Putting the console vs PC debate to rest...... Once and for all.

[VanceIX]

Conina said:

Intrinsic said:

Alright, this is about PC gaming not being as complicated as I made it sound right? Yet you are making a lot of exceptions here. Lets dial back a little.

Say you have $400 and a TV at home. Now you have three options. One is to just go out an buy a PS4. The second is to go out and find a PC for $400 (be it a laptop or a zotac or anything that have everything preinstalled and all you have to do is just connect it to your TV). The third is to streatch your budget out as much as possible to afford an experience that is at least on par with what you can get for consoles.

Option 2 is off the table cause no prebuilt PC isn't going to have the specs that can match a PS4. "mini" PCs in that price bracket dusually don't even had a dedicated GPU.  And consider that you will also need to throw in a controller since you primarily wanna use this for games. This leaves you with optione one and three.

So option 3, you are going to be building a system from scratch. This means, cpu, gpu or an apu. motherboard, HDD, PCU, keyboard, mouse, controller, a case, and windows OS. Now no matter how you wanna spin it, there are like 9 to 11 things theer that you need to build your PC. And you have to get super creative with your buying options and even go into the used market here or there to get the best deals. You are either willing to do all this and know how to, or you are looking for someone that already has and buying the system off them; and that system will not cost you $400. Now being that you are building this system from scratch, nothing in that list is simply a plug and play affair. You have to know something about a BIOS or EMFI, you have to install device drivers for everything that you are putting in your rig.

Why suddenly that $400 budget limit in a discussion if keeping an PC up-to-date has to be complicated nowadays? To automatically exclude your option 2?

Most PC gamers buy pre-installed complete PCs, and it has never been so easy to keep them updated than now. 5 or 10 years ago you had to invest much more time... auto-updates weren't a thing, you had to search for drivers and game patches yourself. I know, when you read in computer forums, you get the impression that every PC gamers builds his own rig... but these are a small but very vocal minority.

And talking about budget... with $400 and a TV you are still lacking the games for the new console. If you want to play (and keep) 1 new game for $60 each month, you are already at $1120 ($400 + 12 x $60)... PC-versions of the same multiplatform games are much cheaper so a $700 PC + 12 games à $40 is in the same area: $1180. That's only the first year, in the second year (again 12 games) the total investment is already in favour of the PC.

If you want to play 2 or 3 games a month, the higher investment of a solid gaming PC amortizes even faster.

And there are companies like iBuyPower and CyberPower that will build your PC for you for just a small markup. You just choose the parts and they'll assemble it, and if you do it during one of their sales you'll save even more.

People tend to convinently forget that and act like everyone absolutely has to hand-assemble their own PC to get decent power (which isn't even that hard in the first place).