This is what I posted in another thread, if in 2005 you compared an Xbox 360 *Hardware issues ignored please* With a PC built from the ground up to play games. Both the $500 and the $1100 machines would have had to have been stripped out and rebuilt from the ground up. I love PC gaming, but consoles are extremely compelling. For me it isn't a hassle to rebuild a computer, its an adventure. Its like comparing a bought sword from the blacksmith to one that you forge yourself for your own uses. It really makes me attached to it, and for that reason alone there are a lot of PC enthusiasts.
Still, look at the numbers/specs. Its pretty bad, I have to grant that. So an $1100 computer system would have required about $500 worth of parts by now to keep it current - $200 8800gt $100 motherboard, $50 ram, $150 CPU so the total cost by now would be $1600 or 4 times the cost of the console box. (You can use an Xbox 360 on a monitor too you know)
November 2005 (The do I buy a gaming PC or the new fangled Xbox 360 edition)
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Retail (Socket 939) - Dead upgrade path.
Two sticks 256MB PC3200 DDR
NVIDIA Geforce 6600 - Pretty slow.... (Previous generation mid range vs next gen high end)
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 80GB
Plus the Usual suspects
$500
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ Retail - Still pretty slow.
Two 512MB sticks PC3200 DDR SDRAM - Matches Xbox 360 totals (IIRC System ram must hold a copy of GPU ram at all times - for alt/tab)
eVGA GeForce 7800GT - A little slower than the Xbox 360 GPU (It was closer to a 1950XT at the time)
Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB
$1086 with the usual suspects.
Tease.
