The Xbox Series X delivers exceptional value for the hardware inside, but the battle against gaming PCs isn’t as cut and dry as you may think.
But in the battle of Xbox Series X versus gaming PCs, there’s a lot more to consider than just pricing. Let’s dig in. First, the elephant in the room. For the first year or two after they launch, new gaming consoles tend to offer much more bang-for-buck than comparable gaming PCs, and the Xbox Series X is no exception. It probably puts your gaming rig to shame, and for a comparatively paltry $500. Turning to GPUs, the RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6800 graphics card coming out on November 18 for $579 features 60 CUs at the same clock speed, so the Xbox Series X will probably wind up being roughly on par with something like a step-down Radeon RX 6700. Microsoft’s console performs somewhere in the ballpark of the last-gen RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti, going off early reports. Add in a blazing-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD, and toss in the ability to play Blu-ray discs, and the Xbox Series X’s hardware value proposition utterly destroys an equivalent gaming PC—and that’s even before you start thinking about the costs of cases, motherboards and whatnot. The most affordable PCIe 4.0 SSDs cost $200. All told, our first attempt at constructing an Xbox Series X-class PC cost around $1,500. Oof. There’s a reason that Microsoft’s next-gen console convinced my colleague Mark Hachman not to invest in a gaming battlestation. Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S.
