Take this article with a grain of salt as appearently ythe video card will not fit with the Motherboard.


Can you build a gaming PC better than the PS4 for $400?

As you probably know by now, the PS4 is essentially a $400 PC. It has an x86 PC CPU, a standard PC GPU, and the same kind of RAM that you’d find on a PC graphics card. There are a few custom chips on the PS4′s motherboard, but for the most part it’s just a normal PC with some custom software. This led me to wonder… could you actually build a comparable PC for $400? More importantly, given how Sony has crippled the PS4′s home theatre functionality, is it possible to build a PC for $400 that is actually better for games and as a living room media box?

To answer that question, we first need to agree on the PS4′s hardware specification. It has a motherboard, an AMD APU (8-core Jaguar CPU + GPU on the same chip), 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and a PSU. The PS4 also has WiFi and Bluetooth — and we’ll also need a case, of course. I think it’ll be very hard to build a PC with the same specification for $400, but we’ll see.

Setting some ground rules


From the get-go, we have a problem: The APU in the PS4 is unique. It pairs an 8-core Jaguar CPU with, essentially, the Radeon HD 7850. The best AMD APU currently on the market (the Richland A10-6800K) has about one third of the processing power of the PS4′s GPU. There are no 8-core Jaguar parts on the market — only the quad-core Kabini A6-5200, which is paired with an even weaker GPU than the A10. Kaveri, when it comes to market in January 2014, will be a closer match — but the PS4 will still have around twice the graphics grunt. In short, we’re forced to use a CPU and discrete GPU. It just got a lot harder to hit our $400 target.

The other big problem is the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, which has an utterly insane peak bandwidth of 176 gigabytes per second. There is no way to build a PC with such a configuration. In the PS4, the RAM is used by both the CPU and GPU in a HSA 2.0 configuration, providing a sizable speed boost – an option that isn’t available to the PC world until Kaveri launches. It’s important to note that even if we could slot some GDDR5 RAM into a PC motherboard, it would probably be much more expensive than conventional DDR3.


Can you build a PS4-alike PC for $400?

We’ll be using Newegg for component prices, because that’s our components supplier of choice when we build new rigs here in the ExtremeTech bunker.


Motherboard: ASRock H61M-DGS ($50). A no-frills motherboard, but you get integrated Gigabit Ethernet and 6-channel audio. It only supports DDR3 1600 RAM, but that’s a compromise we’re forced to make.
CPU: Intel Celeron G1610 ($50). This chip is only a dual-core, but for lightly threaded workloads it has comparable theoretical performance to the PS4′s 8-core Jaguar CPU.
GPU: Asus HD7850-DC-1GD5 ($140, or $120 after rebate).
RAM: Kingston HyperX Black 8GB ($65). This stuff is DDR3 1600 — which has a fraction of the bandwidth of the PS4′s GDDR5.
Storage: 500GB Samsung Spinpoint M8 ($55). 500GB of 2.5-inch storage goodness.
Other: USB Bluetooth + WiFi dongle ($11)
Case and power supply: Apex DM-387 Micro ATX case ($45). This bad boy is cheap, includes a PSU, and can stand on its side — like the PS4!

Total cost: $416, or $396 after rebate

So, there you have it: It is just about possible to build a PS4-comparable PC for $400. You make a lot of concessions, though: We haven’t included the price of an operating system, nor a keyboard/mouse/gamepad. The DM-387 case is a lot bigger than the PS4. There’s no optical drive, so you’re forced to load games via USB or digitally download them via Steam. But everyone has an old copy of Windows XP/7 and a spare Xbox 360 or DualShock gamepad kicking around, right?


Overall, I am very surprised at how close we got to the PS4 for $400, especially when Sony says it’s losing $60 per console. If we had a budget of $460, we could’ve got a nicer case or a much faster CPU. There are some who will point to the drastically different RAM, but in reality, with 1GB of GDDR5 on the graphics card, the real-world difference between the PS4 and our $400 PC will be marginal.

For $400, then, you can have a PC with PS4-like performance that’s (probably) capable of playing the same games at similar resolution and detail levels. The PS4 will likely have an advantage because games can be specifically tailored towards the console’s hardware provisions, but good, high-budget PC ports should be almost comparable. For $400, you also get a full-fat PC that can play every file type you throw at it, either locally, via the LAN, or streaming video/music from a website.

Source: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/171158-can-you-build-a-gaming-pc-better-than-the-ps4-for-400

If you go by the system I posted you can.
A Radeon 7850 for instance is capable of running Battlefield 4 just fine and at full 1080P with ultra settings. (PS4 is only 900P and high settings.)
Granted you're looking at around 30fps, but with Mantle that should rise substantually when it's released in the next week or two. - Which leads me to beleive Battlefield 4 on the PS4 uses a high-level API rather than a low-level one.
Of course you're not locked into the same clocks like a console, so an overclocked 7850 should yield even better results.

Throw 700 bucks in and you've got on pc better than ps4 that should offer the same performance down the road. PS4 will get optimized, your pc won't.
Not counting monitor.

ORLY?
Mantle Presenation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIWyf8Hyjbg&feature=youtube_gdata




Here is roughly a 10% performance improvement on the 7950 between a single driver release, note: This happens often.


So yes, your PC literally gets faster and more optimised as time goes on, stop sprouting miss-information.

But it's not like the pc overhead isn't adressed currently. Mantle, steam-os... The advantage shrinks and will next years.

Yes but the costs sum up with what I wrote in my post. The comparison is rather invalid.

Again, people should wait for future APU releases from AMD and will have a better PS4.

HIS PC, not a single GPU. Of course driver updates will improve performance little by little, but the optimization made on consoles is far mor elaborated due to the closed nature of itself. His particular rig with every component will be less eficient as time goes on than a console. That's what I wanted to say in short words and fell short of an accurate response =)

For example, I think today's BF4 runs good on a 7950, and also good on a PS4. BF in 2017 will still run on PS4, even if poorly, but a 7950 might be out of the minimum specs already. It's the pc nature.

If you want to make a powerful gaming rig on the cheap, you'll need to buy each part individually when it's on a good sale
Make slickdeals.net your homepage and take a peek at it once or twice a day until you have all the parts you need, or set up some email alerts on that site

A couple weeks ago I got a brand new Radeon HD 7950 for a measly $132 because of that site (180 - 10% coupon code -$30 mail in rebate)

You could probably snag a good 7200 3TB toshiba or barracuda hard drive for around $95, or a good 2TB at about $75 or 80. I've been watching hard drive deals a lot lately and unfortunately most of them have been external drives on sale which I'm hesitant to buy because even though it's technically the same thing just in a different enclosure, I assume hard drives are binned and the better ones are sold as internal drives
For processor, if you decide to raise your budget a bit, the i5-4670k has been on sale for $200 a couple times recently. Otherwise something like the amd fx-8320 has been on sale for $130, or try for something like a fx-4130 at about $85 or so
Radeon hd 7870s have been at the $110 price point multiple times so thats a solid choice of video card
Actually they may have even been $100 last month I'm not sure, either way $110 is the price to wait for if you decide on that card
Just a few hours ago, 8gb of Gskills ripjaw x ram was going for only $40, I think you just missed that deal but 8gb of good brand ram has frequently been in the $45 price range

I'm not too familiar with pricing for other parts, case, motherboard, power supply

You dont really need a dvd drive so that can save you $15 or so just going digital. Hell, if you're pc gaming I doubt youll be buying physical disks anyways

Just checked slickdeals and it looks like there's a thermaltake tr500 watt psu on sale for $20 after rebate atm, and let's assume I don't know, $35 for case, $80 for motherboard and that would total 20(PSU)+35(case)+80(mobo)+110(GPU)+45(RAM)+80(HDD)+90(CPU) = 460 if you went the cheap route on the processor, but again you'd have to wait for the good deals and buy part by part over the course of a month or two, and you gotta make sure you fill out all those mail in rebates properly

Did you even read my post? And check the Youtube link?

Frostbite, Unreal, CryEngine, Nitrous will support Mantle (And other engines will support it as time goes on)
He will get the similar optimizations and tricks that consoles will get in the majority of AAA games, it's easy for developers to translate console-like tricks to PC.
http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/mantle/Pages/mantle.aspx

He won't be able to run Ultra settings in 2017, but he will be able to play just a little higher than console equivalent settings.
But guess what? That's all he is entitled to because he would have bought the system and not upgraded it in 3-4 years, you can't expect a GPU equivalant to the PS4 to suddenly be outputting 10x superior image quality, that would be just stupid.
With that in mind a 4 year old GPU (A-La, Radeon 5870) is still very capable even today and will be for a year or two yet.

Besides the money he saves on cheaper games (Typically $10-$20 cheaper, plus majority of new releases and pre-orders you can get an additional 20-30% saving.) and the fact he gets free online will easily mitigate the additional GPU hardware costs in just a couple of years.

The modders for skyrim have done some pretty crazy shit.

Edit: I should note those screens are rather overkill lol. To make an open world game look that good you need an awful lot of different mods.