Skip the consoles and get yourself a gaming P.C.

There has never been a better time to build a gaming P.C.. The P.C. market is booming and is rich with many different options to pick from if you are going to build a P.C. All the way from the entry level parts to the top of the line, there is something for everybody.

As of Nov. 7,consumers can spend about $650 online and build a gaming P.C. that will absolutely destroy all the older generations of consoles, including the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X. These consoles can run games at 1080p (standard HD) and are barely able to hold 60 frames per second consistently. This measure is important because it is essentially describing the “smoothness” of the game, and the lower the fps (Frames Per Second), the choppier the game will appear. Another reason why buying a gaming P.C. is a great opportunity right now is because information surrounding the next generation of consoles is starting to come out, and the news is looking positive for consumers. 

The next generation of consoles, the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett, are rumored to cost around $699-$899 and will feature major upgrades compared to the last generation. 

Some of these include the switch from a hard drive to a Solid State Drive (SSD), which will lead to fast

er load times in games, better CPUs powered by AMD’s Zen 2 micro-architecture, and the ability to play games at 4k Resolution (four times as many pixels as 1080p) while easily maintaining 60 frames per second.

While these improvements will set the next gen consoles apart from last gen ones, it should be mentioned that P.C.s have been able to run games at 4k resolution holding 120 frames per second since early 2012. Granted, these were multi thousand dollar computers, but even today a $250 dollar graphics card in a P.C. can run games at 4k holding 60 frames per second.

The best part of building a P.C. though is that you can pick from a wide range of parts all at different prices in order to find the best bang for your buck. There has never been more competition in the graphics card and processor market with AMD taking market share away from Intel and also releasing a new lineup of mid tier graphics cards that are a drive a hard bargain. There are now more than  20 different processors in AMD’s lineup alone and all of them are priced at an incredible value (especially the Ryzen 5 2600).

After all this, how does it not make sense to buy your own parts and build a computer? For a lot of people its the actual process of putting the parts together and actually building the computer which turns them away from building a P.C. This is understandable, because without prior knowledge or experience building a computer is totally foreign to a lot of people. 

Steven Grigereit, a Senior here at Milford High School, was one of these people who wanted a gaming P.C. but had to idea where to even start on building his own Steven said “I want a super fast P.C. to play my games on, but I know if I try and build my own I’l

l only end up breaking something.” However, after getting help from a student who had experience

with P.C. building Steven was able to put together his own computer in about 5 hours. “I can’t believe I just built a w

hole computer, and only after watching a couple of YouTube videos! This was way easier than I thought it would be.” Grigereit said after the build. When asked what his biggest takeaway from building his own, he said, “I never realized how much cheaper building your own was compared to buying one from the store. It’s also so much faster than my PS4; this was definitely worth the investment!”