Hardware costs are far less with consoles, but the games are more expensive.You don't need to spend $5000 on a PC to game well. My system can run any game out there at least with medium graphics settings, and most at their highest. You could build a system better than mine straight up for less than $1000.
My gaming relevant specs:
Athlon 64 3000 OC'ed from 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz
DFI LabParty NForce4 Ultra-D
2GB PC4000 RAM
250gig SATA hard drive
7800GT video card
I wouldn't recommend building a PC like this now since you can build a far more powerful system for not much more money, but it illustrates that people who think you need to spend anywhere near even $2000 on a computer to game well are out of their minds.
The trick is to buy the right hardware that strikes a balance between the best value performance/cost wise, while preserving the highest upgradeability path.
Case in point, my system was built last year, and the only significant upgrade I'm gonna do soon is a dual core 1M cache per core processor once the prices are low enough. The reason I can do that is I bought the right motherboard (Nforce4 Ultra at the time) with the best CPU for the money (Athlon 64 3000 for $160 I think it was instead of even lower end dual cores that ran several hundred dollars). And I'm mainly upgrading to one of these dual cores to avoid having to buy DDR2 memory, new motherboard, etc. Games still don't really need that high end of a processor yet for the most part.
Be smart about your hardware picks, and you can cut the price of hardware purchasing to play your games substantially.
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