 threads.

One thing I don't see clarified frequently is that the PS4 & X1 CPU is an 8 Core Jaguar. Jaguar is AMD's CPU microarchitecture for netbooks and the such. The largest for the consumer market is a 4 core Jaguar APU. It's a double cluster for PS4 and X1, hence 8 core.

The i3-3220 would be a fair comparison for a PC to Console comparison, although you'd get more out of this i3.

Edit: Case in point is a 2 core-4 thread i3 Ivy Bridge for desktop versus a 8 core Jaguar netbook APU.

Edit 2: Having netbook cores doesn't mean the consoles are in a disadvantage. Developers always optimize for the hardware, and this further pushes away from CPU bottleneck.

That CPU is killing the whole build.