Billy Idol
Legend
Sorry, but you cannot compare Steam sales to anything else. Steam sales is king, you have to experience it. Everything else is a joke in comparsion...
What’s the price of switching from console to PC?
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
- Start date
Sorry, but you cannot compare Steam sales to anything else. Steam sales is king, you have to experience it. Everything else is a joke in comparsion...
Steam sales are cool, but PSN has a lot of big sales these days as well. Nothing as crazy as Steam's sometimes gets, but on the other hand Playstation Plus and it's instant game collection, many free games and discounts definitely isn't bad either, and it is actually fed from quite a similar drive as Steam's sales frequently are.
Yeah but you have to keep paying for psn plus to eventually get games you want, whereas with Steam you could have just bought the games you want outright for $5 to $15 by the time psn plus gets them and own them forever, and be able to use them on any pc in your house, your laptop, tablet, etc. For example I bought Darkness 2 for $12 and Saints Row 3 for $15 many months ago and I can play them anywhere and keep them forever. For how long would I have to keep paying psn plus to finally get those games? Or what happens is if a game is removed from psn plus before I'm done playing it?
I honestly don't understand why people keep getting this so confused. I wasn't asking for PC to be the same size as a console and the same price. I was asking what things cost. If I was to play on a PC, how much would it cost, and how much to get it smaller?
Well I answered that on page 1
Cost may very well be all relative to how you use the device. To me consoles are very expensive whereas gaming on pc is very cheap, that's just how it works out for me. For you it may be the opposite.scooby_dooby
Legend
I have that too of course, but she's a lonely gal these days
Borderlands, Walking Dead, FTL and Guild Wars 2 are making me ridiculously overloaded with things to play.But at least there's always Hockey... and Halo 4
scooby_dooby
Legend
You're lookin at $700 and up at the end of the day IMO. Then there's all the extras, SS Speakers? Huge sexy monitor? Mechanical Keyboard? Gaming Mouse? You can easily spend a lot of money, but you keep getting a better and better gaming experience.
That is really the beauty of the platform. Freedom. Flexibility. Customization.
Making it smaller is a can of worms though... quick answer is just don't do it. Long answer, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and probably do lots of research,
RancidLunchmeat
Veteran
Shifty, I'm pretty sure what you actually want is an osprey.
LOCK THIS THREAD, lol. It cannot possibly get better than this XD
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
About 800 euro's
Silverstone sugi mini ITX + 430 watt psu - 130 eu
Asus p8h61 - 68 eu
Radeon 7950 - 250 eu (didnt check if this will actually fit though!)
Samsung 1tb hdd - 67 eu
Samsung 128gb ssd 90 eu
8gb ram - 39 eu
Core i5 760 (2.8ghz quad) - 160 eu
804 euro in total for a system that is pretty high end AND about as small as its gonna get.
So that's only 100 ~ 200 euro's more than what you'd pay when you buy a ~200 console and a 400 ~ 500 euro pc. So it's really not that much more expensive and this is for a fairly high end system.
Edit: That case doesn't take long gpu cards but the 40 euro coolermaster elite 120 does. Obviously that case is a fair bit longer but otoh it takes a normal sized psu so that could be a plus. Bit bigger but overal price is more or less the same.
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For a smallish PC, I'd probably go with the Fortress FT03. It looks great - well, IMO anyway, decently small footprint, decent ventilation for a small chassis, and it will be as quiet as the fans you stick in it. Micro ATX form factor for the motherboard means you still got decent expansion capabilities, and there's great full-featured gaming/enthusiast boards in this form factor as well. There's even LGA 2011 socket boards available which is pretty crazy really. So, it's not going to be as cramped and limited as an ITX format system.
Drives and storage-wise, there's room for a slot-in optical drive, two 3.5" HDD bays with rubber grommet mounts, one 2.5" bay and an additional 3.5" hotpluggable bay on top of the chassis. Anyone needing more could just go with a gigabit NAS or perhaps a USB3 external chassis. Either should be fairly cost effective these days.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
I like the Bitfenix Prodigy Mini-ITX case, yeah the motherboard has only one expansion slot, but you can do a lot with that case and the price is not bad.
edit: Also my vote goes to ducks.
edit: Also my vote goes to ducks.
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Ok I may as well weigh in with my experiences of playing games on the big screen with a HTPC since I do that all the time.
The keyboard/mouse issues are doable with the right keyboard and mouse. I use a small logitech wireless kb/mouse combo with a good laser which is actually more than adequare, I.E I can play FPS/RTS games on the couch with little trouble. You'll have to budget another $50-100 USD/Pounds for a good interface plus another $30 USD for a wired/50 for a wireless Xbox 360 controller. The major downside really is that there is no local co-op you could rely on except 'pass the controller'.
The system I have in front of my TV is pretty neat:
Antec 100 Case
Phenom X4 920 (upgrade from Athlon X2 2500)
4 GB DDR3
HD 7850 2GB
1 TB Of HDD space.
The way I would recommend future HTPC enthusiasts to go is with an internal SSD and external raid array HDD on USB3 with a small case given the fact that at 1080P you don't need a huge graphics card to run things and something like an HD 77xx would do fine. I would propose that Windows 8 will be an excellent UI for an HTPC given the large size of icons and I have been testing it with the idea of an upgrade in the future.
The idea isn't that an HTPC is cheaper or easier than a console but that ease of use and value can also come from flexibility.
A good option instead of building a new computer is to use a laptop instead. Between Haswell and various AMD APU based laptops you can now get pretty reasonable performance in a low power and quiet package with increased portability. You could buy a laptop for near to the price of a console and get the best of both worlds if you want, portability and performance without spending the time to delve into the details.
Ideally I would say the most user friendly and 'best' option would actually be Shifty's idea of a windows 8 'tablet console'. You could do wireless HDMI and the touch screen would be more comfortable than a KB/Mouse on the lap deal and you have the option of taking your 'console' with you. I would say that with a Windows 8 tablet for say $499-799 would have enough advantages in this scenario compared to say next generation consoles to be worth the entry cost.
The keyboard/mouse issues are doable with the right keyboard and mouse. I use a small logitech wireless kb/mouse combo with a good laser which is actually more than adequare, I.E I can play FPS/RTS games on the couch with little trouble. You'll have to budget another $50-100 USD/Pounds for a good interface plus another $30 USD for a wired/50 for a wireless Xbox 360 controller. The major downside really is that there is no local co-op you could rely on except 'pass the controller'.
The system I have in front of my TV is pretty neat:
Antec 100 Case
Phenom X4 920 (upgrade from Athlon X2 2500)
4 GB DDR3
HD 7850 2GB
1 TB Of HDD space.
The way I would recommend future HTPC enthusiasts to go is with an internal SSD and external raid array HDD on USB3 with a small case given the fact that at 1080P you don't need a huge graphics card to run things and something like an HD 77xx would do fine. I would propose that Windows 8 will be an excellent UI for an HTPC given the large size of icons and I have been testing it with the idea of an upgrade in the future.
The idea isn't that an HTPC is cheaper or easier than a console but that ease of use and value can also come from flexibility.
A good option instead of building a new computer is to use a laptop instead. Between Haswell and various AMD APU based laptops you can now get pretty reasonable performance in a low power and quiet package with increased portability. You could buy a laptop for near to the price of a console and get the best of both worlds if you want, portability and performance without spending the time to delve into the details.
Ideally I would say the most user friendly and 'best' option would actually be Shifty's idea of a windows 8 'tablet console'. You could do wireless HDMI and the touch screen would be more comfortable than a KB/Mouse on the lap deal and you have the option of taking your 'console' with you. I would say that with a Windows 8 tablet for say $499-799 would have enough advantages in this scenario compared to say next generation consoles to be worth the entry cost.
My licensing fees on that are pretty crippling though.
I'm thinking of looking at this platform comparison another way, with a scoring system for different platforms in several criteria. Not to get a best aggregate score, but just to present the general case for each platform, where individuals could weight according to their own preferences. There'd need to be a system to accommodate the breadth of variables though, plus varying value over time (eg. console hardware is great value at launch, and moderate to poor at its end).
My licensing fees on that are pretty crippling though.
I'm sure you'll take $3 a tablet over hundreds of millions of tablets plus 5% on every game.
Right now I would say that the big unknown is really at this point the tablet angle of things given I suspect that of all the options it likely has the best chance of wide adoption and with Nintendo pushing their own tablet they may inadvertently push HD style console gaming onto the tablet form factor.
Rather than say comparing what is a niche of building an HTPC and sticking it next to the TV a more realistic idea could be the tablet with/without a TV interface. I think this is the avenue which realistically has the greatest chance of competing with the console as Windows 8/iPad/Android etc are already arguably overlap with the console style of UI and experience.
Tablet vs console? That'd be an interesting question. It'd also limit the variables and make for a direct product to product comparison, I.E. you could compare the value of a fixed tablet(s) to a fixed console(s).
Edit: Upcoming and existing tablets for comparison.
Plus a serious sacrifice in library at the moment. As console libraries and PC libraries have converged on the major titles, with the difference principally being a few exclusives and the download libraries, they represent interchangeable machines as far as Joe Gamer is concerned, whereas tablet would be a completely different experience until it can match the library. The loss of graphics might be acceptable, but not having FIFA, COD, Madden, Mass Effect, Borderlands, etc. means tablet isn't a gamers' machine yet. (That's not to say it may not displace console around other markets who don't care for 'core' games.)
Looking at the timeframes we're talking about roughly 2013 haswell ix 4xxx generation Intel products and their 14nm 2014 ix 5xxx products which ought to be able to give baseline performance at Wii U levels with the same library essentially minus Nintendo exclusives compensated with PC exclusives.
Intel is rumoured to be including on package Dram (not edram) in their next generation haswell cpu packages so given the two process nodes plus Intel process advantages over the Wii U it would be reasonable to expect Wii U level performance from their next generation CGPUs.
AMD is already beating Wii U with Trinity.
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