Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
With the inbound release date of the "next gen" consoles, I want to challenge the PC enthusiatsts and genius builders here at Hexus to see if they can come up with a list of components to create a PC alternative of the next gen consoles, that has the same power and performance for the same price bracket (£349 / £429).
Rules:
Must include case, wifi and bluetooth connectivity, DVD Drive, HDMI cable, and a wireless playing peripheral (keyboard & mouse / controller & trackball keyboard etc).
Must Not include monitors, speakers, headsets etc as these are optional extras.
Build should be based on a dedicated gaming machine that can stream movies / browse internet. No other tasks need supporting (i.e. photo editing, video re-coding, word processing).
No Loss leading
Operating System is assumed to be the soon to be released SteamOS or another free distro.
The best builds will be added to a vote and the top choice will receive a virtual forged Hexus accolade.
Good Luck
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Are we allowed to loss-lead? ;)
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Does this include Windows too?
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
And just to get the rules straight, do we need to include an OS? (And shouldn't it be a bluray drive over DVD?)
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Quote:
Originally Posted by
CAT-THE-FIFTH
Does this include Windows too?
I skipped out the OS as there are plenty of free distro's out their and with the SteamOS on the horizon...Windows is soon to be replaced anyway. Feel free to use Windows if you can source an OEM key for a decent price though.
Main post updated to mention this.
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Shouldn't actually be that hard due to the fact that it looks like games are only running at 720p 30fps and equivalent of High setting on the XBone (going from BF4 and Ghost Reviews).
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Quote:
Originally Posted by
virtuo
And shouldn't it be a bluray drive over DVD?
I thought about that but decided against it. Consoles are going to bluray to increase the amount of game content available per disc. As PC games are 90% digital, and the reamianing 10% get installed from disc, upgrading to bluray seemed pointless.
DVD drive is purely for watching DVD's.
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
On a side note,a console will stay relevant longer regarding hardware,than say a PC. The thing is as time progress,the games are going to look and run better.
With Windows it will be not really possible to use the budget to get a decent setup as you would need to skimp on the hardware IMHO.
Also,SteamOS is unlikely to support as many games as Windows or even the consoles,and it is yet to be seen if performance will be better or worse for many games.
Anyway,I would get these parts:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-FX6300-E...eywords=fx6300
http://www.amazon.co.uk/M5A97-R2-0-M...eywords=970+r2
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-BLT2...words=8gb+ddr3
http://www.cclonline.com/product/554...tion-/PSU0202/
http://www.cclonline.com/product/662...Drive/HDD1190/
http://www.cclonline.com/product/123...lack-/CDR0201/
http://www.ebuyer.com/544191-powerco...0-2gbd5-2dhppe
http://www.ebuyer.com/239238-casecom...an-k5-9388blue
The whole shebang comes to around £420 without an OS and no wireless card,bluetooth dongle or wireless desktop.
The GPU is an HD7850 2GB which is pre-overclocked to 1GHZ. The PS4 appears to use a derivative of the HD7870M:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Rad...M.72675.0.html
The 8 thread Jaguar based CPU seems to run at 2GHZ,from what I gather with similar IPC to PD IIRC,so I suppose the FX6300 is a reasonable approximation,although it might be faster.
However,the PS4 has very fast system RAM too,compared to a PC.
All the cheapest GTX650TI 2GB cards for around £100 to £110 are not offer any more,and the Nvidia cards currently at around £100 are not competitive in hardware to an HD7850. Even the cheapest HD7850 2GB I can find is sold out:
http://www.cclonline.com/product/126...-Card/VGA1949/
Even if I use this 400W FSP,I could drop the build another £15:
http://www.cclonline.com/product/982...t-OEM/PSU0486/
So,around £25 to £30 in total if the cheap HD7850 2GB appears,which would about cover the wireless card,bluetooth dongle and a very crappy wireless keyboard and mouse.
Regarding the motherboard anyone under £50 is going to be crap anyway,with smaller than mATX PCBs,thin circuitboards,and limited expansion with most also only having two RAM slots and crappy audio.
If you start going any lower in CPU and GPU,it will be pointless IMHO,especially with the ways games are going.
Now you could go B-grade from OcUK and Novatech to reduce costs,but those can be used parts,so IMHO should not allowed as part of the builds.
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Quote:
Originally Posted by
CAT-THE-FIFTH
The 8 thread Jaguar based CPU seems to run at 2GHZ,from what I gather with similar IPC to PD IIRC
Sounds right, when I was doing comparitives for my last notebook purchase I concluded that Jaguar and PD have almost identical IPC. Wouldn't it be nice if AMD gave us a cheaper ~3GHz 8-core CPU for our Steam boxes: with a bit of judicious downclocking and undervolting I bet you could get a pretty low-power rig out of that.... ;)
Quick thought though - should we take Mantle into account? ;) a 7770/7790 would probably do the job then :D
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Just buy some random gamer's hand-me-down 4 year old PC off ebay for £120. Soemthing like an Athlon X2 and a Radeon 5770 and a couple fo gigs of cheapo RAM is more than equivalent.
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Quote:
Originally Posted by
scaryjim
Sounds right, when I was doing comparitives for my last notebook purchase I concluded that Jaguar and PD have almost identical IPC.
How was that measured?? Jaguar is dual issue per core. PD is quad issue per module, so whilst that sounds like an average of 2 per core it should make good use of stalls in one core to push instructions into the other.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
scaryjim
Quick thought though - should we take Mantle into account? ;) a 7770/7790 would probably do the job then :D
I can't see Mantle getting that many titles behind it. So if this is a SteamOS box, then taking a performance hit from the AMD drivers for all other games on the hope that a few games will use Mantle and go really fast seems a brave move :) Mind you it looks like the AMD drivers are improving already, if the rather poor benchmark data on Phoronix is to be believed.
Was the SteamOS requirement edited into the original post?
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DanceswithUnix
How was that measured?? Jaguar is dual issue per core. PD is quad issue per module, so whilst that sounds like an average of 2 per core it should make good use of stalls in one core to push instructions into the other.
Some not entirely scientific benchmark comparisons across a variety of reviews, largely focussing on anandtech's bench. I think I had to cross derive between reviews looking at the A4-5000 and the A8-4555M, which are similarly clocked quad-thread APUs (the Trinity ULV has the advantage of boost for single threaded loads, of course). In well-threaded loads the performance was eerily similar ;)
I'm not sure if Mantle is Windows only or if a linux flavour will be released eventually, but it's probably only going to directly relevant to AAA titles anyway, so I guess for a SteamOS/Linux box it makes sense to look at nvidia. Which makes it a real shame that their lower end cards just aren't price competitive with the AMD cards on Windows: we know we'll be losing absolute performance just because AMD haven't got their Linux drivers in order... *sigh*
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
Quote:
Originally Posted by
scaryjim
Quick thought though - should we take Mantle into account? ;) a 7770/7790 would probably do the job then :D
If the aim is to be a console equivalent then definitely - it'll be titles that are also in development for consoles that will likely be the beneficiaries of mantle as the low-level type work is already being done by the devs.
Re: Challenge: PC equivalent of Xbox One / PS4 (Cost & Performancce)
incredibly hard to match on the simple basis that consoles are generally sold at a loss! So surely uping the budget to at least £500 if not £550 would be fairer. With mantle I would say AMDs GPU generation should stay relevant alot longer, still may be outed by the consoles though simply because of the OS optimisations , masses of dedicated memory and dedicated DSP which handle the audio as to reduce CPU usage.
Think CAT has nailed it though :P
