PS5, Xbox or PC Gaming.. If you are a fan of video games, you are surely interested in the new consoles that have come on the market, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X.
In this article I am going to give a review of the hardware included in the new consoles and that it would cost us to assemble a PC for Gaming with similar characteristics.
Keep in mind that Sony used to tend to make consoles with fairly proprietary hardware (such as the PS2 and PS3) but as of the PS4 it already included hardware closer to the hardware used in PCs.
By cons Microsoft has always made consoles as if they were a dedicated use PC for games.
In this Comparison PS5, Xbox or PC we will see that the latest consoles have quite similar hardware with some differences but with the same base.
PROCESSOR
The PS5 features a custom 8-core processor up to 3.5 GHz (variable frequency) with AMD Zen 2 microarchitecture and 7nm photolithography
The Xbox has a custom 3.8 GHz 8-core processor with AMD Zen 2 microarchitecture and 7nm photolithography
As we can see, both systems use a custom AMD architecture that we will not find in the PC world.
In a PC we could put an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor.
This type of processors allow 2 threads per core, so they can execute up to 16 threads of execution.
GRAPHIC CARD
The PS5 features a custom graphics processor with 36 computing units at up to 2.23 GHz (variable frequency), AMD RDNA 2 microarchitecture and up to 10.28 TFLOPS
The Xbox has a custom graphics processor with 52 computing units at 1.825 GHz, AMD RDNA 2 microarchitecture and 12 TFLOPS
Both systems have the AMD RDNA architecture, in the field of PC the graphics card that is most similar is the Radeon RX 6800 from AMD.
With these graphics processors, resolutions of up to 8K and 120 FPS can be reached, although the usual thing will be to run games at 4K and 60 FPS.
In addition, the graphics processor uses the so-called Ray Tracing which will give more realism to the shadows and especially to the lighting of the graphic scenes.
MEMORY
In this section, the PS5 has 16 GB GDDR6 with a 256-bit bus and the XBox with 16 GB GDDR6 with a 320-bit bus.
In both consoles the memory is shared between the CPU and the graphics card.
In the PC field, memory cannot be shared between the processor and the graphics card, so you have to opt for 16 GB of DDR4 memory, significantly slower than GDDR6.
HDD
The PS5 has a custom 825GB SSD with proprietary interface and the Xbox has a custom 1TB SSD with NVMe interface
For the PC, you could choose a 1 TB SSD with NVMe PCIe 4.0 interface
Keep in mind that these latest generation SSD drives have nothing to do with those included in previous consoles such as the PS4 since they are much faster, which greatly favors the games loading much faster.
SOUND
The PS5 has a sound with 3D Tempest audio technology and the Xbox with Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1, Dolby TrueHD with Atmos and LPCM of up to 7.1 channels
CONNECTIVITY
In the connectivity section, the PS5 has 1 x HDMI 2.1, 2 x USB 3.1, 1 x USB 2.0, 1 x USB 3.1 type C, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet and 1 x PCIe 4.0 M.2 internal slot for storage expansion SSD
The Xbox has 1 x HDMI 2.1, 3 x USB 3.1 Gen 1, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet and 1 TB Seagate expansion card slot
In both systems we could expand the current hard drive in the future.
WIFI
The PS5 has WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1.
Xbox includes 802.11ac WiFi
WIFI 6 or Wifi 802.11ax is the latest version and 11ac or Wifi 5 is significantly better.
BLUERAY
Both the PS5 and the Xbox have a digital version that does not include a BlueRay reader unit, the price difference of the digital version and the version with BlueRay is 100 euros.
FINAL PRICE
Both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X in their digital version cost 399 USD.
Following that Comparison PS5, Xbox or PC, if we wanted to build a PC for Gaming with similar characteristics it could cost us about 1500 USD!!
At this point you may wonder how Sony and Microsoft can afford the sale of equipment whose components are much more expensive than the console ???
The answer is the way of selling that many companies have lately that is based on selling a computer at a significantly cheaper price and making money with added products, in this case accessories and especially games.