The 7 Year Console Refresh
What is the right hardware choice for the money? We give you two PC builds to compete against the PS4 and Xbox One.
The consoles are coming! The consoles are coming! Ok, that is not necessarily true. One is already here and the second essentially is too. This of course brings up the great debate between PCs and consoles. The past has been interesting when it comes to console gaming, as often the consoles would be around a year ahead of PCs in terms of gaming power and prowess. This is no longer the case with this generation of consoles. Cutting edge is now considered mainstream when it comes to processing and graphics. The real incentive to buy this generation of consoles is a lot harder to pin down as compared to years past.
The PS4 retails for $399 US and the upcoming Xbox One is $499. The PS4’s price includes a single controller, while the Xbox’s package includes not just a controller, but also the next generation Kinect device. These prices would be comparable to some low end PCs which include keyboard, mouse, and a monitor that could be purchased from large brick and mortar stores like Walmart and Best Buy. Happily for most of us, we can build our machines to our own specifications and budgets.
As a directive from on high (the boss), we were given the task of building our own low-end gaming and productivity machines at a price as close to that of the consoles and explaining which solution would be superior at the price points given. The goal was to get as close to $500 as possible and still have a machine that would be able to play most recent games at reasonable resolutions and quality levels.
The Basis for Consoles
The overwhelming reaction to the latest generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft was how eerily similar they are in specifications. Yes, there are some differences between the two, but the overall specifications are lock-step with each other. The primary reason for this is that both companies tapped AMD’s custom silicon group to design the chip for each company. The design is then signed off on and Sony/Microsoft takes care of the fabrication (eg. order wafers from TSMC).
Since Sony launched the PS4, we shall take a look at them first. The heart of the console is the AMD designed APU. It features two quad-core Jaguar based processors, so it has eight cores in total. This is clocked between 1.6 and 1.7 GHz in speed, but Sony claims that it can go as high as 2.75 GHz. Obviously Sony is utilizing some of the Turbo Core functionality inherent in AMD’s CPU designs. Clockspeed will depend on load and available TDP overhead. In some situations where the GPU portion is working extra hard, the CPU will be as low as 1.6 GHz. In situations where performance is balanced, we could expect the cores to go into the 2 GHz range. Only when no graphics workload is present would we expect the 2.75 GHz number.
The graphics portion is a GCN based architecture that features 18 CUs, which make up a total of 1152 shaders. This portion is clocked around 800 MHz and in total the APU gives around 1.86 TFlops of computing power. The PS2 had around 6 GFlops of performance, and that was embargoed from certain countries because supercomputing trade rules. The compute power of this particular console is very impressive, and the GCN architecture allows for very efficient use of power and an impressive amount of flexibility in programming.
The APU’s crossbar and memory controller are not well known, but it does appear to be off-the-shelf technology from AMD. The twist here is that Sony utilized a full 256-bit GDDR5 interface running at 5.5 GHz, giving around 176 GB/sec of bandwidth. It is well known that GPUs love large amounts of bandwidth, and Sony gives it in spades. GDDR5 is more expensive than DDR3, but not excessively so. It more than makes up for the cost by providing plenty of bandwidth to run at resolutions of 1080P with varying amounts of AA as required by the game developers.
The PS4 comes standard with a 500 GB hard drive spinning at 5400 RPM. It also features a modern Blu-ray drive that can run many times faster than the BD drive of the PS3. Oddly enough, it does not play back DVDs. The interesting part here is that the hard drive is easily accessible and upgradeable by end users. Ryan wrote an article exploring the performance possibilities of such an upgrade.
The Xbox One is very similar, but slightly different in a couple of major areas. First off they do bundle the device with the latest generation Kinect. Their OS and media support is a big step above the PS4, but time will tell if that investment will pay off for the Xbox One. It is still primarily a gaming machine, no matter what other bells and whistles we see. Choices were made with the hardware that could affect performance in the long run, but we are not entirely sure what those effects will be. The APU is again designed by AMD and integrates two quad-core Jaguar based units along with 12 GCN based compute units which comes out to be 768 stream units, or the same as a Bonaire based graphics card. It is clocked at 853 MHz rather than Sony's 800 MHz, but the difference in stream units is a limiting factor against the PS4. The Xbox One also features a 256-bit memory bus connected to 8 GB of memory, but it is DDR3 based and quite a bit slower at 63 GB/sec of bandwidth. This is offset by the inclusion of 32 MB of eDRAM on the APU that services the GPU portion. We have yet to see how this hardware tradeoff affects performance and abilities overall, but most expect the PS4 to be the faster overall solution.
This console has a Blu-ray drive and a 500 GB hard drive. This drive is not user accessible, but MS does provide USB 3.0 ports that can access external hard drives. This will of course incur a performance hit, but at least hard drive space can be increased rather cheaply (we think). MS does provide a very interesting software stack, as it appears as though gaming and media features are supported by separate virtual operating systems.
Man that’s a tiny pansy ass
Man that’s a tiny pansy ass CPU. Almost looks like an ARM chip lol. Could they not have done better? Gonna take some massive parallel programming skills to maximize that thing.
Not more so massively
Not more so massively parallel than the GPU, and the available software toolchain/IDE/gaming engine’s API abstracts away, the need for programmers to worry about parallel programming skills! However weak, you think the CPU is, it is attatched to and shares a fat GPU BUS, and on the PS4, a fat bus to GDDR5 memory, with most of the grunt work in the hands of the GPU, those 8 CPU cores will not have the latency and bandwidth issues, that are common on general purpose computing paltforms! Yes they could have done more, and they will have to update the platform more often, with a more powerful AMD APU, but that should no be to costly for future versions, since the majority of the platform development costs( software, motherboard, peripherals, OS, developer IDEs) have already been spent.
Silly article .You didn’t
Silly article .You didn’t mention The hidden tasks that usually WINDOWS OS demand it more from the hardware other than give it freely to gaming benefits.
That argument is moot with
That argument is moot with this console generation. They are running multiple operating systems simultaneously. Also, the “hidden tasks” can be turned off as you please since the PC is entirely under your control.
That argument is moot with
That argument is moot with this console generation. They are running multiple operating systems simultaneously. Also, the “hidden tasks” can be turned off as you please since the PC is entirely under your control.
That argument is moot with
That argument is moot with this console generation. They are running multiple operating systems simultaneously. Also, the “hidden tasks” can be turned off as you please since the PC is entirely under your control.
That argument is moot with
That argument is moot with this console generation. They are running multiple operating systems simultaneously. Also, the “hidden tasks” can be turned off as you please since the PC is entirely under your control.
Well its simple really people
Well its simple really people know when they buy a game console that the point is to play games on it. People that buy a PC either think they need a PC or they are smart enough to know they can do more with it than play games and build it to play them better for a premium.
A good tip would be:
Do you
A good tip would be:
Do you already own a pc purchased in the last 3-4 years with at least an i5 and a pci-e 16x slot?
well, congrats, because for approx. 400usd u can get a new AMD gpu or the asus gtx770 with 4 gigs of vram and exceed the graphics performance of either console.
U already own the O/S and everything else u might need.
Bluray drive: Download (legally) your movies and backup on hard drives. Steam and generally digital distribution is your friend 🙂
Sure the CPU’s and other parts have become a bit more efficient, but seriously, u could pump bf4 @ 1080 with an i7 920 or a mid-high i5 with more settings turned on than either of the consoles considering u bought a current gen GPU in the 400 range.
I still don’t get it, here we are, next-gen just released, some titles look “ok” but nothing we havent seen in the pc side yet. Its as if the new consoles aimed to cater TODAY’s needs and forget TOMORROW entirely, i can’t see how XB1 will cope with tomorrows tech when today can only pump titles like COD or BF4 at 720p. Behold, the shackles that will hold gaming back for another 7 years.
At least we’re getting slightly better ports.
MY xbox 360 is a glorified
MY xbox 360 is a glorified netflix / mediaplayer :0)
Josh: Sizing up the console
Josh: Sizing up the console vs. your option PC war
• • • Playstation 4 vs. Xbox One • • •
Width: 27.5 cm / 10.8 in vs. 34,3 cm / 13,5 in
Length: 30.5 cm / 12 in vs. 26,3 cm / 10,4 in
Heigth: 5.3 cm / 2 in vs. 8 cm / 3,2 in
Case capacity: 4,45 liters vs. 7,22 liters
vs.
• • • Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case • • •
Width: 21 cm / 8.3 in
Length: 49.7 cm / 19.6 in
Heigth: 43 cm / 16.9 in
This is absolutly differend size world and power consumption world. „Gozdzilla“ (your option PC) vs. „small is beautiful“ (PS4 or Xbox One).
•• My Option PC 1: Personal Gaming a Home Entertainment Console ••
• Processor: Intel Atom C2750 2.4GHz (@2.6GHz Turbo) „Avoton“ 8C/ 8T SoC 20W
• Motherboard: Supermicro A1SAi-2750F (380,99 €)
• Memory: Kingston SO-DIMM 8GB KIT DDR3 1600MHz CL9 HyperX Plug and Play (2x4GB) (77,30 €)
• Graphics Card: SAPPHIRE HD 7750 1GB GDDR5* Low Profile, 1 slot (88,78 €)
• Storage: Western Digital 2.5″ Black Mobile 750GB 16MB cache 7 200 ot/min (66,59 €)
• Case: SilverStone Milo ML05 Mini-ITX 35 cm (W) x 9,9 cm (H) x 20,4 cm (D), 7,07 liters (48,07 €)
Power Supply: SilverStone ST30SF 300W SFX series 80PLUS BRONZE (56,58 €)
• Optical Drive: Samsung SU-208DB slim (20,69 €)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 8.1 ENG 64-bit (OEM) (87,05 €)
• Peak Compute: 819 GFLOPS (GPU) = 8 CU (512 SPs + 16 ROP)
• Total Price: 826,05 EUR with VAT
•• My Option PC 2: Personal Gaming a Home Entertainment Console ••
• Processor: AMD A6-5200 2.0 Quad-Core processor „Kabini“ 4C/ 4T SoC 25W
• Motherboard: ECS KBN-I/5200 Mini ITX Motherboard (105 €)
• Memory: Kingston SO-DIMM 8GB KIT DDR3 1600MHz CL9 HyperX Plug and Play (2x4GB) (77,30 €)
• Graphics Card: SAPPHIRE HD 7750 1GB GDDR5* Low Profile, 1 slot (88,78 €)
• Storage: Western Digital 2.5″ Black Mobile 750GB 16MB cache 7 200 ot/min (66,59 €)
• Case: SilverStone Milo ML05 Mini-ITX 35 cm (W) x 9,9 cm (H) x 20,4 cm (D), 7,07 liters (48,07 €)
• Power Supply: SilverStone ST30SF 300W SFX series 80PLUS BRONZE (56,58 €)
• Optical Drive: Samsung SU-208DB slim (20,69 €)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 8.1 ENG 64-bit (OEM) (87,05 €)
• Peak Compute: 819 GFLOPS (GPU) = 8 CU (512 SPs + 16 ROP)
• Total Price: 550,06 EUR with VAT
* In present time is highest graphics card for Low Profile, 1 slot: only SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7750 1GB GDDR5. If AMD or NVIDIA will bring in future more perfomance graphics card – than we can change.
A very interesting article.
A very interesting article. In my opinion the console, pc comparison is always a tricky subject to approach. One could argue that many console gamers have different wants and needs when compared to their pc gaming brethren. A computer with similar performance to pricepoint qualities as the next gen consoles is certainly an appealing prospect to some, but a few points need to be kept in mind-
1. Not everyone wants, or knows how to build a PC.
2. Console = one warranty. Home build PC = many warranties
3. You buy a game for a console and you know it will run at full speed/quality settings with no nasty hidden surprises.
4. Now this may seem a strange one but bear with me… once you have your console you are stuck with it. No hardware upgrades every few months/years for you. Bad right? No! Remove the temptation to upgrade parts and your money stays in your wallet!
No, Your money goes to Sony
No, Your money goes to Sony and MS in the shape of supscriptions and 25%? license on games.
Console gaming is cheaper if you dont buy any games.
When I upgrade my PC I sell my old hardware and it costs a pittance (less than the price of a new 360 game).
My attempt to build a PC
My attempt to build a PC equivalent:
PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/269Fx
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/269Fx/by_merchant/
Benchmarks: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/269Fx/benchmarks/
CPU: AMD FX-8120 3.1GHz 8-Core Processor ($139.98 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: MSI 970A-G43 ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($39.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Western Digital WD Blue 500GB 2.5″ 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($49.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: MSI Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB Video Card ($129.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($19.99 @ Microcenter)
Optical Drive: Pioneer BDC-207DBK Blu-Ray Reader, DVD/CD Writer ($45.98 @ OutletPC)
Keyboard: Logitech MK120 Wired Slim Keyboard w/Optical Mouse ($12.99 @ NCIX US)
Total: $498.90
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-11-21 16:17 EST-0500)
You know I hope you guys
You know I hope you guys follow this up with software comparisons to see how these builds do running multiplatform games, Like AC4 for instance.
Pretty liberal on the thermal
Pretty liberal on the thermal paste there… looks like one of my builds 🙂
I prefer to see a new
I prefer to see a new generation of consoles absolutely *trounce* the PCs of the day. PC gamers have to suck it up at first, but then games developers start taking advantage of the extra power and pushing the limits of what the consoles can do. The benefits flow through to everyone.
Once PCs catch up, there’s a 4 or 5-year ice-cap on development while the consoles eke out the second half of their life-span. It’s pointless (too strong a word?) developing games that consoles can’t run. For this reason, I think it’s great when the consoles get a solid head start. If a budget PC can already match these new ones, the next 10 years might be ‘more of the same’.
Not caring to much about the
Not caring to much about the consoles. Truth be told, sell me an encrypted drive for Sony, Nintendo and Microsofts consoles. I’ll use my own hardware and have a pc, Sony, steam, Nintendo and Microsoft A.I.O.. Hell that would make all my kids happy, less maintenance, cheaper and the developers could go to town on whatever.
I use my PC for everything
I use my PC for everything else also,
my PC is like 2000 dollars or more
1000w power supply
2600k at 4.5ghz ( 3 years old now, still going strong)
16gb ddr3
2 SSD drive
2 7200 drive
2 GTX 780 ( just got this )
playing games using three monitors > console
I use my PC for everything
I use my PC for everything else also,
my PC is like 2000 dollars or more
1000w power supply
2600k at 4.5ghz ( 3 years old now, still going strong)
16gb ddr3
2 SSD drive
2 7200 drive
2 GTX 780 ( just got this )
playing games using three monitors > console
I use my PC for everything
I use my PC for everything else also,
my PC is like 2000 dollars or more
1000w power supply
2600k at 4.5ghz ( 3 years old now, still going strong)
16gb ddr3
2 SSD drive
2 7200 drive
2 GTX 780 ( just got this )
playing games using three monitors > console
How about a gaming console
How about a gaming console with 2 or more gigabit ethernet ports, so 2 or more gaming consoles could daisy chained togather, for LAN partys, or some sort of Lan/HDMI hub with up to 7 ethernet and 7 HDMI connections could be plugged in at once!
The HUB could have its own CPU/encoding/mixing/video processor to process the output and send it to a large display/projector, or groups of monitors. Games could be written to make use of all the consoles in in unison for some true 4k gaming. It is going to be intresting to see what the modders are going to do with these consoles.
$540 goes a lot longer way
$540 goes a lot longer way than what was listed. You could have easily come up with a better system with BluRay for less than $499. No reason to go with corsair case or power supply and ram when there are much cheaper options. Looking for the best bang for your buck as far as performance goes and there isn’t really a reason to compare PC if the BluRay isn’t included.
I own a ps3,xbox360,pc (i7
I own a ps3,xbox360,pc (i7 3770..16Gb ram..crossfire 6970 and now an xbox one. I can tell you it all comes down to what works for you and your needs.
The ps4 and xbox one are both great systems. Will either one match what a good gaming pc can do graphics wise…no. Will they still look great and be acceptable for the average gamer…yes The ps4 and xbox one are a squash on graphics so let the debate go.
so why if I own a rockin gaming pc do I own these consoles? Now this may vary from individual to individual but for me personally it two things. More people I know will own a console so I can play with them online and I game from my couch and the use of a controller (in my opinion)is so much better than keyboard and mouse. Now before you start debating mk vs controller I realize for fps on pc the mouse is dead accurate but now you know why I play consoles.Its just more comfortable to be a couch gamer with a controller and playing against km players isn’t much fun in fps when i get my butt handed to me.
In the end just buy what works for you.Stop debating and start gaming.
There is a lot of talk about
There is a lot of talk about the cost of the machines and that you have to pay more for a PC of equal or better performance what about the price of the games. New games for both the consoles will be about £60 as for PC games they come in around £30. So if you bought 10 games for each that an extra £300 so over the life time of all three a pc is the cheap option
I think we all should just
I think we all should just look for instance at Crysis 3 on Xbox 360 or GTA V. Or maybe Battlefield 4 on old generation consoles. Compare these games with the games that appeared when the consoles entered the market. Compare GTA San Andreas with Crysis 3 on Xbox 360. The difference is amazing, we could all agree with that. And think that Xbox 360 has approx 200 GFlops of GPU+CPU computing power. It has old hardware architecture. It has slow memory. And still, with optimised drivers and APIs, just look how much room for improvement there was.
So, just imagine for a second how all the games could look like on a 10 times more powerful console.
I think today, the barrier in getting better visuals is just the speed of development, the limitations of the engines used for developing games. It’s going to take some time until the developers will learn the ins and outs of these new consoles. Just, be patient…