All purpose Sales and Sales Rumours and Anecdotes [2024 edition]

[Cappuccino]

Like I said, the console market isn't as healthy as it used to be, but what I'm mainly arguing against is the notion that the majority of console owners view the PC as a viable alternative. Most don't. That's why the PS5 Pro can sell for a lot at launch as the hardcore PS5 users aren't even comparing it to a PC alternative. They're just console enthusiasts that want it.

What I mean by Sony killing scalpers is that at the launch of PS5 Pro they are capturing the surplus that scalpers would ordinarily capture by raising the base price enough and dampening demand.

Ordinarily Sony would build it for $400 and sell it for $500. Netting only $100 and the scalpers would pick up a ton of them and sell them for $700. Now Sony's just selling them for $700 and making $300 instead. Even if they sell half the units they would have, they'll actually make more money. It's smart business. They can always adjust aggressively as their inventory builds. The ideal price for Sony is the one that discourages scalping enough that they are still available at stores.

Maybe the majority of console owners, sure. But this isn’t a product for most console owners, this is a product for enthusiasts, and at this point most enthusiasts are probably on PC. Last gen it made sense for enthusiasts to buy a 4Pro (even if they were on PC too!) because of exclusives, but if you are a ‘hardcore enthusiast’ who would be the type to pay $700 for a marginal improvement then you are probably primed to switch to PC.

 

[homerdog]

I’ve literally never seen this happen in my life lol, if it’s not bootable then UEFI won’t attempt to boot to it, it just goes to the next item on the list.

I’ve got all sorts of esoteric USB devices connected at all times and this hasn’t happened to me, at least in recent memory.

I actually have seen this happen, but it was always because either the BIOS was set wrong (my fault) or the boot drive was dying. Basically the computer was fucked up.

UEFI does a pretty good job of knowing which drive you're supposed to boot from. It will even autoboot from the correct drive after you install Windows even when the Windows install media is still connected. I've always wondered how it knows to do that.

To play devil's advocate, there are probably issues I run into that are trivial for me to resolve but would throw a normie for a loop. Problems I don't even remember having because I knew exactly what was causing it and fixed it with minimal conscious thought. Not calling Shifty a normie just saying consoles might make more sense than I realize.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Maybe the majority of console owners, sure. But this isn’t a product for most console owners, this is a product for enthusiasts, and at this point most enthusiasts are probably on PC. Last gen it made sense for enthusiasts to buy a 4Pro (even if they were on PC too!) because of exclusives, but if you are a ‘hardcore enthusiast’ who would be the type to pay $700 for a marginal improvement then you are probably primed to switch to PC.

It's a niche product at $700, but the point is that it won't be that expensive forever. Sony has some flexibility there.

 

[see colon]

PC proportion seems about the same for both. EA saw a big uptick for PC in 2022 that might be indicative of something, or a change in monetisation that more greatly impacted PC.

EA games returned to Steam in late 2019 or 2020. Perhaps the revenue uptick in revenue corelates with EA releases that year, and it could be something as simple as Madden 22 launching on the platform. I can't remember if 21 launched directly into Steam or got released later with the next gen version, but having a full year of Madden revenue from the most popular PC storefront likely didn't hurt.

 

[Albuquerque]

To play devil's advocate, there are probably issues I run into that are trivial for me to resolve but would throw a normie for a loop. Problems I don't even remember having because I knew exactly what was causing it and fixed it with minimal conscious thought. Not calling Shifty a normie just saying consoles might make more sense than I realize.

I think you're getting what Shifty was trying to lay down.

Appliances "just work" for "normies" in the same way Apple products attempt to do the same for their own devices. There are probably a hundred thousand or more places on this planet which sell their own "PCs" with their own unique mix of parts and operating systems and supplementary applications preloaded, before we then talk about the literally millions of people who can assemble one for themselves out of their own mixmash of parts and operating systems and applications. And let's not even start on peripherals!

When a game does something unexpected on a PC platform, the number of variables to solve for in the PC space might as well be infinite. You put what processor in what wonky-ass motherboard with what dorked-up RAM and somehow you've got it slightly underclocked but it's because the thermal paste dried up three years ago and it's subtely overheating all the time and then you dropped what jacked-up video card into it running drivers that are still compatible with Window\s 7 because you refuse to upgrade to a modern OS because "the man is watching?" JFC!!

A console is an appliance. You plug it in to power, an HDMI displace device, and internet. Everything else in the box is a canned set of constants. Sure, the newest consoles allow for a limited set of peripherals too, however anyone buying those peripherals would already know to remove said peripheral if the game were having problems with it. The entire premise of a console since the dawn of the console itself is to permit the masses to play games without having to know anything about PCs.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I actually have seen this happen, but it was always because either the BIOS was set wrong (my fault) or the boot drive was dying. Basically the computer was fucked up.

I don't touch the BIOS. There's nothing reportedly wrong with the PC's health, and there are no other issues.

UEFI does a pretty good job of knowing which drive you're supposed to boot from.

There are only two drives, the internal SSD system and the internal HDD storage. Just every once in a while the BIOS decides to try to boot from USB and fails and gives up. Remove all USB devices, reboot and it sorts itself out and gets back to booting off SSD like normal for the next 4+ months. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To play devil's advocate, there are probably issues I run into that are trivial for me to resolve...

I dare say that there are issues PC users deal with without even realising they deal with them. If you ever tweak or poke or adjust anything, you are doing more than a console user needs to.

When you get a post like this, it's basically RNG whether it gets solved or not, and can take ages...

https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/13cz05c/apex_legends_crashes_and_blue_screens

Fixed hardware eliminates that on the whole, with any major errors being hardware faults dealt with by support/warranty. That's something PC won't be able ot compete with unless someone creates a standard box, like SteamDeck, and supports it.

 

[homerdog]

I think you're getting what Shifty was trying to lay down.

Appliances "just work" for "normies" in the same way Apple products attempt to do the same for their own devices. There are probably a hundred thousand or more places on this planet which sell their own "PCs" with their own unique mix of parts and operating systems and supplementary applications preloaded, before we then talk about the literally millions of people who can assemble one for themselves out of their own mixmash of parts and operating systems and applications. And let's not even start on peripherals!

When a game does something unexpected on a PC platform, the number of variables to solve for in the PC space might as well be infinite. You put what processor in what wonky-ass motherboard with what dorked-up RAM and somehow you've got it slightly underclocked but it's because the thermal paste dried up three years ago and it's subtely overheating all the time and then you dropped what jacked-up video card into it running drivers that are still compatible with Window\s 7 because you refuse to upgrade to a modern OS because "the man is watching?" JFC!!

A console is an appliance. You plug it in to power, an HDMI displace device, and internet. Everything else in the box is a canned set of constants. Sure, the newest consoles allow for a limited set of peripherals too, however anyone buying those peripherals would already know to remove said peripheral if the game were having problems with it. The entire premise of a console since the dawn of the console itself is to permit the masses to play games without having to know anything about PCs.

I will grant that having been a PC gamer since I was a small child it's probably impossible for me to put myself in the shoes of someone who knows nothing about PCs.

 

[Cappuccino]

I think you're getting what Shifty was trying to lay down.

Appliances "just work" for "normies" in the same way Apple products attempt to do the same for their own devices. There are probably a hundred thousand or more places on this planet which sell their own "PCs" with their own unique mix of parts and operating systems and supplementary applications preloaded, before we then talk about the literally millions of people who can assemble one for themselves out of their own mixmash of parts and operating systems and applications. And let's not even start on peripherals!

When a game does something unexpected on a PC platform, the number of variables to solve for in the PC space might as well be infinite. You put what processor in what wonky-ass motherboard with what dorked-up RAM and somehow you've got it slightly underclocked but it's because the thermal paste dried up three years ago and it's subtely overheating all the time and then you dropped what jacked-up video card into it running drivers that are still compatible with Window\s 7 because you refuse to upgrade to a modern OS because "the man is watching?" JFC!!

A console is an appliance. You plug it in to power, an HDMI displace device, and internet. Everything else in the box is a canned set of constants. Sure, the newest consoles allow for a limited set of peripherals too, however anyone buying those peripherals would already know to remove said peripheral if the game were having problems with it. The entire premise of a console since the dawn of the console itself is to permit the masses to play games without having to know anything about PCs.

I guess my issue with this line of thought is it’s being over dramatized to prove a point. A slightly underclocked CPU isn’t going to crash your game, it lowers FPS by maybe 5% and most don’t even notice. Dried up paste maybe happens every ten years, you really don’t need to replace it often (and usually by the time it’s time for a repasting they’re looking at a new build, or at the very least a CPU upgrade), PC gaming enthusiasts end up overemphasizing this.

Someone who is too ‘normie’ to repaste their CPU isn’t going to be running custom Windows 7-compatible video card drivers lol. They’re going to go to Nvidia.com and download the generic installer they provide. I don’t even know what a ‘jacked up’ video card would mean here, if it’s broken they’d RMA it, like they would for a broken console.

Of course, most PC gamers use pre builts anyways, so if their system has any problems they’d probably just send it back to the SI.

 

[Cappuccino]

I don't touch the BIOS. There's nothing reportedly wrong with the PC's health, and there are no other issues.

There are only two drives, the internal SSD system and the internal HDD storage. Just every once in a while the BIOS decides to try to boot from USB and fails and gives up. Remove all USB devices, reboot and it sorts itself out and gets back to booting off SSD like normal for the next 4+ months. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I dare say that there are issues PC users deal with without even realising they deal with them. If you ever tweak or poke or adjust anything, you are doing more than a console user needs to.

When you get a post like this, it's basically RNG whether it gets solved or not, and can take ages...

https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/13cz05c/apex_legends_crashes_and_blue_screens

Fixed hardware eliminates that on the whole, with any major errors being hardware faults dealt with by support/warranty. That's something PC won't be able ot compete with unless someone creates a standard box, like SteamDeck, and supports it.

I’ve seen consoles exhibit this exact same behavior lol, crashes aren’t unique to PC and the outcome is usually the same: repeated crashes and power failures usually mean bad hardware and a replacement is in order. At least with a PC you have the option of replacing a piece of it and not junking the entire unit.

 

[Albuquerque]

I guess my issue with this line of thought is it’s being over dramatized to prove a point.

All the stuff I typed is shit that I've personally been party to, either from family, friends, coworkers who asked for help, friends-of-friends, etc. I've been doing this shit for 27 years professionally, and a half-decade longer before that. Paste that dries up in 10 years? Sure, if you're DIY and using the good stuff. If you're Dell and cranking out little bullshit PCs for $449 for an i3 and 4GB of ram? The paste they're using is whatever the cheapest possible thing they could buy which would >90% outlive the ~1yr warranty period. And when a processor is overheating, it can stutter as the clocks fluctuate around, especially if the user is running the IGP. I could pull apart a PC from my former employer today and there would probabluy be chalk between the CPU and the little integrated heatsink+fan combo.

I don't suck at this. I've built custom PCs since I was 14 (and that was back before VLB existed), I've built custom watercooling loops with tubes and a heater core from an old Buick and a water pump from a bigass aquarium shop. I've modified surface mount resistors to overvolt a Riva 9500np and a GeForce3 Ti200. And yet, even I've been mauled and perplexed for a few days by a PSU which was starting to falter. I would run a game for hours and it would be fine, then I'd load up another game and the box would reboot itself after somewhere between five and fifteen minutes. I ran Prime95 for hours without issue. I ran Memtest86 for a full day without issue. I ran the little MSI Kombuster fuzzy donut to torture the GPU for hours without issue. I even ran exhaustive tests on the disk, wiped the offending game out and redownloaded it with Steam, nothing really seemed to solve the problem. It finally dawned on me to try running Intel Burntest while also running the fuzzy donut test at the same time, and boom the PC instantly reboots.

Tada, power supply. A nice brand-name 1KW one too, still didn't matter, apparently it was tired of my shit and wanted out.

I'm not kidding when I say the number of variables to "solve for" on a PC becomes functionally infinite, because there is essentially no limit to the permutations of hardware configuration, OS configuration, installed apps, driver iterationsm, and subtle hardware faults which exist on the billions of PCs which exist on this planet. Guess how many permutations exist of an XBOX Series X? You don't have to guess, because it's approaching 1/inf of the number of PC permutations.

Consoles solve a mega-shitload of problems for developers and users alike.

And don't get it crooked, the only console I own is an XBOX 1X that was given to me as a Christmas gift however many years ago since that console was relevant. I can't tell you the last time I actually turned it on, I should probably sell it. My gaming is on PC exclusively, which includes my (now hardware modified) Steamdeck.

 

[Cappuccino]

All the stuff I typed is shit that I've personally been party to, either from family, friends, coworkers who asked for help, friends-of-friends, etc. I've been doing this shit for 27 years professionally, and a half-decade longer before that. Paste that dries up in 10 years? Sure, if you're DIY and using the good stuff. If you're Dell and cranking out little bullshit PCs for $449 for an i3 and 4GB of ram? The paste they're using is whatever the cheapest possible thing they could buy which would >90% outlive the ~1yr warranty period. And when a processor is overheating, it can stutter as the clocks fluctuate around, especially if the user is running the IGP. I could pull apart a PC from my former employer today and there would probabluy be chalk between the CPU and the little integrated heatsink+fan combo.

I don't suck at this. I've built custom PCs since I was 14 (and that was back before VLB existed), I've built custom watercooling loops with tubes and a heater core from an old Buick and a water pump from a bigass aquarium shop. I've modified surface mount resistors to overvolt a Riva 9500np and a GeForce3 Ti200. And yet, even I've been mauled and perplexed for a few days by a PSU which was starting to falter. I would run a game for hours and it would be fine, then I'd load up another game and the box would reboot itself after somewhere between five and fifteen minutes. I ran Prime95 for hours without issue. I ran Memtest86 for a full day without issue. I ran the little MSI Kombuster fuzzy donut to torture the GPU for hours without issue. I even ran exhaustive tests on the disk, wiped the offending game out and redownloaded it with Steam, nothing really seemed to solve the problem. It finally dawned on me to try running Intel Burntest while also running the fuzzy donut test at the same time, and boom the PC instantly reboots.

Tada, power supply. A nice brand-name 1KW one too, still didn't matter, apparently it was tired of my shit and wanted out.

I'm not kidding when I say the number of variables to "solve for" on a PC becomes functionally infinite, because there is essentially no limit to the permutations of hardware configuration, OS configuration, installed apps, driver iterationsm, and subtle hardware faults which exist on the billions of PCs which exist on this planet. Guess how many permutations exist of an XBOX Series X? You don't have to guess, because it's approaching 1/inf of the number of PC permutations.

Consoles solve a mega-shitload of problems for developers and users alike.

And don't get it crooked, the only console I own is an XBOX 1X that was given to me as a Christmas gift however many years ago since that console was relevant. I can't tell you the last time I actually turned it on, I should probably sell it. My gaming is on PC exclusively, which includes my (now hardware modified) Steamdeck.

In your original comment you were talking about 3 year old thermal paste being so dried out it creates thermal throttling, and that was crashing games. I don’t see a scenario where that’s plausible. Same with janked up drivers to remain on Windows 7, this is such a niche issue I don’t really think it’s very common.

I don’t really get this permutations argument. Hardware doesn’t fail at an accelerated rate if your CPU and GPU are from different manufacturers. We standardize modern PCs around a certain set of communication specs.

As for hardware failure, console PSUs fail all the time, it just means they have to junk the entire unit instead of figuring out the PSU is dead and replacing it.

An interesting anecdote: contrary to popular belief it’s actually easier to get surround sound working on PC due to longstanding bugs on the major consoles, which is ironic because consoles are usually dubbed as media boxes as well as gaming consoles, and are thus made for the living room and a surround sound system.

 

[Albuquerque]

In your original comment you were talking about 3 year old thermal paste being so dried out it creates thermal throttling, and that was crashing games. I don’t see a scenario where that’s plausible.

Quote me where I said it was crashing.

And when you can't, because I didn't say it, quote what I did say and get back to me if you still don't understand.

 

[Cappuccino]

Quote me where I said it was crashing.

And when you can't, because I didn't say it, quote what I did say and get back to me if you still don't understand.

So if it’s not crashing then what is it doing? Causing minor performance degradation? That’s not really an issue regular people care about lol.

 

[Albuquerque]

Apparently you've never seen a processor sawtooth in clockspeed due to irregular cooling. One way in which an overheating CPU can show itself is egregious framerate stutter -- where a game will perform at high speed for a big fistful of frames, and then almost pause for a handful of milliseconds until temps reduce, only to then raster another huge burst of frames. It's most prevalent in iGPU systems, but systems with a dGPU can suffer from it too.

This isn't some black and white thing : oh a CPU gets hot, it just slows down? No, not always, sometimes it rapidly heats and then cools and then heats again; clock hysteresis isn't guaranteed and nor do AMD and Intel offer as much.

More importantly: are you just going to be pendantic all day, or are you going to attempt to contribute in good faith to a conversation which deals with complexity of the PC ecosystem? Whether you like it or not, the PC world is incredibly complex, far more so than the console ecosystem -- and there's zero logical way for you or anyone else to refute it. Those complexities are then borne out in poor user experiences, for those who have no interest in anything further than just playing games.

 

[Cappuccino]

Apparently you've never seen a processor sawtooth in clockspeed due to irregular cooling. One way in which an overheating CPU can show itself is egregious framerate stutter -- where a game will perform at high speed for a big fistful of frames, and then almost pause for a handful of milliseconds until temps reduce, only to then raster another huge burst of frames. It's most prevalent in iGPU systems, but systems with a dGPU can suffer from it too.

This isn't some black and white thing : oh a CPU gets hot, it just slows down? No, not always, sometimes it rapidly heats and then cools and then heats again; clock hysteresis isn't guaranteed and nor do AMD and Intel offer as much.

More importantly: are you just going to be pendantic all day, or are you going to attempt to contribute in good faith to a conversation which deals with complexity of the PC ecosystem? Whether you like it or not, the PC world is incredibly complex, far more so than the console ecosystem -- and there's zero logical way for you or anyone else to refute it. Those complexities are then borne out in poor user experiences, for those who have no interest in anything further than just playing games.

I’ve seen plenty of this happen, but it’s to extremely old systems. I’ve never seen a CPU’s thermal paste dry out in less than a decade. In all my years I’ve never had one personally because by the time it would have dried enough to need physical intervention I would have already replaced it with something newer.

This affects consoles too btw, I imagine many of the original Xbox Ones and PS4s in use probably could use a repasting. Most retro consoles require it at this point.

Every comment I’ve posted is in good faith, I think you guys are playing up the complexities in PC gaming to make it sound like it’s a huge leap to go from console -> PC. In reality most of these issues are pretty easily resolved, my wife figured out how to paste her CPU upon install and she certainly isn’t a technical person.

 

[Albuquerque]

Every comment I’ve posted is in good faith, I think you guys are playing up the complexities in PC gaming to make it sound like it’s a huge leap to go from console -> PC. In reality most of these issues are pretty easily resolved, my wife figured out how to paste her CPU upon install and she certainly isn’t a technical person.

Why are you so focused on heatsink paste? I gave a half dozen other perfectly valid examples and yet you've decided CPU paste is the one that matters? CPU paste issues are valid, not just because they're dry, sometimes they're also fully missing and nobody would really notice unless the system is actually stressed.

Howabout you expand your next reply: you've yet to touch on the number of hardware permutations which can exist even on a "modern" PC. Literally hundreds of CPU options, dozens of chipset options, hundreds of system boards all with their own funky firmware decisions, bordering on hundreds of GPU options, dozens of sound options, thousands of network options, dozens of storage options. Every one of these points on a hardware decision tree matter when chasing down a game that's doing something "wrong."

Or we can talk about each one of those pieces of hardware likely needing one of dozens of different driver versions. In most cases Microsoft can find a driver for you, however the MS version isn't guaranteed to be recent or fully featured. The manufacturer will near-always provide their own driver package, typically replete with a bunch of tertiary software which claims to enhance your experience with their product. My Logitech keyboard uses a different "fully featured" software package than my Logitech mouse, so I have two continually-resident software packages just for those two devices. Turns out, BOTH of them have integrations where they track which app you've got open to then offer keybinding or RGB color options unique to the app. Then I've got another continually resident software package for my Soundblaster XFi 4, which is a little wonky and sometimes drops the Dolby Digital encoding via SPDIF, which I usually only notice when my rear channels stop functioning. Then I get to play the game of opening device manager, right-clicking to remove the XFi audio driver, reboot, let the system reinstall the drivers auto-magically, then go back to the software configuration package and re-enable DDE via SPDIF, and finally change my default output to the SPDIF again. After all that bullshit, I haven't even come to the point where my GPU driver occasionally needs some love to avoid issues in games, or my network driver needed an update for TCP stack overflow issues when using 2.5GbE mode and after transmitting something like 16 terabytes of data during a single power-on session (I don't power the box off, and centralized backups are a thing in my household.)

Or we can talk about OS versions and updates, which we ALL know are perfectly stable and haven't caused issues with CPU performance, or application stability, or hell even boot process failures when mixed and matched with other certain drivers or hardware or resident applications. If you'd like to skip that, we can talk about whatever dorky applications are already installed and have hooks into the underlying OS -- DRM enforcement, anti-cheat nonsense, howabout antivirus even? I'm sure nobody here got hammered by the Crowdstrike EDR update which BSoD'd about a hojillion Windows machines two months ago. /s There have been plenty of examples of 3rd party apps screwing with games since the beginning of PC time.

And in the other corner, for an example, the Series X has a singular highly controlled hardware ecosystem which only deviates after having been QA'd to death. Supply chains for that hardware are tightly controlled, firmware versions on hardware devices are tightly controlled, the driver and OS updates are rigorously controlled and coordinated. The user can't install apps at an OS level, they can't screw with the OS config, they can only download or otherwise install a game that has been purposefully packaged to maintain isolation from the other loaded games and OS features.

 

[Cappuccino]

Why are you so focused on heatsink paste? I gave a half dozen other perfectly valid examples and yet you've decided CPU paste is the one that matters? CPU paste issues are valid, not just because they're dry, sometimes they're also fully missing and nobody would really notice unless the system is actually stressed.

Howabout you expand your next reply: you've yet to touch on the number of hardware permutations which can exist even on a "modern" PC. Literally hundreds of CPU options, dozens of chipset options, hundreds of system boards all with their own funky firmware decisions, bordering on hundreds of GPU options, dozens of sound options, thousands of network options, dozens of storage options. Every one of these points on a hardware decision tree matter when chasing down a game that's doing something "wrong."

Or we can talk about each one of those pieces of hardware likely needing one of dozens of different driver versions. In most cases Microsoft can find a driver for you, however the MS version isn't guaranteed to be recent or fully featured. The manufacturer will near-always provide their own driver package, typically replete with a bunch of tertiary software which claims to enhance your experience with their product. My Logitech keyboard uses a different "fully featured" software package than my Logitech mouse, so I have two continually-resident software packages just for those two devices. Turns out, BOTH of them have integrations where they track which app you've got open to then offer keybinding or RGB color options unique to the app. Then I've got another continually resident software package for my Soundblaster XFi 4, which is a little wonky and sometimes drops the Dolby Digital encoding via SPDIF, which I usually only notice when my rear channels stop functioning. Then I get to play the game of opening device manager, right-clicking to remove the XFi audio driver, reboot, let the system reinstall the drivers auto-magically, then go back to the software configuration package and re-enable DDE via SPDIF, and finally change my default output to the SPDIF again. After all that bullshit, I haven't even come to the point where my GPU driver occasionally needs some love to avoid issues in games, or my network driver needed an update for TCP stack overflow issues when using 2.5GbE mode and after transmitting something like 16 terabytes of data during a single power-on session (I don't power the box off, and centralized backups are a thing in my household.)

Or we can talk about OS versions and updates, which we ALL know are perfectly stable and haven't caused issues with CPU performance, or application stability, or hell even boot process failures when mixed and matched with other certain drivers or hardware or resident applications. If you'd like to skip that, we can talk about whatever dorky applications are already installed and have hooks into the underlying OS -- DRM enforcement, anti-cheat nonsense, howabout antivirus even? I'm sure nobody here got hammered by the Crowdstrike EDR update which BSoD'd about a hojillion Windows machines two months ago. /s There have been plenty of examples of 3rd party apps screwing with games since the beginning of PC time.

And in the other corner, for an example, the Series X has a singular highly controlled hardware ecosystem which only deviates after having been QA'd to death. Supply chains for that hardware are tightly controlled, firmware versions on hardware devices are tightly controlled, the driver and OS updates are rigorously controlled and coordinated. The user can't install apps at an OS level, they can't screw with the OS config, they can only download or otherwise install a game that has been purposefully packaged to maintain isolation from the other loaded games and OS features.

Again, all of this is highly standardized. Using two different CPUs does not cause BSOD unless you are doing something weird. I’ve literally upgraded CPUs without even touching windows and it works fine (this was on W10 even, W11 prob works the same).

The average person is not using 2.5GbE, they are likely using the standard gigabit port that’s on basically every motherboard and deploys drivers through windows update. Using esoteric pieces of hardware can introduce instability but it’s irrelevant because we’re talking about replacing a console, not setting up a server rack. None of the consoles use 2.5 Gb Ethernet.

A sound card? Come on dude, who uses sound cards beyond people stuck in 2004. I’ve legit never seen someone use Toslink via sound card, in fact I haven’t seen Toslink being used in years! Everyone’s moved on to HDMI, which is what you’d use on console too.

Where I see the most issues with PC peripherals is RGB because most of it is poorly QA’d. However not only it is essentially irrelevant to the experience if your lights stop working, it’s also something the consoles can’t do at all lol.

My point is, if you take a PC and build and use it like a console (ie don’t install a 25 year old sound card, use modern hardware with modern software support, cool it properly, and use HDMI or DisplayPort out) you will have roughly the same amount of problems as a console user. This has been the case for myself, and everyone I know, including people without in depth computer knowledge. Issues arise when people do odd, out of spec things (like using Chinese riser kits, I’ve done this before and it kills reliability), or use hardware without proper software support (there are communities of people who are using very old AMD cards with modded drivers, not for the faint of heart for sure).

The hardest parts IMO of using a PC are diagnosing individual parts (but frankly you don’t really have to do this, a lot of people just trash the whole system when part of it breaks (essentially what you’d do with a console)), and the initial configuration, having to go into the NVCP to turn on Gsync and everything is a bit Byzantine (but fixed by the newest GeForce Experience update).

All of these permutation issues we are discussing are nullified by the fact that modern standards are designed to be plug and play. As long as hardware conforms to whatever spec it’s using (USB, PCI-e, whatever) there should be no problems with them all working together. In my experience this holds true.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This is going to get too heated if we carry on like this. There's no way to prove either side in this. We can only present anecdotes and then people will interpret them based on their own experiences and beliefs. I've used PCs since the Amiga got superseded. I've known them from the days my mate was faffing around with .bats and LoadHigh trying to get his sound card working with some game, up to now where I built my own development PC. PCs are much improved, but random shit happens. As the family tech guy, I'm the person called on to solve some dumb laptop error and waste hours trying to identify and fix the issue. On fixed gaming hardware, significant problems are a hardware fault. On PC, it's not always. Sometimes some bits don't play nice together, with too many pieces assembled together. I've even had it on prebuilt systems, and you get manufacturer support with no idea how to solve the issue.

Maybe that is defective hardware, a tiny defect somewhere in a zillion components. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Either way, it's not a 'dead system' type you know it needs replacing, but at the user level it's just a random quirk that can't be solved and replacing the entire unit isn't an option because the GPU people blame the OS and the OS people blame the game and the game people say it's a fault of the SSD manufacturer and the SSD manufacturer says check with the GPU people...

Suffice to say, me as someone who's grown up around PCs and has a degree in Comp Sci and writes and debugs software with pretty great problem-identifying and resolution skills, who has no particular attachment to Sony tax and would love a Steam-like gaming OS, I'm still hesitant to swap to PC. You can call me stupid or naive or a liar or prejudiced or clueless or whatever makes you feel happy because your anecdotes don't align with mine - that's my thought process as a consumer and I dare say it's a common thought process and a primary reason why consoles continue to sell and will continue to do so even as the price increases.

 

[Albuquerque]

Again, all of this is highly standardized. Using two different CPUs does not cause BSOD unless you are doing something weird. I’ve literally upgraded CPUs without even touching windows and it works fine (this was on W10 even, W11 prob works the same).

You're handwaving a lot of shit away with these statements.

You're talking about your own PC.

I had direct responsibility for the entire server infrastructure (datacenter compute, storage, hypervisor, base operating system, and data protection) for two Fortune 250 orgs in the last 15 years. I also, for about three years there in the middle, was responsible for every end-user compute device for 7000 physical stores in the continental 48 United States -- all 85,000 registers and back office "server" -- for a fortune 250 org.

In my experience, with 100,000 x86 PC devices over those 15 years, shit is NOT so simple as you think it is with your "oh I upgraded a processor and it was fine" and "my wife swapped some CPU grease!" Even in the 85,000 store devices we had only five certified hardware register models, about a dozen certified peripheral devices, and even then we had to work hard to ensure drivers didn't jack up peripherals or dork up operating systems in mysterious ways. I can't tell you how many times we had issues with the "same" peripheral but was shipped with newer firmware (without anyone mentioning it) and it would somehow jack up the driver config which would cause our application to lose connectivity to the device.

All of this shit is real, and comes from 20+ years of actually doing this professionally for orgs where it actually matters in terms of making money for shareholders.

 

[Cappuccino]

You're handwaving a lot of shit away with these statements.

You're talking about your own PC.

I had direct responsibility for the entire server infrastructure (datacenter compute, storage, hypervisor, base operating system, and data protection) for two Fortune 250 orgs in the last 15 years. I also, for about three years there in the middle, was responsible for every end-user compute device for 7000 physical stores in the continental 48 United States -- all 85,000 registers and back office "server" -- for a fortune 250 org.

In my experience, with 100,000 x86 PC devices over those 15 years, shit is NOT so simple as you think it is with your "oh I upgraded a processor and it was fine" and "my wife swapped some CPU grease!" Even in the 85,000 store devices we had only five certified hardware register models, about a dozen certified peripheral devices, and even then we had to work hard to ensure drivers didn't jack up peripherals or dork up operating systems in mysterious ways. I can't tell you how many times we had issues with the "same" peripheral but was shipped with newer firmware (without anyone mentioning it) and it would somehow jack up the driver config which would cause our application to lose connectivity to the device.

All of this shit is real, and comes from 20+ years of actually doing this professionally for orgs where it actually matters in terms of making money for shareholders.

Okay yes I’m speaking about a singular PC running basic hardware. Idk why you are talking about enterprise deployments, that’s like comparing getting my Honda an oil change to maintaining a turboprop airplane. Nobody is saying that’s simple, in fact nobody but you brought it up lol.